The Stanford Project on Emerging Companies, a longitudinal study of 200 Silicon Valley start-ups during the first dot-com boom, found that tech entrepreneurs gave little thought to human resources. Nearly half of the companies left it up to employees to shape the culture and perform traditional human resource tasks. Only 6.6 percent had the type of formal personnel management seen at typical companies.

Bureaucratic H.R. is “loathed” by engineers because it adds costs and slows decision-making, the leaders of the study, James N. Baron and Michael T. Hannan, wrote in a paper in California Management Review.

Yet a human resource department is essential. The two found that companies with bureaucratic personnel departments were nearly 40 percent less likely to fail than the norm, and nearly 40 percent more likely to go public — data that would strike many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs as heresy.

“In the new economy, as in the old one, it turns out that organization building is not a secondary diversion from the ‘real’ work of launching a high-tech start-up,” they wrote. “It might well prove to be the main event.”

Not that bureaucracy should be wholeheartedly embraced. There is a reason that the most exciting innovation in Silicon Valley seems to be happening at three-person start-ups and not at behemoths like Microsoft. When Larry Page, the Google co-founder, took over as chief executive, he acknowledged that it had become weighed down by bureaucracy and said he wanted to regain “the nimbleness and soul and passion and speed of a start-up.”

But Silicon Valley needs to acknowledge that bureaucratic layers have an important purpose. In another paper that emerged from the Stanford study and might be useful to GitHub and other male-dominated tech companies, Mr. Baron and Mr. Hannan found that bureaucracy inside Silicon Valley start-ups also improved employment prospects for women in technical roles. Companies that leave personnel tasks to employees have a harder time diversifying because workers hire people just like them, and place too much emphasis on new employees fitting in to the existing culture.

Developing a human resources plan at the company’s inception is essential, Mr. Baron, who is now a professor at Yale School of Management, said in an interview. Adding or amending personnel practices later in the company’s life can be helpful, but making such big changes midstream can also bring negative consequences for employee retention, profits and even chances for survival.