The Organizational Atmosphere Hypothesis Reconsidered in a Productive Efficiency Perspective: Theoretical Proposition and Empirical Analysis

Abstract: The paper is a contribution to both organizational economics and management science that analyzes the relations that exist between organizational atmosphere and firm productive efficiency. The concept of atmosphere can be basically defined as a satisfying exchange relation that exists in the boundaries of what Williamson calls the “internal organization” of the firm. Williamson’s Organizational atmosphere has not really been exploited in the economic literature. That’s why we propose to enrich and operationalize that concept in a knowledge economy through: (1) human capital development; (2) weak human capital control; (3) employees participation; (4) good social climate; (5) extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. The objective is then to analyze the empirical conditions under which organizational atmosphere foster firm productive efficiency. We analyze this features based an heckman model ran on a sample of 11378 French firms. Keywords. Human resource development, internal organization, non-calculative exchange, organizational atmosphere, productive efficiency, theory of the firm