How Leadership and Public Service Motivation Enhance Innovative Behavior

Prior research has linked the innovative behavior of public sector employees to desirable outcomes such as improved efficiency and higher public service quality. However, questions regarding the drivers of innovative behavior among employees have received limited attention. This article employs psychological empowerment theory to examine the underlying processes by which entrepreneurial leadership and public service motivation (PSM) shape innovative behavior among civil servants. Based on three‐wave data from 281 Chinese civil servants and their 59 department heads, entrepreneurial leadership is found to positively influence subordinates' innovative behavior by enhancing two dimensions of psychological empowerment: meaning and impact. Additionally, PSM was found to influence subordinates' innovative behavior by enhancing the dimensions of meaning and competence. These findings suggest that to facilitate innovative behavior among employees, public organizations should consider introducing training that encourages leaders to serve as entrepreneurial role models and recruit employees with high levels of PSM.     

Do Politicians See Eye to Eye? The Relationship between Political Group Characteristics,Perceived Strategic Plan Quality,and Strategic Consensus in Local Governing Majorities

Although strategic consensus is a core concept in strategic management research, empirical evidence is lacking on (1) the degree of strategic consensus in public organizations, (2) how strategic consensus is impacted by group characteristics specific to public strategic decision‐making groups, and (3) how strategic plans impact these relationships. An analysis of multisource data from 1,075 governing majority members nested in 256 Flemish municipalities (Belgium) indicates that within‐group strategic consensus varies among governing majorities and is negatively impacted by political diversity and political power, but these relationships are mediated by perceived strategic plan quality. The results indicate that the idiosyncrasies of public decision‐making groups can impede high levels of strategic consensus, but strategic plans can attenuate this effect by fulfilling a boundary‐spanning role.     

The application of new public management doctrines in the developing world: An exploratory study of the autonomy and control of executive agencies in Tanzania

This article examines the agencification of public service in Tanzania. This is discussed with reference to the New Public Management (NPM)‐inspired reforms of which the creation of executive agencies is one of its core features. The article attempts to understand the extent to which executive agencies in Tanzania display characteristic features of an ideal‐agency model as propagated by the NPM reform doctrines. Key features of the ideal‐agency model have been described as structural disaggregation, autonomy and contractualisation. It questions views held by many NPM‐minded reformers, such as the EU and World Bank that this model is universally applicable and can be emulated in different parts of the world. The article's assumption is that the NPM‐agency model is based on a weak empirical foundation and its universal applicability is questionable. To illustrate our arguments we confront the NPM‐agency model with the empirical data drawn from the agencification of public services in Tanzania. Findings indicate that agencies in Tanzania display hybrid characteristics in terms of their autonomy and control. Our conclusion is that the universality of NPM‐agency model is illusive. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Recentralization and vertical alignment in the French health‐care system

In foreign exemplars, key new public management (NPM) features such as decentralization and devolution of health‐care responsibilities had outcomes below expectations. Other NPM traits such as the patient as overseer of reforms or the empowerment of patient remained elusive. In France, the integration of public values such as greater participation of patients and local actors (NGOs and elected officials) and NPM‐driven private values such as performance evaluation has yet to be seen. Taking advantage of NPM's failings and austerity agenda, a French welfare elite regained control over health‐care policy decisions at the expense of regions and other local actors. NPM outcomes were below expectations. Austerity cures led to weakening of the regional decision spaces, which can be explained under the principal–agent relationship. Accountability shifted to managerial (the professionalization of hospital managers) and legal (governance via regulations) forms in a bid to restore central government control. A democratic recess results from the lack of public engagement in recent health reforms.     

The Effect of Problem Severity,Managerial and Organizational Capacity,and Agency Structure on Intergovernmental Collaboration: Evidence from Local Emergency Management

Like most public managers nowadays, local emergency managers operate within complex, uncertain environments. Rapid changes in the scope and severity of the issues increase the extent of intergovernmental collaboration necessary to address such challenges. Using a large data set of county emergency management agency directors, variations in intergovernmental collaboration reflect influences from problem severity, managerial capacity, and structural factors. The results demonstrate that public managers who perceive problems as severe, possess specific managerial skills, lead high‐capacity organizations, and operate in less complex agency structures collaborate more often and more effectively across governmental boundaries.     

The Dilemma of the Unsatisfied Customer in a Market Model of Public Administration

The relationship between administrative service performance and citizen satisfaction has been assumed, but not demonstrated, in the application of market models to public service delivery. Although the citizen satisfaction literature cautions that the link between objective and subjective measures of service quality is tenuous at best, public‐sector professional organizations define a managerial focus on objective measures of service performance as accountability to citizens for outcomes. What if we're wrong?     

Managerial Networking in Nonprofit Organizations: The Impact of Networking on Organizational and Advocacy Effectiveness

Public management scholars are interested in the ways that public managers can improve the performance of their organizations and, by extension, public service outcomes. However, public sector outcomes are increasingly being produced by nonprofit organizations. Nonprofits have encountered increased pressures to improve effectiveness in recent years, both from their funding entities and from the public. A growing body of public management research has shown that managerial networking can pay dividends for organizational effectiveness, yet no studies to date have considered the effects of managerial networking on nonprofit effectiveness. This is the first study to apply the basic elements of Meier and O'Toole's model to the nonprofit sector. Using survey data from a random sample of 314 nonprofit human service organizations in 16 U.S. states, the authors explore the frequency of various networking relationships on organizational and advocacy effectiveness. The findings reveal that political networking increases advocacy effectiveness and community networking increases organizational effectiveness.     

Public sector reform in a poor,aid‐dependent country,Tanzania

African public sectors went through many changes during the 1960s and 1970s in response to political, economic and social pressures. They expanded in size but remained, at least in design, hierarchical and centralized. Their formal relations to society did not undergo any significant changes either. Generally, the reforms now under way are significantly different from earlier ones. Most are inspired by the new public management (NPM) paradigm. They are also much more radical in their aims, among which are: to reduce the core functions of the state; redraw the boundaries between political and administrative responsibilities; emphasize efficiency; redefine relations between public and private sectors; strengthen accountability; reduce corruption; reorganize organizations and staff; change values and attitudes; and exploit new technologies. This article focuses on a paradox of reform in Tanzania: multiple changes are pursued in the public sector despite fragile domestic political support to the reform package as a whole and despite few service delivery improvements on the ground. It is argued that this is the result of substantial external influences, fragmented domestic policy making, weak links between policy making and implementation, and questionable assumptions about some of the key NPM‐inspired reform measures. Moreover, the analyses highlight a number of differences with some of the recent reform literature. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The challenges of fractionalized property rights in public‐private hybrid organizations: The good,the bad,and the ugly

Policy designers seeking to harness profit‐driven efficiency for public purposes are increasingly creating organizations with fractionalized property rights that distribute “ownership” among public and private actors. The resulting hybrids are quite diverse, including mixed enterprises, public‐private partnerships, social entrepreneurship organizations, government‐sponsored enterprises, and various other hybrid forms. Marrying public purposes to private sector efficiency and strategic flexibility provides a tempting rationale for mixing public and private owners in hybrid organizations. Because public‐private hybrids involve fractionalized property rights, however, they exhibit tension among owners over both strategy and, more importantly, goals. To understand public‐private hybrids, we assess them in terms of six dimensions of property rights: fragmentation of ownership, clarity of allocation, cost of alienation, security from trespass, credibility of persistence, and autonomy (of both owners and managers). The unclear allocation of fractionalized ownership rights facilitates the appropriation of financial residuals and asset ownership opportunistically. Other weaknesses in the property rights configurations of public‐private hybrids create managerial dissonance or opportunistic behavior that typically leads to a narrowing of goals, but sometimes also to organizational failure.     

New Millennium,New Public Management and the New Zealand Model

Recently the much‐discussed ‘New Zealand model’ of new public management (NPM) has become significantly revised. It now lacks the theoretical coherence and the market‐led focus that it relied on between 1987 and 1996. Labour‐led governments since 1999 have undertaken gradual and pragmatic – yet significant – changes in public management structures and principles, refining and sometimes reversing the model implemented in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This article does a ‘stock‐take’ of public management developments in New Zealand from 1999 to 2008, and argues that New Zealand can no longer be viewed as a leading exponent of market‐led NPM. Some NPM principles have been refined, but others have been quietly abandoned. The new National‐led government appears unwilling to undertake radical reforms, and, while it may seek a greater role for the private sector, looks set to continue with the ‘gradual and pragmatic’ approach adopted since 1999.     

Deinstitutionalisation and Managerialism in Queensland's Public Psychiatric Institutions: Challenging ‘Rhetoric’ with Empirical Results

This article places the experience of public psychiatric institutions for the long term mentally ill in the context of New Public Management (NPM). This managerialist school of thought has been in widespread ascendancy since the 1970s. Some key characteristics of deinstitutionalisation and NPM are outlined. We then present some historical data about the temporal process of deinstitutionalisation in Queensland's public psychiatric institutions. The time series analysis provided is of a single state since Australia's public health care system is state‐based. Although NPM is not a coherent set of principles or doctrines, it is argued that ideology and the reality may be contradicting. Some of NPM's particular emphases are empirically analysed, in particular the view that administration/management expenditures are to be reduced, while emphasising workers ‘at the coal face’. The empirical results provide no evidence of a ‘parsimonious’ approach to management: parsimony occurs only for nursing staff. Relative expenditures on managerial functions have increased.     

Wakeup Call: Strategic Management,Network Alarms,and Performance

New empirical evidence suggests that service performance is shaped by the strategies adopted by public organizations and the networking behavior of public managers. Strategy captures two central behavioral aspects of public organizations: the way in which objectives and actions are selected (processes), and an organization’s approach to service delivery (content). Networking is similarly concerned with the behavior of public managers as they interact with others. These twin themes are linked in an integrated study that explores the relationship between strategy, networking, and service performance within a sample of English local governments. The results show that strategy processes based on rational planning offer long‐run positive effects on public services, as does a strategic proactive stance.     

新公共管理：反思、批判与超越——兼评新公共服务理论

通过采用企业化政府的理念,新公共管理提高了效率,但也导致了公共性、公平、责任、价值诉求等公共管理价值的缺失.通过对新公共管理的反思和批判以及对新公共服务的理论基础、原则和内容的介绍,说明新公共服务在理论基础、价值选择、政府责任、公民精神方面不仅可以弥补和纠正新公共管理的偏颇,并可以替代新公共管理成为公共管理的发展趋势.     

Benefiting from Public Sector Innovation: The Moderating Role of Customer and Learning Orientation

This article examines whether the payoff from engaging in innovation‐generating activities is contingent on an organization's level of customer and learning orientation. The authors suggest that innovative activity is associated with higher public service quality when the level of customer and learning orientation within the focal organization is high. They test this hypothesis by drawing on a novel panel data set covering all public nonspecialist hospital organizations in England. Using dynamic panel data estimation techniques, the authors find strong support for a direct relationship between innovative activity and public service quality and for a moderating role of both customer and learning orientation. These findings call for a contingency perspective on public sector innovation and highlight some of the boundary conditions that need to be in place if public service organizations are to benefit fully from their innovative activities.     

The role of chief executive tenure for public organizations' hiring of management consultants

Public organizations increasingly rely on management consultants to access expertise, impose reforms, and drive organizational change, and spend large sums each year on their services. Despite this, we know little about the antecedents of public organizations' use of management consulting services. Drawing on upper echelon theory, a longitudinal hypothesis‐testing study of the hiring of management consultants in 72 Swedish public organizations, and interviews with Swedish chief executives (CEs), we find an inverted U‐shaped relationship between CE tenure and public organizations' use of management consulting services. We also find that this relationship is moderated by CEs' previous experience and managerial discretion. These findings contribute to theorizing on the use of management consulting services and the influence of CEs in public organizations.     

The influence of management on the cost of fire protection

An important and unresolved issue central to the study of government performance is how the actions of managers and the nature of organizations affect the cost of public services. This paper presents an empirical analysis of fire departments that estimates the influence of managerial choices on per capita spending within a simultaneous public production system. It does so by refining a theoretical cost model from the field of public management to include fundamental dimensions of government organizations and administration. Two‐stage least squares regression analysis is then employed to examine the fire protection case. The results of the analysis substantiate the intuition that managerial practices and decisions influence the cost of a public service. They show that the cost of fire protection depends significantly on the outcomes of a department's fire prevention and suppression activities, some key aspects of a department's management practices, the configuration of its workforce and equipment, its legal structure, and factors in its external environment. © 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Reforming Social Services in Hong Kong: The Role of Contracting and Performance Management in the Non‐Profit Sector

Contracts and performance management, along with the concept of consumerism, have become the fundamental metaphors for New Public Management (NPM) and key changes in the public service. ‘Doing well while doing good’ and finding generally acceptable accountability measures for social services have become the perennial aspirations of planners, service providers and funders. This article examines the contingent factors and rationales behind the quality movement and recontracting exercise in reforming the delivery of personal social service programs in Hong Kong within the framework of New Public Management (NPM). It explains the use of long‐term relational contracts rather than the standard business contracts between the government as funder and non‐profit organisations as service providers. It also deals with the complex relationships among quality issues, quality standards, consumerism, accountability, performance indicators, and performance management.     

Understanding evolving public motivational practices: An institutional analysis

New public management (NPM) has been the focus of research and reform practices in countries globally since the late 1970s. This article looks at NPM in historical perspective with particular attention to understanding the evolution of public motivational practices. Three different eras and motivational models common in OECD countries are discussed—the bureaucratic model, the NPM model, and the new public service model. This long‐linked historical perspective highlights the interplay between administrative theory and realpolitik. It is possible to see how certain priorities have been a result of or led to the preservation, the adaptation, or the discontinuation of practices in alignment with the values and behaviors of the successive reform eras. Additional research into the dynamics of change in the public sector is suggested.     

Taking a Closer Look at the Empowerment‐Performance Relationship: Evidence from Law Enforcement Organizations

This article examines the influence of empowering leadership practices on police officers' job performance, perceptions of managerial effectiveness, and unit performance. These relationships are examined using multisource survey data collected from 100 law enforcement managers, 446 of their subordinates, and 98 of their direct supervisors. The analysis shows that empowering leadership contributes positively to subordinate officers' job performance and unit effectiveness. Empowering leadership is also positively associated with subordinate but not with supervisor ratings of managerial effectiveness. Task‐oriented leadership, however, is positively associated with both subordinate and supervisor ratings of managerial effectiveness. Implications of these results for managerial leadership in law enforcement organizations are discussed.     

Making Good Use of Partners: Differential Effects of Managerial Networking in the Social Care Domain

ABSTRACT

Public managers engage in networking relationships with a wide variety of external actors and organizations from which they can draw different types of support and resources. Most empirical studies on managerial networking merely present different intensities of external networking in general, as if it were a unidimensional concept. In practice, however, public managers strategically differentiate between functional or task-related groups of external partners, based on the specific policy context. Moreover, such differentiation in networking behavior can be expected to systematically impact agency and public program performance outcomes. This article derives contextualized hypotheses on how managerial networking affects the performance of Dutch local governments in the social care domain. Multilevel structural equation analyses of 3,257 social care clients in 71 local governments provide evidence that bilateral client-interest networking is more beneficial to the Social Support Act's overall goal of improving the level of social participation of clients than professional networking. Moreover, the effect is indirect: managerial networking with client interest groups improves the physical self-reliance of clients, enabling them to engage in social activities.