Early Innovation Adoption: Effects of Performance-Based Motivation and Organizational Characteristics

Abstract

Early adopters of innovation play a critical role in the successful spread of the innovation by legitimizing the adoption of the innovation and/or providing evidence of its effectiveness. This article explores why some organizations adopt innovations before than others by focusing on determinants of early innovation adoption. Analysis reveals that there is a U-shaped influence of organizational performance on early innovation adoption. Most organizations are encouraged to be early adopters by their poor performance, but some organizations with very high performance tend to be innovation-friendly. Other organizational characteristics such as organizational size and pro-innovation bias also have positive impacts on early innovation adoption. These findings have practical implications about strategies for successfully diffusing innovations.     

Public Managers' Perceptions of Organizational Goal Ambiguity: Analyzing Alternative Models

Much organizational theory, research, and practice emphasizes the value of organizational members having clear perceptions of the organization's goals. For years, authors have asserted that public organizations have particularly vague goals, goals more vague than those of business firms. Yet, researchers have not devoted a lot of attention to ways of measuring perceptions about organizational goal clarity in public organizations and analyzing these perceptions. Many authors claim that the external political context increases goal ambiguity in public organizations. Some survey evidence, however, suggests that other factors, such as individual dispositions and attitudes, and internal organizational structures and processes, have greater effects. We analyze three alternative models of goal ambiguity—a political model, an organizational model, and an individual model—using data collected in Phase II of the National Administrative Studies Project (NASP-II), and then a composite model. Although political context acts as a significant determinant of goal ambiguity, both organizational and individual models have better explanatory power. Implications of these findings for theory and managerial practice are discussed.     

Understanding the changing role of public sector performance measurement in less developed countries

This article develops a framework for understanding changes in the demand for and supply of performance information in public sector organizations in less developed countries (LDCs). New Institutional Sociology (NIS) is used to argue that pressures from specific stakeholders stimulate organizations to produce particular performance information. The article distinguishes three groups of stakeholders (i.e. funding bodies, statutory boards and purchasers), and elaborates on the performance dimensions these stakeholders are interested in. The group of funding bodies, with their interest in financial performance information, used to be the most important group of stakeholders. However, statutory boards and purchasers are gaining importance as a result of recent public sector reforms, which include decentralization, marketization and the implementation of anti‐corruption programs. As a consequence of pressures coming from these stakeholders, new performance dimensions, such as the quality and quantity of services and the political governance structure, will be added to organizations' performance measurement (PM) systems. Whether these and other—often more traditional financial—performance dimensions will be balanced and integrated throughout organizations depends on the power positions of the various stakeholders. The arguments presented in this article intend to stimulate public sector organizations in LDCs to design and redesign PM systems as a response to changing stakeholder interests. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Understanding multi-purpose hybrid voluntary organizations: The contributions of theories on civil society,social movements and non-profit organizations

Abstract

The paper offers a theoretical framework to study the conditions that lead to the emergence of multi-purpose hybrid voluntary organizations and the factors that influence their ability to mobilize resources and enlist commitment. These organizations are characterized by four interrelated attributes: (a) they set out as their mission to uphold and promote cultural values that are typically at variant with dominant and institutionalized values; (b) they offer services to members and the public that express their distinct values, using the services as a model and catalyst for social change; (c) in addition to their instrumental goals, they aim to meet the expressive and social identity needs of their members by promoting a collective identity; and (d) they evolve into hybrid organizations by having multiple purposes—combining to various degrees goals of value change, service provision and mutual-aid. Because they deliberately combine features of volunteer-run associations, social movements and non-profit service organizations, we articulate a theoretical framework that melds concepts and propositions from the various theoretical perspectives used to study each of these organizational forms. We argue that the expanded theoretical framework offers a more comprehensive and dynamic view of civil society and a better perspective to the study of third sector organizations.     

Leadership and Organizational Culture: Sustaining Dialogue between Practitioners and Scholars

Few topics in the study of contemporary public organizations better illustrate the burdens—and potential benefits—of sustaining dialogue between practitioners and scholars than the interplay between leadership, organizational culture, and public sector performance. Following two decades of intensive research and advocacy, the last 10 years have seen diminished scholarly attention to this subject, while efforts to shape culture remain central to the leadership of public organizations. This essay reflects on the 8 Cs of organizational culture: complicated, control, competence, commitments, credibility, conflict, context, and change.     

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.     

Why Do Autonomous Public Agencies Use Performance Management Techniques? Revisiting the Role of Basic Organizational Characteristics

This study investigates to what extent the use of different performance management techniques within (semi-) autonomous public sector organizations, also called public agencies, can be explained by the defining organizational features of such organizations. Using multi-country survey data of over 400 public agencies, the effect of these features—internal performance target setting and monitoring, multi-year planning, as well as the internal performance-based allocation of resources—upon three performance management techniques has been studied. This set-up recognizes differences among management techniques, as well as recurring factors, allowing us to make more general statements. Analyses illustrate that external result control by the minister and parent ministry positively affects the use of all performance management techniques examined in public agencies. However, each performance management technique is affected differently by specific organizational variables.     

Pressure,Legitimacy, and Innovative Behavior by Public Organizations

According to New Public Management (NPM) doctrines, public organizations involved in service delivery and policy implementation will be induced to innovative behavior if they have enough managerial autonomy and simultaneously are subjected to managerial pressure, such as result control by government or competition of other providers. This NPM pressure‐response model is tested by using survey data on 84 Flemish public organizations. These tests provide evidence for the assumed effect of NPM‐like pressure on the innovative behavior of public organizations. However, the empirical model shows more complex relationships as is assumed by NPM doctrine. These complex relationships are corroborated and explained by making reference to a multiple‐case study of four Flemish public organizations. An expanded political/administrative pressure‐response model, referring to legitimacy as a motivational force, is suggested in order to explain innovative behavior by public organizations. This model may help to understand the preconditions for spontaneous adaptation of public organizations.     

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).     

Toward a new institutional strategy framework for political marketing

The present literature on political marketing strategy has provided important knowledge about how the material context of technologies, polls or competitors influences strategy formulation. However, less attention has been directed to the constraints facing a political organization from the social context related to habits, norms or social conventions. This article thus aims at bringing organizational new institutional theory into the field of political marketing strategy. Accordingly, it is investigated how political organizations when initiating marketing strategies act or react toward institutionalized demands in their environment, such as issues or ideas that are considered socially appropriate. As such, a strategy framework consisting of a phase model and a typology is developed. The phase model is drawn from extant literature within organizational new institutional theory stating that decision makers will (1) scan information from their environment, (2) interpret this incoming information in available cognitive categories and (3), finally, select a strategy premised on their cognitive interpretations. On this ground, we build a novel typology that specifies which political marketing strategy decision makers will select under different cognitive framings of their environment. Here, we delineate four ideal type political marketing strategies—conformity, decoupling, defense and entrepreneurial—that correspond to how organizational decision makers interpret their institutional surroundings. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Workplace Spirituality and Organizational Performance

This article reviews the literature on workplace spirituality, pointing out emergent theories and examining the links between this phenomenon and organizational dynamics. It also examines workplace spirituality in a historical context and compares it to religious beliefs and to established ethical theories and moral principles. The article also looks at organizations in which an emphasis on spiritual values has had an impact on work productivity. While some corporations have institutionalized spirituality, public agencies are reluctant to follow suit for fear of violating the principle of church-state separation. Finally, the article suggests ways that managers and administrators in both the public and the private sector can use workplace spirituality to increase performance and develop ethical organizations.     

Innovation strategies for the adoption of new information technology in government: an Australian experience

Adopting and diffusing new technology, creating user awareness and managing organizational innovation effectively are major tasks for contemporary organizations. In large-scale organizations, with centralized information technology (IT) environments, the tasks of technology evaluation, IT change and diffusion require considerable coordinating efforts. The article recounts the experience of a large-scale public organization in managing work-process innovation and the adoption of IT options that could be adequately cost-justified. Such options need, at least, to encourage users to simultaneously learn to utilize IT to improve current practices and to embrace entirely new functions.     

Organizational Resources and Methods of Participation

This report deals with the influence of various organizational resources upon methods of participation. We found it useful to subdivide the concept of political participation into four groups: Input participation, decision participation, consumer participation, and respondent participation. Using data from one city and one sector we cannot suggest any general conclusions. Our findings show these various methods of participation to be highly intercorrelated and that the various methods of participation - along with organizational resources as income and staff, the contextual variable, and preoccupation with the local system level - influenced each method of participation. This means that we have to take the positions of organizations in the political system into consideration if we want to study their participation in the political processes. The resources stemning from positions in the political system are perhaps more influential upon the method of participation than the traditional organizational resource variables.
The process of consuming public finances is not without political effects. Consumer participation is related both to decision participation and to input participation. Our study also indicates that it is wrong to assume closed models with no feedback loops when we study relations between interest organizations and public authorities.     

Romanticizing bureaucratic leadership? The politics of how elected officials attribute responsibility for performance

A core task for elected officials is to hold bureaucratic leaders responsible, but how do they determine if public managers actually influence outcomes? We propose that partisan and leadership heuristics affect how politicians apply a logic of individualized responsibility, that is, focus on individual bureaucrats rather than situational factors to explain organizational outcomes. We match survey data of local elected officials in Denmark with individual partisan variables and objective performance data about the schools they oversee. We provide evidence that partisan beliefs matter, with conservative elected officials more willing to pursue a logic of individualized responsibility. We also find that elected officials are more likely to assume that bureaucratic leaders determine organizational outcomes where performance is very high or low, a leadership attribution heuristic previously established in private sector studies. We argue that our findings have important implications for contemporary governance, given the growing reliance on performance metrics to assign responsibility.     

How Organizational Learning Is Supported by Performance Management Systems: Evidence from a Longitudinal Case Study

Abstract

Performance management is meant to encourage organizational change by providing better and more relevant feedback to managers. But there is no denying the complexity of learning and change. How performance management helps this process goes beyond the simple availability of performance information. In this study, we examine the learning processes in a large Belgian public organization through interviews of managers, directors, and administrators. By using 4Is framework of organizational learning—from Intuitions to Interpretation to Integration to Institutionalization—we identify critical blocks and enablers of learning and change. Critical impediments include off-topic discussions of performance information, lack of opportunity to share and discuss management practices, and limited motivation to change entrenched processes of work. Performance management also provides reliable enablers of organizational learning, such as giving credibility-by-results to new management practices, focusing discussions on processes that lead to measurable results, the ability to follow new innovations closely as they are implemented, and the possibility of creating a learning culture supported by performance information. Finally, we discuss how perceived credibility of performance information is crucial to organizational learning and how it is reinforced by use and dialogue.     

The political economy of an African public enterprise: A longitudinal case study of the administrative and economic operations of the Sierra Leone Port Organization

In most of the post-colonial states of sub-Saharan Africa, both the size of the state bureaucracy has grown and its functions proliferated. Whatever the economic rationale of public sector organizations, they do not exist and operate in a social and political vacuum. This paper argues that they are typically an integral part of a patron clientelist political and economic system on which the foundations of government sometimes depend. The consequences for the economic performance of public sector organizations arising out of this socio-political context is now widely recognized in the growing literature on African public enterprise. Contributions to this discussion, however, have tended to be dominated by economists and public administration specialists who have generally adopted a technocratic problem solution approach. In isolating their analyses of the performance of African parastatals from an appraisal of the role of the state, this approach fails to situate adequately the problem of performance in its proper context. This paper provides a case study which examines the administrative and economic operations of the Sierra Leone Port Organization in the colonial and post-colonial states. In arguing that problems of performance of African public sector organizations also require political solutions this discussion extends the discussion beyond a technocratic focus.     

Collaborative Innovation: A Viable Alternative to Market Competition and Organizational Entrepreneurship

There are growing pressures for the public sector to be more innovative but considerable disagreement about how to achieve it. This article uses institutional and organizational analysis to compare three major public innovation strategies. The article confronts the myth that the market‐driven private sector is more innovative than the public sector by showing that both sectors have a number of drivers of as well as barriers to innovation, some of which are similar, while others are sector specific. The article then systematically analyzes three strategies for innovation: New Public Management, which emphasizes market competition; the neo‐Weberian state, which emphasizes organizational entrepreneurship; and collaborative governance, which emphasizes multiactor engagement across organizations in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. The authors conclude that the choice of strategies for enhancing public innovation is contingent rather than absolute. Some contingencies for each strategy are outlined.     

Seeing eye to eye: organizational behaviour,brokering and building trust in Tanzania

The focus of this article is organizational behaviour in and around the private sector in Tanzania at a time of transition through liberalization and the promotion of private sector activity; how the private sector has re‐emerged in the very recent past; how it operates as a group or, more accurately, as a set of groups, and the relationships between its component parts and with other development organizations (notably public actors: the state and aid donors). Within this framework our interest is in how organizational behaviour is mediated and trust is built through the brokering of relations between different organizations which intersect the public and private (and what this means for the public sphere). The article assesses the usefulness of a three‐level framework for analysing organizational and institutional transformation, shows that some tentative but modest change is occurring, and that a range of incomplete but positive political processes are happening. We show that institutional development is the weak link in these processes. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Right Mix? Gender Diversity in Top Management Teams and Financial Performance

Recent research has illustrated that demographic diversity influences the outcomes of public sector organizations. Most studies have focused on workforce diversity; by comparison, little is known about how managerial diversity affects organizational outcomes. This article focuses on gender diversity in the top management teams of public organizations and its relationship to financial performance. Theory suggests that management diversity can be a positive asset for organizations, allowing for the use of more diverse knowledge and human skill sets. Results of this study, however, suggest that organizations may only be able to leverage these advantages if they have a supporting management structure. In a longitudinal study of top management teams in Danish municipalities, the authors find that gender diversity in top management teams is associated with higher financial performance, but only in municipalities with a management structure that supports cross‐functional team work. These results are interpreted in light of existing theory, and implications are suggested.     

Disparate Measures: Public Managers and Performance-Measurement Strategies

Over the past two decades, many studies have investigated the scope and significance of performance measurement in public organizations. Nonetheless, there is more to learn about the challenges facing public managers who want to measure organizational outputs and use the feedback to improve performance. Specifically, managers are often faced with redundant measures of the same output, each of which may be preferred by a different political principal or stakeholder. Furthermore, a manager's choice of measures can have serious consequences for both the estimation of agency problems and the success of programmatic solutions. We test these assertions in an analysis of educational organizations in Texas. We find that managers' assessments of organizational performance and decisions regarding solutions depend on the choice of performance measures.