How to effectively exercise organizational control and align employee and partner capabilities, activities and performance with organizational goals is one of the fundamental questions in the operations and management literature in general. Organizational control has been studied in a wide variety of work contexts such as new product development, information systems development, and sales in both intra-organizational and inter-organizational settings. This study synthesizes this research using advanced meta-analytic methods on a total sample of 11,759 organizational control-performance relationships from 69 independent samples and tests several new hypotheses. The meta-analytic results show that organizational controls generally enhance performance and, more importantly, function as complements to one another. However, the effectiveness of individual control mechanisms varies across contexts. Analyses show that informal clan controls are more effective across organizational boundaries. In addition, the effectiveness of organizational control mechanisms varies for different types of tasks. Specifying and rewarding the achievement of outcomes is more effective for new product development and information systems development tasks than for sales tasks. Specifying and rewarding behaviors is more effective for information system development and sales tasks than for new product development tasks. Clan controls are equally effective for different tasks types. The paper concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and managerial implications of these findings for the operations management literature