The Roles of Local Government Managers in Theory and Practice: A Centennial Perspective

The standard narrative to explain the evolution of roles filled by city managers suggests that managers originally served as administrative technicians who carried out the policy directives of city councils, but, over time, they became more involved in policy advice and community leadership. This article documents enduring involvement in policy and the recent expansion of community leadership, analyzing definitions of the manager's roles offered by practitioners and scholars since the beginning of the city manager profession 100 years ago. In addition, measurements of the manager's role performance at various points in time are examined, along with trends in the preparation of managers and the context in which they work. Ignoring the evidence that the policy role is integral to professional management can lead to unfounded questions about the legitimacy of city and county managers and impairs our understanding of the council‐manager form of government and political–administrative relations.     

Turnover among City Managers: The Role of Political and Economic Change

Executive turnover can have profound effects on city policies, programs, and commitments such as contracting or issuing debt. This article identifies how political changes, reflected in the composition of the city council, and economic changes in the community influence city manager turnover. Analysis of manager turnover patterns in 143 large U.S. cities with council-manager governments from 1987 to 1999 allows us to distinguish "push" and "pull" factors that can induce city managers to leave their jobs. The empirical analysis demonstrates that political conflict and economic development can influence the likelihood that a city manager will exit a community, but these effects can be complex. In particular, the influence of community economic development on turnover includes a temporal dimension not revealed in previous research. We conclude by discussing the findings' implications for career patterns in city management.     

Management by groping along

Public managers do and should grope along. They need to have a clear sense of mission for their agency. But they will never know precisely how to realize these purposes. Every new management task confronts even the most experienced manager with a new organizational, political, and cultural situation. Consequently, the public manager cannot develop the perfect plan from the beginning. Rather, he or she must experiment with various initiatives, trying to determine what works and what does not. Meanwhile, the successes that result from some of these initiatives move the manager closer to his goal, create new capabilities for his organization, and help motivate his staff by demonstrating that they can be successful. There are thousands of management principles, and it is never obvious which ones apply in a particular managerial situation. Thus, every public manager must grope along.     

Long–Serving City Managers: Why Do They Stay?

The literature on council–manager government often mentions the political difficulties that city managers face with their elected officials and constituent groups. In addition, the generally accepted route to success for city managers is to move to larger and better–paying cities. As a result of these push–and–pull factors, the average tenure of city managers is short. There are, however, a relatively small number of city managers who enjoy long tenure in single cities. The authors identified the 146 city managers who are serving and have served for at least 20 years the same city and sought to determine the factors leading to their long service. The survey indicates that long–serving city managers are more likely to be found in smaller cities that are homogeneous and politically stable. The majority of these city managers are white males with above–average educational levels, strong support from elected officials, and personal commitments to the cities they serve.     

Public Management on the Ground: Clustering Managers Based on Their Behavior

Public management research has identified a dizzying array of management variables that affect organizational performance. While scholars have learned much by analyzing one or a few specific behavioral dimensions of public management at a time, we argue for the value of a more holistic and inductive approach that uses data on several aspects of public management for identifying manager types. Such an approach accounts for both the cognitive processes of people affected by management and the reality that managers’ individual behavioral decisions are interrelated. We examine the overlap of 21 aspects of public school management behavior using cluster analysis. We identify four different manager types (“firefighters,” “laissez-faire managers,” “administrators,” and “proactive floor managers”), each reflecting a distinct constellation of managerial behaviors. The manager types we call “administrators” and “proactive floor managers” are associated with relatively better outcomes, while “firefighters” are associated with relatively worse outcomes.     

Can Managerial Turnover Be a Good Thing? The Impact of City Manager Change on Local Fiscal Outcomes

A long line of private sector research outlines the positive and negative impacts of employee and managerial turnover on organizations. However, public administration scholars often treat turnover as a phenomenon to be avoided and focus more on the antecedents of managerial turnover than on its consequences for public organizations. Within the context of local government, the impact of city manager turnover on organizational outcomes is unclear. This article identifies how city manager turnover influenced local fiscal outcomes during the Great Recession. Analysis of 165 council‐manager municipalities in California, more than one‐third of which experienced turnover during the height of the recession, allows for empirical examination of the impact of turnover during the test period of 2008–11 on local fiscal outcomes in 2011 and 2012, specifically the degree and incidence of budget deficit spending. The results demonstrate that managerial turnover may lead to better fiscal outcomes, conditional on how long the new manager has held the position. This suggests that while cities that hired new managers during the recession did better than those that did not, the earlier in the recession a manager was hired, the better.     

Comparing Public and Private Managers' Leadership Styles: Understanding the Role of Job Context

ABSTRACT

Comparing public and private managers is a major subject in the public management literature, but there have been only a few empirical studies of the differences in their respective leadership styles. Traditionally, leadership style is explained by the characteristics of the manager, the employees, and their job. This study explains leadership by the manager's job context: the degree of job complexity, role clarity, and job autonomy. We argue that differences in job context explain the use of different leadership styles in the public and private sector. To clearly specify the importance of sector, the study investigates direct, mediating, and moderating effects. Based on a survey of Danish public and private managers with 949 respondents, this article shows that job context variables vary significantly between public and private sector managers. The article provides some explanations for why public managers use more participative leadership, while private ones use more directive leadership.     

Long–Serving City Managers: Practical Application of the Academic Literature

The authors identified 146 city managers who have served in the same city for the past 20 years and asked them to complete a survey to determine the factors leading to their long service. As a part of the survey, the city managers were invited to express, in their own words, the reasons they had stayed in the same city for such an extended time compared to the average tenure for city managers. In the article that follows, the authors quote from the academic literature statements pertaining to practical issues of concern to city managers and the elected officials for whom they work, giving credence to the applicability of the academic literature to today's city management profession. Following the quotations from the literature, the authors present the heartfelt reflections of these senior city managers on their long careers in public service.     

Understanding Shared Roles in Policy and Administration: An Empirical Study of Council‐Manager Relations

Recent literature in public administration emphasizes enhanced collaboration between elected and administrative officials. The complementarity view is presented as an alternative to the traditional politics–administration dichotomy. At the center of this new perspective lies the concept of shared roles between elected officials and public administrators with respect to policy making and administration. This article expands the emerging literature on role sharing by proposing and testing new variables to understand what enhances the policy‐making role of city managers and the administrative role of elected officials. Employing data collected from a nationwide survey of city managers and utilizing structural equation modeling methodology, this research finds that the council’s expectations and the city manager’s role conception significantly influence the city manager’s involvement in policy making, while the context of policy making, the city manager’s support, and the council’s access to resources affect elected officials’ involvement in administration. This article aims to make a cumulative contribution to the literature on role sharing.     

Principles for Public Management Practice: From Dichotomies to Interdependence

In this essay we explore the relationship between management practices and a basic governance dilemma: how to manage flexibly and accountably. The challenge is both practical and theoretical. Managers must respond flexibly to the changing demands and expectations of the public and the ever-changing nature of public problems, yet they must do so in a manner that provides accountability to the public and political overseers. A dichotomous approach to the study of leadership as management action and the governance structures within which managers operate has inhibited the search for a public management theory that reconciles the dilemma. Emphasis upon managers as leaders typically focuses on the flexible actions managers might take to overcome structural "barriers," while emphasis upon governance structures typically focuses on the essential role of structure in ensuring accountability and restraining or motivating particular management efforts. The practicing manager, however, cannot deal with these aspects of the work separately. Managers must attend to demands for both flexible leadership action and structures that promise accountability. Anecdotal evidence provides illustrations of some of the ways that managers can integrate these demands. We suggest that these efforts point to an alternative theoretical framework that understands action and structure as mutually constitutive, creating a dynamic tension in which attention to one requires attention to the other.     

增长驱动、城市化战略与市管县体制变迁

市管县体制的历史变迁与我国经济增长逻辑和城市化进程具有内在的逻辑关系:市管县体制在改革开放以前已经发端,市管县体制产生的原因主要是为城市发展工业和解决城市生活服务;改革开放以后一段时期,国家为了获得更加快速的经济发展加速了城市化进程,并形成了小城镇建设和发展中小城市的城市化战略,在此背景下,能够满足这种经济发展和城市化战略要求的市管县体制重新得以复兴并得到全国推广;进入新世纪以后,由于县域经济和区域经济成为新的经济增长级,中国城市化战略也由此越来越明显地趋向于县域城市化和发展大城市群。在这种新的增长驱动逻辑之下,国家又寻求多种方式超越市管县体制,其具体方式包括"强县扩权"改革、"省直管县"改革、省域内的行政区划调整,以及跨区域治理框架的构造。市管县体制的历史变迁本质上反映了国家在不同时期增长驱动逻辑下主动权变地革新政府管理制度以获得更好的经济发展目标和治理效果。未来中国政府层级管理体制的改革方向应该朝一种包含各种体制内容的、充分反映地区差异性的政府层级管理体系方向努力。     

The psychological roots of populist voting: Evidence from the United States,the Netherlands and Germany

What are the psychological roots of support for populist parties or outfits such as the Tea Party, the Dutch Party for Freedom or Germany's Left Party? Populist parties have as a common denominator that they employ an anti‐establishment message, which they combine with some ‘host’ ideology. Building on the congruency model of political preference, it is to be expected that a voter's personality should match with the message and position of his or her party. This article theorises that a low score on the personality trait Agreeableness matches the anti‐establishment message and should predict voting for populist parties. Evidence is found for this hypothesis in the United States, the Netherlands and Germany. The relationship between low Agreeableness and voting for populist parties is robust, controlling for other personality traits, authoritarianism, sociodemographic characteristics and ideology. Thus, explanations of the success of populism should take personality traits into account.     

Roll Calls, Party Labels, and Elections

We develop a model of legislative policymaking in which individuallegislators are concerned with both policy and reelection. Legislators'preferences are private information, and they have two meansof communicating their preferences to voters. First, they eachhave a "party label" that credibly identifies an interval withinwhich their ideal points must lie. Second, their roll call votesmay convey additional information about their preferences. Eachlegislator must therefore tailor his or her votes to his orher district in order to forestall a reelection challenge fromthe opposing party. In equilibrium, nonsincere voting recordswill occur mostly in moderate districts, where extreme incumbentsare vulnerable to challenges from relatively centrist candidates.In those districts, the most extreme legislators may even chooseto vote sincerely and retire rather than compile a moderatevoting record. Thus, both roll call scores and candidate typeswill be responsive to district type. An empirical test of shiftsin roll call scores of retiring House members in moderate districtsconfirms these findings.     

How Should We Estimate the Performance Effect of Management? Comparing Impacts of Public Managers’ and Frontline Employees’ Perceptions of Management

Many areas of public management research are dominated by a top-focused perspective in which emphasis is placed on the notion that managers themselves are usually the best sources of information about managerial behavior. Outside of the leadership literature, managers are also the typical survey respondents in public management studies. An alternative perspective on management can be provided by subordinates’ perceptions of what management is doing. Surveys of subordinates and of managers each pose potential advantages and potential disadvantages when it comes to measuring management, and each approach is likely to prove more fruitful for measuring certain management functions. Using a unique data set of parallel surveys on management with managers and their subordinates as respondents, we examine the differences and relationships between Danish school managers’ and teachers’ perceptions of management functions and the implications of such relationships for organizational performance. We find a surprisingly low correlation between manager and teacher responses regarding the same management functions. Teacher responses are better predictors of student performance for management aspects that are visible to and mediated by teachers. However, manager responses better predict performance for manager expectations that are less visible to employees.     

The Role of the Public Manager in Inclusion: Creating Communities of Participation

In this article, we focus on the role of the public manager in bringing about inclusion. While inclusion often implies public participation, we have observed that one of the challenges for public managers practicing inclusive management is the necessity of combining information and perspectives of three domains: the political, the technical, and the local or experiential. Inclusion, from this perspective, involves the creation of communities of participation in which representatives of these three domains can use their knowledge to address public problems. We examine the ways in which managers do informational and relational work to enact such communities of participation.     

Perceived Organizational Red Tape and Organizational Performance in Public Services

The claim that perceived organizational red tape hampers public services has become a central theme in public administration research. Surprisingly, however, few scholars have empirically examined the impact of perceived red tape on organizational performance. This article empirically analyzes how perceived organizational red tape among managers and frontline staff relates to objectively measured performance. The data consist of survey responses from teachers and principals at Danish upper secondary schools combined with grade‐level administrative performance data. Based on theories of red tape and motivation crowding, the authors hypothesize that perceived organizational red tape reduces performance within such organizations. The empirical result is a small negative relationship between staff perception of red tape and performance and no relationship between manager‐perceived red tape and performance.     

Debt Diligence: How States Manage the Borrowing Function

State-level indebtedness is large and persistent and bond issuance has become increasingly complex. In light of these conditions, professional standards have been proposed by some organizations (including the Government Finance Officers Association) seeking to persuade members to codify sets of desirable practices into policies for debt issuance. We surveyed state government debt managers to assess the comprehensiveness and prevalence of debt policies. We find little evidence of the adoption of comprehensive formal debt policies. Instead, states rely more heavily upon the guidance provided by their own sets of standard practices or "rules of thumb."