After 60 years of scholarship on the rule-bound bureaucratic personality, this article turns attention to the unbureaucratic personality. Identified by a willingness to bend rules, the unbureaucratic personality is thought to be influenced by individual and workplace attributes. The individual attributes investigated in this article include nonconformity, risk propensity, and public service commitment, all of which are expected to stimulate the unbureaucratic personality. Workplace attributes include formalization and centralization, which are expected to suppress the unbureaucratic personality, and red tape, which is expected to trigger it. These hypotheses are tested using mail survey data collected from employees of four cities in a midwestern state. The results of ordered probit modeling of the data suggest that nonconformity and risk taking increase the unbureaucratic personality, as do red tape and centralized workplaces. By contrast, the unbureaucratic personality appears to be diminished by public service commitment and workplace formalization. The implications of these results for the normative aspects of rule bending are discussed.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1407206_code711790.pdf?abstractid=1407206&mirid=1

The Unbureaucratic Personality

/pdf/the-unbureaucratic-personality-3bm9ucpdxz.pdf

There is limited scholarship considering how social status factors such as race, ethnicity, gender, and age frame rules in public organizations. Using data collected from semistructured interviews with 49 local government officials, the author argues that there is a paradox of rules. Women and people of color are increasingly entering the ranks of local bureaucracies, but they experience their authority differently than white men. Their claim to authority is chal- lenged more often. Unable to rely on implicit rank and social status as a de- fense, they must rely instead on official rights and rules. The very meaning of their authority is therefore different: It is more rule and rights based, more formal than informal, more explicit than implicit. Yet, because it is more rule based, formal, and explicit, their authority is also more open to question and challenge, and more resented as an artifice. People of color and women in positions of authority thus face the paradox of rules: They must rely on formal rules as a key basis for their authority, but relying on rules makes their author- ity seem more artificial than real.

The Paradox of Rules: Rules as Resources and Constraints

Employees’ competencies are key to understanding individual performance. In this article, we investigate which competencies are considered important in government using the results of a sur...

https://tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14719037.2019.1638442

Harry Cohen

Papers

Bureaucratic flexibility: some comments on Robert Merton's 'Bureaucratic Structure and Personality'.

The anomia of success and the anomia of failure: a study of similarities in opposites.