Public Value and the Ideal State: Rescuing Public Value from Ambiguity

Public value theory has had its supporters and critics, with debate about the use of strategic management by public managers and confusion about the meaning of public value. This paper formalises Moore (1995) into a simple theory. That theory introduces the concept of an ‘ideal state.’ The ideal state is a simple means of describing and analysing public value, using a graphical presentation. In an ideal state roles are clear and public value is optimised. Insights from that ideal state are then applied to a more real world to clarify the nature of public value and to consider the appropriate use of strategic management by public servants. The conclusion is that public value theory provides some justification for strategic management, but the paper also demonstrates the limits to strategic management by officials.     

Risk Management and Risk Avoidance in Agency Decision Making

Despite decades of efforts to enhance the public's role in bureaucratic decision making, citizens still tend to have little influence on the decisions that public managers make. Solutions often focus on the processes or structures of participation, but such changes may be of limited effectiveness if the structure is only part of the problem. Although much research has argued the normative justification for including the public, noting that frameworks that do not encourage genuine participation may diminish rather than enhance public influence, there has been less focus on how participants’ divergent frames of reference may also diminish the influence of public input. This research explores this gap from a risk management perspective, suggesting that public managers tend to view risk as something to be managed, whereas citizens tend to view risk as best avoided.     

Transformational Leadership and Public Service Motivation: Driving Individual and Organizational Performance

Despite growing evidence about prosocial motivations and their effects on employee behavior, how can new public service motivation research translate into more effective management practices—which, so far, regrettably remain underdeveloped? Increasingly, public service motivation studies have moved from understanding what motivates public servants to exploring how public service motives influence performance. Similarly, greater attention is now paid to the practices of transformational leadership. Drawing on concepts from transformational leadership, this essay explores how managers can harness the positive aspects of public service motivation to enhance employee and organizational performance and outlines strategies that can help managers incorporate public service motivation values across management systems.     

Public Values in Special Districts: A Survey of Managerial Commitment

Special districts are increasingly important in the landscape of public organizations and now constitute about 40 percent of all U.S. jurisdictions. Yet little is known about the public value commitments of managers in special districts. This systematic study of senior managers in large special districts finds that support for public values is strong and similar to that of senior managers in cities. This study explores the effect of concomitant commitments to “businesslike” values on public values and the impact of concomitant commitments on perceived organizational outcomes. Though a positive relationship exists between commitments to public and businesslike values among senior managers, the authors find evidence that both too much and too little commitment to businesslike values has a negative impact on perceived organizational outcomes, which are furthered by strong commitment to public values. This article demonstrates that special districts are a relevant but underresearched area of public administration.     

Public versus Private Managers: How Public and Private Managers Differ in Leadership Behavior

This article aims to find out whether there are behavioral differences between public and private sector managers. Two groups of public managers (managers of social insurance agencies and public school principals) and a group of private managers (two samples) are investigated. Behavioral dimensions are investigated including leadership style (task, relationship, and change orientation), decision‐making style (the functions of sensing, intuition, thinking, and feeling), and motivation profile (achievement, affiliation, and power motivation). An analysis of data from 459 managers in four organizations in Sweden reveal significant differences in behavior between public and private managers. However, no significant differences in leadership behavior are discovered among public managers. Possible explanations for such differences and similarities are explored.     

Goats or wolves? Private sector managers in the public sector

Public administration reforms have propagated the use of private sector management skills in the public sector, and an increased openness to managers with a private sector background. This has created a debate between those who think private sector experience improves public institutions by bringing core managerial values such as results orientation, efficiency, or openness to innovation, and those who argue that private sector experience can damage core public sector values, such as impartiality and equity. Despite the abundant anecdotal evidence, broad empirical evidence on the effects of private sector experience on public managers' values remains limited. Using data from a survey among central government top managers in 18 European countries, we show that public managers with private sector experience have, as expected, more core managerial values. Yet, unlike the conventional view, core public values do not suffer.     

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.     

Performance and Management in the Public Sector: Testing a Model of Relative Risk Aversion

Research has demonstrated that management influences the performance of public organizations, but almost no research has explored how the success or failure of a public organization influences the decisions of those who manage it. Arguing that many decisions by public managers are analogous to risky choice, the authors use a well‐validated model of relative risk aversion to understand how such choices are influenced by managers’ perceptions of organizational performance. They theorize that managers will be less likely to encourage innovation or give discretion to employees when they are just reaching their goals relative to other performance conditions. Analyses of responses to the 2011 and 2013 Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys provide considerable support for these assertions. The findings have significant implications for our understanding of the relationship between management and performance in public organizations.     

Rawls on agreeing to disagree: How democracies differ from non-democracies in justifying war

We use Rawls’s account of public reason and the Law of Peoples to test two hypotheses: democracies are more likely to invoke self-defense in justifications than non-democracies, and democracies are more likely to invoke human rights in justifications than non-democracies. Through an analysis of war justifications since 1875, we find that although democracies and non-democracies are similarly likely to use self-defense as a justification, democracies are more likely to justify war through human rights. Institutions and values centering on rights that promote domestic public justification also promote justifications compatible with those values and institutions at the international level.     

Public Service Motivation Research: Lessons for Practice

Public service motivation research has proliferated in parallel with concerns about how to improve the performance of public service personnel. However, scholarship does not always inform management and leadership. This article purposefully reviews public service motivation research since 2008 to determine the extent to which researchers have identified lessons for practice. The results of the investigation support several lessons—among them using public service motivation as a selection tool, facilitating public service motivation through cooperation in the workplace, conveying the significance of the job, and building leadership based on public service values. These results are important because they offer evidence that the field is coalescing around tactics that managers and leaders can use to address enduring concerns about employee motivation in the public sector. They also prompt us to articulate ideas that can guide a tighter integration of research and practice moving forward.     

Public Values in Public–Private Partnerships

Although public–private partnerships (PPPs) are frequently analyzed and lauded in terms of efficiency, their impact on public values is often neglected. As a result, there is little empirical evidence supporting or rejecting the claim that PPPs have a negative effect on public values. This case study provides valuable insight into the relationship between public values in PPPs and the circumstances affecting the degree to which public values are upheld. Research findings demonstrate that whether public values are at stake in PPPs cannot be answered with a simple yes or no. Rather, public values can be threatened, safeguarded, or even strengthened depending on the project phase and the specific facet of the public value under scrutiny. Insight into which circumstances influence the safeguarding of public values in DBFMO (design–build–finance–maintain–operate) projects unravels the strengths and weaknesses of PPPs in terms of public values, providing public managers with a starting point for optimization.     

Regulating Public Services: How Public Managers Respond to External Performance Assessment

Performance management systems have become a key component of contemporary public administration. However, there has been only limited analysis of the social construction of performance by public managers who are subject to them. This article examines the ways in which public managers create, maintain, and disrupt performance management practices. The authors find that managers make external performance assessments perform for themselves by constantly negotiating boundaries in ways that combine bureaucratic and managerial rationales. The authors argue that the ways in which organizational boundaries are constructed are fundamental to understanding the success or failure of performance management systems and the transformation of managerial ways of thinking about performance into a logic of improvement through which contemporary public sector reforms become embedded.     

THE DESIGN AND USE OF PERFORMANCE INFORMATION IN INDONESIAN LOCAL GOVERNMENTS UNDER DIVERGING STAKEHOLDER PRESSURES

Public sector managers in less developed countries are confronted with opposing forces. A lack of sufficient resources along with a tradition of corruption are obstacles for developing and using performance measurement systems. However, recent public sector reforms in less developed countries, including decentralisation and anti‐corruption programmes, stimulate the development and use of such systems. On the basis of a framework, which distinguishes different types of stakeholders, each with particular performance interests, we analyse how public sector managers are coping with the two opposing forces, given the relative power positions and the interests of their stakeholders. On the basis of four cases studies of local government agencies in Bali (Indonesia), we found that with respect to the annual performance reports, managers in these agencies focus more on fulfilling the formal requirements regarding the format of these reports and on their timely submission than on their contents, which are all symptoms of a symbolic rather than functional use of performance information. However, the reports include information on inputs that is linked to similar information in short‐term reports, which the managers use in a functional manner. These managers show a kind of juggling behaviour, in the sense that they partially try to serve conflicting performance interests. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Only When We Agree! How Value Congruence Moderates the Impact of Goal‐Oriented Leadership on Public Service Motivation

Questions of how and when managers can motivate the workforce of public organizations are fundamental for scholars and practitioners alike. A dominant assertion is that goal‐oriented leadership strategies, such as transformational leadership, foster public service motivation (PSM). However, existing studies rely on designs that are vulnerable to endogeneity and rarely investigate the scope conditions of the leadership‐PSM relationship. Combining a field experiment with 364 managers and surveys of their 3,470 employees, the authors show that transformational leadership and transactional leadership, when induced experimentally, do not have the claimed positive effect on PSM. In fact, the results indicate that goal‐oriented leadership can have demotivating effects when employee and organizational values are incongruent. Public managers should therefore carefully assess existing levels of value (in)congruence before implementing goal‐oriented leadership strategies, and—in case of value conflicts—seek to align perceptions of the desirable among members of the organization.     

Incentives in Third‐Party Governance: Management Practices and Accountability Implications

Contract incentives are designed to motivate contractor performance and to provide public managers with a powerful tool to achieve contract accountability. Our knowledge of contract incentives is rooted in contract design, yet as we move beyond contract specification and further into the contract lifecycle, we know little about why and how managers implement incentives. This study assesses public managers’ use of contract incentives in practice and advances theory development. A typology of contract incentives is constructed to capture a comprehensive range of formal and informal incentives, and the factors that influence managerial use of incentives are identified. The findings shed light on the complexities of maintaining accountability in third‐party governance structures and the management techniques aimed at improving the performance of public agencies.     

The Other Type of Performance Information: Nonroutine Feedback,Its Relevance and Use

The literature on performance information use explains how public managers deal with mainly quantitative data that are systematically collected and formally reported. This article argues that such a narrow understanding is incomplete, as it excludes all kinds of nonroutine performance information, including verbal, ad hoc, and qualitative feedback. To understand how responsive public managers are to performance feedback, alternative sources of performance information need to be taken into account. A literature review suggests considering two important sources of nonroutine feedback: organizational insiders and relevant external stakeholders. Using survey data from German local government, this article shows that public managers prefer to use nonroutine feedback over routine data from performance reports. Furthermore, a regression analysis indicates that different sources of performance information require different determinants to trigger their use. This finding is essential because it suggests that explanations of performance information use can covary with the information source studied.     

Politicization,Bureaucratic Legalism,and Innovative Attitudes in the Public Sector

Previous studies have identified institutional, organizational, and individual factors that promote innovation in public organizations. Yet they have overlooked how the type of public administration—and the type of administrators—is associated with innovative attitudes. Using two large, unique comparative data sets on public bureaucracies and public managers, this article examines how bureaucratic politicization and legalistic features are associated with senior public managers’ attitudes toward innovation in 19 European countries. Results of multilevel analysis indicate that the bureaucratic politicization of an administration and the law background of public managers matter. Public managers working in politicized administrations and those whose education includes a law degree exhibit lower pro-innovation attitudes (i.e., receptiveness to new ideas and creative solutions and change orientation).     

Does Ethical Leadership Matter in Government? Effects on Organizational Commitment,Absenteeism, and Willingness to Report Ethical Problems

Recent ethical scandals involving managers in government organizations have highlighted the need for more research on ethical leadership in public sector organizations. To assess the consequences of ethical leadership, 161 managers in a large state government agency and 415 of their direct reports were surveyed, and personnel records were obtained to measure absenteeism. Results indicate that after controlling for the effects of employee characteristics, perceptions of procedural fairness, and supportive leader behavior, ethical leadership reduced absenteeism and had a positive influence on organizational commitment and willingness to report ethical problems. Implications of the findings and suggestions for future research are presented.     

We’re Not all Happy Yet: Attitudes to Work,Leadership, and High Performance Work Practices among Managers in the Public Sector

This article explores the attitudes of male and female managers in the public sector toward high performance Human Resource Management (HRM) policies and practices, work, and organisational leadership, and compares these attitudes to those of managers in the private sector. It finds that female public sector managers are most positive about high performance HRM policies and practices. Male public sector managers are less positive than female managers in the public sector and male and female managers in the private sector across all the measures. Psychological contract theory suggests either the changes associated with high performance HRM policies and practices, or attempts to decrease the disadvantage felt by women in the public sector may have resulted in a sense of disadvantage among some men in the sector, and created a changed, more transactional psychological contract between these men and their organisation. Strategies are needed to reengage public sector men.     

Lessons from Resource Dependence Theory for Contemporary Public and Nonprofit Management

The fiscal landscape continues to challenge public and nonprofit managers. Against this backdrop, public and nonprofit managers look for new strategies to address the challenges associated with limited resources. Resource dependence theory provides valuable guidance for managers who want to understand the considerations and consequences relevant to different types of interorganizational partnering. In this article, the theory's core ideas are described, along with three common strategies or tactics that organizations use to obtain critical resources from the environment: merging, forming alliances, and co‐opting. For each strategy, the authors derive a set of practical lessons for busy public and nonprofit managers.