Historically, Sears, Roebuck has been a relatively decentralized organization (Worthy, 1984) which, it has been argued, is a source of their success (Emmet and Jeuck, 1950). Analogous comments have been made to explain the superior performance of Wal-Mart (Collins and Porras, 1994). While anecdotes are many, there has been no formal analysis as to how organizational structure influences perform...