Showing papers in "Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory in 2005"

New public management is dead. Long live digital-era governance

Abstract: The "new public management" (NPM) wave in public sector organizational change was founded on themes of disaggregation, competition, and incentivization. Although its effects are still working through in countries new to NPM, this wave has now largely stalled or been reversed in some key "leading-edge" countries. This ebbing chiefly reflects the cumulation of adverse indirect effects on citizens' capacities for solving social problems because NPM has radically increased institutional and policy complexity. The character of the post-NPM regime is currently being formed. We set out the case that a range of connected and information technology-centered changes will be critical for the current and next wave of change, and we focus on themes of reintegration, needs-based holism, and digitization changes. The overall movement incorporating these new shifts is toward "digital-era governance" (DEG), which involves reintegrating functions into the governmental sphere, adopting holistic and needs-oriented structures, and progressing digitalization of administrative processes. DEG offers a perhaps unique opportunity to create self-sustaining change, in a broad range of closely connected technological, organizational, cultural, and social effects. But there are alternative scenarios as to how far DEG will be recognized as a coherent phenomenon and implemented successfully.

Goal Ambiguity and Organizational Performance in U.S. Federal Agencies

Abstract: In spite of numerous observations that government organizations have high levels of organizational goal ambiguity that exert major influences on their other characteristics, few researchers have measured goal ambiguity and tested these frequent assertions. In previous research, we developed measures of four dimensions of goal ambiguity: mission comprehension ambiguity, directive goal ambiguity, evaluative goal ambiguity, and priority goal ambiguity. Confirming hypotheses developed from the literature on public organizations, the latter three variables showed relations to such organizational characteristics as organizational age, financial publicness (proportion of funding from government allocations), and regulatory status. This article reports a second analytical step of examining the relations between the goal ambiguity dimensions and indicators of organizational performance based on responses to the 2000 National Partnership for Reinventing Government Survey of federal employees. The performance variables included managerial effectiveness, customer service orientation, productivity, and work quality. Regression analyses with numerous control variables found that directive, evaluative, andpriority goal ambiguity relatednegatively tomanagerial effectiveness. All four performance indicators showed significant negative relationships with evaluative goal ambiguity and directive goal ambiguity. The results provide further evidence of the viability of the newmeasuresof goal ambiguity, support theory-basedbut previously untestedhypotheses, and further indicate the feasibility and value of analyzing goal ambiguity of government organizations. The literature on public organizations contains numerous assertions about the impacts of goal ambiguity on important characteristics of those organizations. Again and again, authors say that vague, hard-to-measure goals influence structural dimensions, attitudes, behaviors, and organizational outcomes in public organizations andmake them different from business firms on these characteristics (for a review, see Rainey 1993). The great frequency of such observations, however, has not generated a comparable amount of empirical research aimed at proving or disproving them. The small number of studies that have tried to provide We wish to thank Jungwook Lee for his valuable editorial assistance with this article. We also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for rigorous critiques and numerous colleagues who provided comments at the ‘‘Determinants of Performance in Public Organizations’’ seminar, Cardiff University, May 6–8, 2004. Address correspondence to Young Han Chun at doongsirigo@hanmail.net. doi:10.1093/jopart/mui030 Advance Access publication on February 25, 2005 a The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org. JPART 15:529–557 at R uers U nirsity on A uust 2, 2010 http://jpaordjournals.org D ow nladed fom empirical evidence, moreover, have usually relied on managers’ responses to survey questions about whether their organizations have vague or clear goals (e.g., Rainey, Pandey, and Bozeman 1995). These studies have found that public and private managers do not differ in their responses to questions about whether their organizations’ goals are vague and hard to measure. These findings thus run counter to the typical observation that public organizations have less goal clarity than business firms. They raise the question of whether one would get different empirical results using evidence relying less on managers’ survey responses. The situation calls for more research with better measures of goal ambiguity. This study relates new measures of the goal ambiguity of U.S. federal government agencies to measures of the agencies’ performance. This study is the second report of a larger study reported previously (Chun and Rainey 2005). That first article reported the development of the new measures of the four dimensions of goal ambiguity described below. As described below, it reported evidence that supported hypotheses about the relations between those measures of goal ambiguity and ‘‘antecedent’’ variables that should influence the degree of goal ambiguity. These antecedents included the agency’s financial publicness (the proportion of its funding from government allocations as opposed to sales or user charges), regulatory functions versus nonregulatory functions, complexity of the policy problems the agency confronts, and others. Researchers in the social sciences have paid very little attention to clarifying and measuring the concept of goal ambiguity. These confirmations of hypotheses about relations between the goal ambiguity measures and these antecedent variables justified optimism about measuring organizational goal ambiguity in a meaningful way and about using those measures in research on the many assertions about its antecedents and consequences. The larger study analyzed the relations between goal ambiguity and a variety of consequence variables, including such variables as employee work satisfaction and perceptions about organizational structure. This article reports our analysis of the relations between goal ambiguity and arguably the most important of these consequence variables, organizational performance. Examining these relationships has important implications for the theory of public organizations, since assertions about goal ambiguity figure so importantly inmany scholars’ assertions about the other characteristics of public agencies, including their performance. It also has important implications for public policy and managerial practice, for the assumption that goal clarification will improve organizational performance underlies recent administrative reforms, including the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) in the United States and initiatives based on the New Public Management in other nations. This assumption involves a leap of faith, since there is so little empirical evidence of such a relationship and since one can argue that for some government agencies goal clarification might not be feasible and might indeed be dysfunctional. Further development of measures of organizational goal ambiguity and research on their relations to other variables can contribute to better analysis of such matters. Then comes the formidable challenge of measuring the performance of government agencies in a way that provides common, comparable measures for all the different agencies. We use data from the very large 2000 National Partnership for Reinventing Government Survey conducted by the Office of Personnel Management to construct the performance measures from the responses of the employees in the agency. As we describe later, the survey’s very large sample size leads to very sensitive statistical tests that find many statistically significant results but with small effect sizes (small R statistics). Nevertheless, the finding of statistically significant support for the hypotheses offers 530 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory at R uers U nirsity on A uust 2, 2010 http://jpaordjournals.org D ow nladed fom further support for the usefulness of the measures of goal ambiguity and useful evidence about frequent assertions in the literature. DIMENSIONS OF GOAL AMBIGUITY IN ORGANIZATIONS For this study, organizational goal ambiguity refers to the extent to which an organizational goal or set of goals allows leeway for interpretation,when theorganizational goal represents the desired future state of the organization. An organizational goal loses clear meaning and becomes ambiguous when it invites a number of different interpretations. This definition of organizational goal ambiguity (or clarity) is consistent with some previous conceptions of the construct (DiMaggio 1987; Kelemen 2000; Locke et al. 1989; Zahariadis 1999). Goals can be ambiguous in various ways, however, and along different dimensions. We developed four dimensions of goal ambiguity that refer to communicating the reason for the existence of an organization, directing organizational activities, evaluating organizational performance, and making decisions about organizational priorities (Chun and Rainey 2005). Measuring Organizational Goal Ambiguity The measures for variables usually appear in the method section. Given the newness of the four concepts and measures of goal ambiguity, to aid the reader we describe the measures in this section aswe introduce the concepts. As described below, the data formost of the dimensions of organizational goal ambiguity were collected from the agencies’ strategic plans and performance reports. The Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 requires that virtually every federal agency describe the agency’s goals and performance indicators in the strategic plans and in annual performance plans and performance reports that must be submitted to Congress (U.S. Office of Management and Budget [OMB] 2001). This provides access to information about the formally stated goals of most federal agencies. The measures of the goal ambiguity dimensions we employ do not have a long history of use, so we provide evidence of criterion validity, especially convergent validity, in notes in the following sections. 1 There has been little clarification of the relations among such goal attributes as goal vagueness, specificity, complexity, multiplicity, conflict, tangibility, and measurability. The relationships among these ambiguity-like constructs remain ambiguous themselves. A focus on the level of interpretive leeway involves conceiving goal ambiguity as a general concept incorporating these seemingly interrelated goal attributes. 2 Using the GPRA plans and reports as data sources to measure goal ambiguity in federal agencies has several significant advantages in dealing with methodological complicat

Diversity, Representation, and Performance: Evidence about Race and Ethnicity in Public Organizations

Abstract: In the past twenty years, the growing percentages of racial and ethnic minorities in the United States have led scholars to pay increased attention to the issue of diversity. However, very little research using the public organization as the unit of analysis has sought to understand the true impact of workforce diversity on work-related outcomes. This study seeks to understand the impact of one type of diversity-race and ethnicity-on organizational outcomes in public education. Using data from Texas public school districts, the article finds that diversity among managers is unrelated to the three performance outcomes tested, while diversity among teachers is negatively related to one and positively related to two performance outcomes. Representation among managers, on the other hand, is positively related to all three performance outcomes, while representation of teachers is negatively related to one of the outcomes. In the past twenty years, the growing percentages of racial minorities in the United States have brought diversity to the attention of public management and policy scholarship. Public administration research has recently considered an abundance of diversity-related issues, including racial integration of federal agencies (Corwell and Kellough 1994; Kellough 1990; Kellough and Elliott 1992), private versus public sector diversity management initiatives (Dobbs 1996), and problems with diversity program implementation (Riccucci 1997; Von Bergen, Soper, and Foster 2002). Universities have created courses in diversity management, which have led to a number of new textbooks in the past ten years (Chemers, Oskamp, and Costanzo 1995; Henderson 1994; Riccucci 2002). However, much of the work on diversity stems from a normative view that any diversity leads to positive consequences (Wise and Tschirhart 2002). With few exceptions (Wise and Tschirhart 2000), the research has not attempted to assess the real value of diversity. Many, if not most, articles on diversity that appear in the core public management journals are case studies of diversity programs, statistical analyses of workforce trends, or "best Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Georgetown Public Management Research Conference, Washington, DC, October 9-11, 2003, and at the Seminar on the Determinants of Performance in Public Organizations, Cardiff, Wales, May 6-8, 2004. Special thanks to Kenneth Meier, Laurence O'Toole, and Lois Wise for their helpful comments and suggestions. Address correspondence to the author at pitts@cviog.uga.edu. doi: 10.1 093/jopart/muiO33 Advance Access publication on March 10, 2005 ? The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.28 on Tue, 30 Aug 2016 05:22:58 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 616 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory practices" studies. Although case studies can be valuable tools through which to build theory, they should be supplemented by quantitative research. Work in social psychology and business administration has been using quantitative methods to test hypotheses connecting diversity and performance (Wise and Tschirhart 2000). Demographic changes warrant the attention of further research. In 1980 whites made up 80 percent of the total U.S. population.1 By 2000, that figure had decreased to only 69 percent, while all other racial and ethnic groups in the United States had increased. This represents a substantial population shift in a relatively short period of time, and evidence suggests that diversity will continue to increase into the twenty-first century (Johnston and Packer 2000). Globalization and related economic changes in the United States have combined to create unforeseen levels of racial and ethnic heterogeneity. Along these same lines, more people are speaking languages other than English at home, people with disabilities are becoming more functional with better technology and changing social attitudes, and the baby boom population has increased the number of retired, older citizens. The United States is becoming increasingly diverse on a number of dimensions. The labor force is experiencing similar trends, and estimates project that white men will account for only 37 percent of the U.S. workforce by 2008.2 Studies have shown that U.S. workers are becoming older and more balanced with respect to gender and race, particularly in the public sector (Bond, Galinsky, and Swanberg 1998; Johnston and Packer 1990). The typical assumption is that these changes in the workforce and population require greater efforts toward hiring and retaining diverse employees. Some research argues that diversity is necessary in order for organizations to be "competitive" (see particularly Thomas 1991). However, whether diversity among agency employees results in increased organizational performance is an empirical question that is rarely tested in the public administration literature (Wise and Tschirhart 2000).3 This article takes on three interrelated questions as its focus. Does racial diversity increase or decrease organizational performance? Does racial representation-matching agency employees to characteristics of the target population increase or decrease performance? Are these relationships different for street-level bureaucrat diversity and manager diversity? After reviewing the relevant literatures, I will examine the impact of racial diversity on a series of performance outcomes in one public policy setting. RESEARCH ON DIVERSITY Representative Bureaucracy Two streams of research touch on the issue of public sector organizational diversity: representative bureaucracy and research on diversity effects. Representative bureaucracy considers whether a public organization employs a bureaucracy that matches the general population on salient indicators of diversity, such as race, ethnicity, or gender (Meier and Nigro 1976; Mosher 1968; Pitkin 1967; Selden 1997). The theory holds that passive I All of these population statistics can be located at http://www.censusscope.org/us/chart_race.html (accessed January 2005). 2 Workforce projection statistics are available from the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics at http://stats.bls.gov (accessed January 2005). 3 Recruiting and retaining more diverse employees is a legitimate normative goal for government organizations, but it is nevertheless necessary to understand the impact of increased diversity so that management strategies can be developed. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.28 on Tue, 30 Aug 2016 05:22:58 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Pitts Diversity, Representation, and Performance representation-the bureaucracy matches the general population on these indicators-will lead to active representation, which is the formulation of policies that will benefit the interests of diverse groups (Meier 1993a; Mosher 1968). The link between passive and active representation is premised on research showing that people from similar backgrounds race, for example-will have similar values and beliefs (Meier 1976; Mosher 1968; Pitkin 1967; Selden 1997). For example, representative bureaucracy at its simplest suggests that, based on shared values and beliefs, a black bureaucrat will be more likely than a white bureaucrat to represent the policy preferences of black citizens. This notion was an early basis for affirmative action in the public sector (Selden and Selden 2001). However, for active representation to occur, and for representative bureaucracy to make sense, bureaucrats must be afforded discretion in their jobs vis-a-vis policymaking or implementation, and the policy issue must be salient to the specific group being represented (Keiser et al. 2002; Meier 1993a; Selden 1997; Sowa and Selden 2003). Even if these criteria are met, passive representation does not always result in active representation, and ongoing research has attempted to identify factors that result in a link between the two (Keiser et al. 2002; Meier 1993b; Selden 1997). This line of research has shown the benefits of representation in the public education policy setting (Keiser et al. 2002; Meier and O'Toole 2001; Meier, Wrinkle, and Polinard 1999; but see Nielsen and Wolf 2001), as well as in federal agencies (Dolan 2000; Hindera 1993). Little work has considered representative bureaucracy as it relates to agency performance per se. Rather, most studies of representative bureaucracy seek to understand whether a given group benefits from representation in government. The aggregation of benefits for all of these groups implicitly constitutes agency performance, so the issue is more in framing the question than in the substance of conclusions drawn in research. However, in an era of results-based government and increased support for businesslike accountability mechanisms, it is relevant to consider representation as it explicitly relates to agency performance, and this subtle distinction is one that has not been made in the literature.

Goal Ambiguity in U.S. Federal Agencies

Abstract: Observations that government organizations have particularly high levels of organizational goal ambiguity, and that this goal ambiguity has major influences on their other characteristics, abound in the literature on public bureaucracy. Few researchers, however, have developed quantified measures of goal ambiguity and tested these frequent assertions with large samples of government organizations. We develop measures of four dimensions of goal ambiguity: mission comprehension ambiguity, directive goal ambiguity, evaluative goal ambiguity, and priority goal ambiguity. Confirming hypotheses developed from the literature on public organizations, the last three variables show relations to organizational age, financial publicness (proportion of funding from government allocations), competing demands, policy problem complexity, and regulatory status. The success of the measures of goal ambiguity demonstrates the feasibility of measuring the concept and conducting empirical tests of observations that are often repeated without such testing, and will support further theoretical and methodological development of this important topic. In the literature on the distinctive characteristics of public organizations and their management, the most frequently repeated observation concerns the greater vagueness of their goals, as compared to the goals of private business firms, and the greater difficulty that public organizations face in assessing goal achievement (e.g., Allison 1983; Dahl and Lindblom 1953; Downs 1967; Drucker 1980; Lowi 1979; Lynn 1981; Wildavsky 1979; Wilson 1989). Although scholars and expert observers further contend that this goal ambiguity has many serious consequences, mostly dysfunctional ones, conceptual analysis and empirical research on the topic have been quite limited. We present a new way to conceptualize and measure organizational goal ambiguity and then test a set of propositions about the construct’s relation to variables that we hypothesize to be antecedent to it, using data on a sample of 115 U.S. federal agencies. We suggest a definition of organizational goal ambiguity and introduce four dimensions of the construct. These are mission comprehension ambiguity (How understandable is the mission statement?), directive goal ambiguity (measured by a ‘‘rules to law’’ ratio), evaluative goal ambiguity (as indicated by a coding scheme for the agencies’ performance

Red Tape and Public Employees: Does Perceived Rule Dysfunction Alienate Managers?

Abstract: This study explores the relationship between organizational red tape and work alienation. While bureaucratic controls have long been considered sources of worker detachment, the relationship between red tape and managerial alienation has not been explicitly tested. When managers encounter rules, regulations, or procedures that seem pointless yet burdensome, these encounters may simultaneously trigger the key psychological ingredients of alienation - powerlessness and meaninglessness. These in turn are expected to reduce organizational commitment, job involvement, and job satisfaction, alienation indicators used in this study. To test these expectations, the study uses data from the National Administrative Studies Project (NASP-II). NASP-II surveyed managers in state health and human service agencies, producing a response rate of approximately 53 percent. Statistical analyses indicate that perceived personnel red tape is a consistently negative and statistically significant influence in all alienation models. Perceived organizational red tape is statistically significant and negative in all but the job involvement model. Other bureaucratic control mechanisms included in the models also appear to be sources of alienation, including centralization and technology routineness. However, formalization appears to be a mitigating, not exacerbating, influence on alienation. Considered together, these results suggest that red tape and other forms of bureaucratic control have adverse effects on the psychological attachment felt by public managers to their workplace.

The Evolution of Dyadic Interorganizational Relationships in a Network of Publicly Funded Nonprofit Agencies

Abstract: This article addresses a gap in the extant literature on networks by assessing how interorganizational relationships evolve in a public sector network setting The context for the research was a network of publicly funded health and human service agencies involved in service delivery to people with serious mental illness Longitudinal data were collected from a single community The analysis suggests that public and nonprofit sector relationships evolve differently than private sector partnerships, providing an alternative perspective to the prevailing view in organization theory

Representative Bureaucracy, Organizational Strategy, and Public Service Performance: An Empirical Analysis of English Local Government

Abstract: The theory of representative bureaucracy suggests that organizations perform better if their workforces reflect the characteristics of their constituent populations. The management literature implies that the impact of representative bureaucracy is contingent on organizational strategy. Our empirical evidence on English local government is inconsistent with the basic theory of representative bureaucracy but supports a moderating effect of organizational strategy. Representative bureaucracy is negatively associated with citizens' perceptions of local authority performance. However, organizations pursuing a prospector strategy are able to mitigate this negative relationship.

Assessing Performance Budgeting at OMB: The Influence of Politics, Performance, and Program Size

Abstract: This article investigates the impact of performance, as measured by the OMB performance budgeting initiative called Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART), on recommendations in the President’s budget. In a multivariate analysis using data from the FY 2005 budget, with appropriate controls for the political content of programs, we find that the PART scores have a statistically significant impact on budget decisions within OMB. We find that PART scores have a larger impact on small and medium sized programs than on large programs. We also find that the ‘‘results’’ component of PART scores has a smaller impact on budget decisions than the ‘‘program purpose’’ component, a finding which tends to contradict the goal of performance budgeting to redirect resources to programs that produce results. The relative unimportance of the ‘‘results’’ component may be due to the lack of good outcome measures for most programs in PART.

Where Next? Research Directions on Performance in Public Organizations

Abstract: The dependent variable in all the articles presented in this symposium issue of JPART was organizational performance in public agencies. Management variables included organizational strategy, resources, leadership, goals, workforce diversity, and representation. The empirical articles also controlled for external effects on performance. Although the collection of articles presented here is a major step forward for research on public organizations, the evidence that management matters needs additional exploration, and the methods used by scholars need to be improved.

The Effects of Managerial Succession on Organizational Performance

Abstract: Boyne and Dahya (2002) posit that the means, motives, and opportunities available to top managers will affect their ability to impact organizational performance. In this analysis, I test the theory posited by Boyne and Dahya and expand the model by exploring whether the performance effects of executive succession differ between an internal promotion and an external hire. Using Texas school superintendents as the managers in question, I use pooled, time-series data to test both the immediate and the long-term effects of managerial succession on performance. The findings reveal that an immediate, negative effect of executive succession is present only in the case of an externally hired replacement and that the long-term effect of managerial change on organizational performance is positive. These findings suggest that public managerial succession does influence organizational performance. The influence of public managers on organizational performance has persistently been of interest in the field of public administration (Barnard 1939; Brudney, O'Toole, and Rainey 2000; Nicholson-Crotty and O'Toole 2004; Rainey 2003). Case studies of specific managers or a single organization have been extremely valuable as foundations for understanding the complex interrelations between managers and performance. Building on these case studies, a more rigorous attempt at empirical, quantitative studies is starting to permeate the study of public administration. For example, studies have now examined how performance is influenced by networks (Meier and O'Toole 2003; Milward and Provan 1998; O'Toole and Meier 1999; Provan and Milward 1995), strategy (Boyne and Walker 2004), and governance (Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill 2000). Despite the recent surge in quantitative studies of public management, one issue that has not been explored is the extent to which organizational performance is affected when top management is changed. Studying the effect of managerial succession on organizational performance from a large N perspective will assist in building the growing body of public management scholarship by allowing for more generalizability and by contextualizing evidence on single organizations. This article will apply a theoretical model developed by Boyne and Dahya (2002) to an organizational type of high public salience: public school districts. Through testing this theoretical model, it is possible to explore the shortand long-term effects of Special thanks to Ken Meier, George Boyne, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Address correspondence to the author at ghill@politics.tamu.edu. doi:1 0.1 093/jopart/mui034 Advance Access publication on February 18, 2005 ? The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.127 on Fri, 14 Oct 2016 04:30:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 586 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory managerial succession on organizational performance. I will present the Boyne/Dahya theory of managerial succession and test it on the impact of school superintendents on performance. Finally, I will discuss the results and derive implications for theories of managerial succession and the effects of succession on organizational performance. THEORY OF MANAGERIAL SUCCESSION There is little public administration literature that looks specifically at how managerial succession affects organizational performance. Numerous scholars have addressed managerial change in some form, however. McGregor (1974) studies the issue of mobility of career bureaucrats through the civil service organization. Goodman (1982) views managerial change as elusive, something that cannot be clearly or accurately tested. O'Toole and Meier (2002) look at organizational stability, but they do not explicitly address the impact of managerial change. They argue that organizational stability leads to more efficient functioning. In short, the research questions in this article have not been expressly addressed in any of these bodies of literature. The primary work available on the effects of managerial succession on organizational performance is Boyne and Dahya (2002). The premise of the theoretical model they develop is that "the motives of chief executives, the means at their disposal, and the opportunities available" (Boyne and Dahya 2002, 179) are the primary independent variables that affect performance when management is changed. It is this view of executive succession that I wish to test. Furthermore, I expand the Boyne/Dahya model by exploring whether performance effects differ between internal promotion and an external hire when a top manager is replaced. The assumption most often associated with managerial change is that it occurs because the previous manager was ineffective or inefficient, and that a new manager is assigned to transform the organization. Furthermore, managers of long tenure can ossify, becoming rigid and unadaptable to either the environment or the changing needs of the organization, in which case change is necessary. Others assert that change strategies are industry specific. Lieberson and O'Connor (1972) show that environmental factors, the organization's place within the industry, as well as the industry itself have a greater effect on performance than does leadership. Some studies seem to contradict Lieberson and O'Connor's findings. Weiner and Mahoney (1981) examine manufacturing companies and find that leadership explained 44 percent of the variance in profit. Others have found similar effects of leadership. For example, Thomas (1988) looks at retail and finds that leadership explained 51 percent of the profit variance. If leaders or managers make up such a substantial portion of the variance in performance indicators, then changing those leaders ought to have an effect on this variance.

Management Tenure and Network Time: How Experience Affects Bureaucratic Dynamics

Abstract: Meier and O’Toole have developed an empirical model that allows scholars to test for the impact of managers on a system and its outputs. In this article I attempt to add to management theory and analysis by examining the impact of time in the system and management tenure. I use ordinary least squares to replicate and expand upon Meier and O’Toole’s results, using school superintendent survey responses along with outcome measures from school districts in Texas. The most interesting results suggest that (1) networking has a much larger impact when one controls for experience with the system; (2) experience with the system has independent effects on outcomes; (3) management tenure interacts with networking, resulting in greater outcomes; and (4) new managers may find alternative (possibly deceitful) ways of affecting outcomes other than working their networks. The public management field is in the midst of a theoretical and empirical upheaval concerning the role played by networks in the delivery of public services. The rise of public/private cooperation in the public sphere has cast doubt on the picture of the modern bureaucracy as a hierarchical system of inefficiency. I continue the process of examining management effects through public/private networks by exploring the frequently discussed but infrequently tested idea of time within a network. Much of the management literature treats networking as a one-shot phenomenon, ignoring ‘‘managerial experience’’ differences across organizations, but this study treats the relationships formed over time as a critical element of network management success. The article is fairly straightforward in that it adds a number of new components to a previously developed model of management, to look separately at ‘‘new’’ and ‘‘established’’ managers in their respective networks. There are two overriding themes: First, what effects do new managers have in their networks? Do they find it easy to operate, or do they need time to develop relationships and build trust? The converse is asked about established managers: Do they make outcome production inefficient because they are

Dramatic Reform in the Public Service: At-Will Employment and the Creation of a New Public Workforce

Abstract: As is widely known, the state of Georgia transformed its civil service system in the mid-1990s. A new performance management and pay-for-performance plan was put into place, and authority for personnel policy was significantly decentralized, but perhaps most notably, all employees hired or promoted after July 1, 1996, were placed in the state's unclassified service where they were required to serve on an at-will basis. In stark contrast, state workers hired into their positions earlier continued to enjoy an array of job protections and appeals rights as members of the traditional classified service. This article seeks to understand the impact of such dramatic public service reform on the attitudes of employees. A survey of unclassified (at-will) and classified employees conducted four years after the reforms revealed generally negative views toward the array of changes in the state's personnel policies, but interestingly, unclassified employees were significantly less negative about the full range of reforms than their classified co-workers, even when differences in age, tenure, and other factors were held constant.

Multiple Public Service Performance Indicators: Toward an Integrated Statistical Approach

Abstract: Public service organizations usually produce multiple outputs, measured on different scales, giving rise to a suite of performance indicators. The traditional approach to statistical analysis of organizational performance has been to develop a separate regression model for each performance indicator. This piecemeal approach, the article argues, may discard valuable information, as it ignores potentially important relationships between individual performance measures. We therefore propose modeling an organization’s performance measures simultaneously, using the methods of seemingly unrelated regressions. The approach implicitly introduces a latent organizational variable into the regressions and may therefore economize on the need to assemble explicit measures of organizational characteristics. The method is illustrated using an example from English public hospitals. In most industrialized nations, measuring the performance of public services has assumed central political importance, as governments come under increased pressure to reduce taxation and ensure that tax revenues are spent cost-effectively. To that end, governments have put in place extensive systems for measuring the performance of public service organizations, with a view to improving accountability thorough improved political and managerial scrutiny of those organizations (Bird 2004). Yet only a few years ago such performance data were sparse, selective, and slow to emerge. Now the revolution in information technology is rapidly leading to a situation in which public services are overwhelmed with indicators of activity and performance. In this new world of data overload, an emerging challenge is to turn the data into meaningful messages that are useful for informing both managerial decisions and democratic debate. Without technologies to address this difficulty, there is a risk that the superabundance of data will be used ineffectively. In interpreting performance data, one of the most pressing concerns is often that public service organizations operate in different circumstances, and therefore direct We would like to thank the participants at the Cardiff Seminar, the referees, and our colleagues Katharina Hauck and Andrew Street. Smith is funded by ESRC grant R000271253. Address correspondence to Peter C. Smith at

Taking Tough Choices Seriously: Public Administration and Individual Moral Agency

Abstract: Using the concepts of thick and thin relationships as the basis for ethical behavior, this paper critiques the emphasis on discretion in the mainstream administrative ethics literature and argues that moral and other dilemmas facing public administrators provides a more useful frame. Two examples drawn from the UK Hutton Investigation into the death of David Kelly are used to demonstrate the relevance and usefulness of this approach.

Interests and Implementation: Fostering Voluntary Regulatory Actions

Abstract: This research addresses the role of interest groups in the implementation of voluntary forms of regulation to prevent harms to water quality. Voluntary programs engender information uncertainties and competing pressures on decisions to address potential harms. We address hypotheses about these considerations for data about actions undertaken by marine facilities, with particular attention to differences in the influence of governmental actors, environmental groups, and trade associations. We find that these influences are shaped to differing degrees by the trust placed in information sources, fears of future regulation, a sense of duty to act, and desire to reduce informational and regulatory uncertainties. These findings suggest potential roles for interest groups in overcoming information gaps in the implementation of voluntary regulatory programs.

How competitive is competitive bidding? The case of the single regeneration budget program

Abstract: Governments think they can improve policies and get better value for money by asking organizations to bid for programs or funds rather than allocating them according to objective measures of need. This article seeks to evaluate this form of competitive bidding by exploring whether competition improved bid quality in England's Single Regeneration Budget program. After reviewing the main theoretical accounts, we argue that competition only exists at the margins where groups that would not otherwise get funded may move away from the sort of project they most wanted. Groups that wanted to carry out projects that the government finds valuable anyway will generally not have to compete with each other, and many other groups could have put in lower-quality bids to get the benefits of participation in the process. Using data from four years of the program, we show that there were some gains but that they were