Relevant and Preferred Public Service: A study of user experiences and value creation in public transit

When public service success is dependent upon creating value that attracts users, public managers can benefit from adopting private sector principles. This article draws on the theory of attractive quality and strategic management research to focus on the theoretical and managerial implications of how organizations’ resource allocations affect user experiences. The present study shows how public transit organizations’ achievement of twenty-five different service requirements affected their offerings’ relevance and preference among 930 users. This article increases the understanding of how strategic choices and prioritization between various service requirements affect both the effectiveness and efficiency of (public) service offerings.     

Researching Public Sector Change

This article highlights the importance of taking a gendered perspective for the understanding of new public manage-ment and the restructuring of public services. Significant changes havetaken place in the management structure and processes of public sector organizations throughout the decade, with work-forces being redefined and reconstitu-ted. Relatively little research work has examined the gendered implications of such change and the way in which pro-cesses of redefinition are negotiated, accepted or resisted by male and female professionals. A conceptual framework for future research is presented which is informed by three separate research literatures: the feminization thesis, developments in HRM and marketiza-tion and managerialism. The article con-cludes by emphasizing the importance of a more inclusive and gendered view of restructuring agendas. A theoretical framework is proposed that accommo-dates difference and agency in the restructuring process as a way forward in analysing public sector change.     

Innovation-Oriented Culture in the Public Sector: Do managerial autonomy and result control lead to innovation?

This article examines the effect of specific new public management (NPM)-related characteristics to explain innovation-oriented culture within public sector organizations. According to NPM doctrines, an enhanced managerial autonomy combined with result control will stimulate a more innovation-oriented culture in such organizations. Using multi-country survey data of over 200 public sector agencies, we test for the influence of organizational autonomy, result control and their interactions, on innovation-oriented culture. High levels of managerial autonomy and result control have independent and positive effects. However, the interaction between high personnel management autonomy and high result control has a negative effect.     

‘… and politics?’

This article illuminates the relationship between the increased importance management has gained in public institutions, and political reality in everyday work lives. It attempts to gauge the rationalities behind the managerial and the political system and derives a heuristic structure from them. On the basis of this discussion, an analysis is conducted of the origins of new public management, using Switzerland as an example. It is concluded that NPM reforms started as managerial reforms of public institutions, but that they developed into de facto political reforms. Thus the managerial background of project managers, consultants and public management scholars is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for a successful implementation of NPM in the politico-administrative system. The contribution which public management is able to make to the governance debate must not be underestimated. Not least, it leads to a clarification of the sources of legitimacy of government action. The rationality model introduced in this article is designed to make systemic differences between management and politics visible – and to improve communication between politicians and public managers.     

In Search of Collaborative Public Management

Abstract

This paper describes how managers from disparate organizations collaborated to implement a crime programme through the mechanism of a multi-layered crime partnership. The case is analysed using three theoretical models: collaborative public management (CPM), new public management (NPM) and public administration (PA). A case study research strategy was adopted with eighteen managers from the partnership being interviewed and ten partnership meetings being observed, to enhance understanding of management practice under partnership. This paper provides evidence for CPM, a model of management suited to deliver on the shared outcomes required by government from the varied organizations involved in crime programmes.     

Individualization and Marketization of Responsibility for Gender Equality: The Case of Female Managers in China

This article investigates the question of where the responsibility for promoting gender equality resides in the Chinese employment context. Utilizing Acker's (2006) inequality regimes framework, the study explores women's underrepresentation in management roles in China and explains the persistence of gender inequalities in managerial echelons of Chinese organizations. Based on 30 interviews with female managers, the findings demonstrate the marketization and individualization of gender equality in organizational activity. The existing gender inequality, and the lack of responsibility for tackling it, has been either legitimized by eluding to the commercial‐only focus of organizations or rendered invisible through a belief in individual choice as the determining factor of career progression for women. Gender inequality in management is also maintained through the compliance of female managers themselves with the presumed legitimacy of gender‐based differential access to managerial roles. References to culture and tradition, market forces, competitive pressures, and individual choices by female managers are often made in explaining the unequal career paths and outcomes for men and women in their organizations. Our findings contribute to the human resource management (HRM) literature by framing macrosocietal context as a dynamic and endogenous aspect of management of human resources in organizations and provide novel insights into the interplay between HRM and societal context. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Gender and managerial coaching across cultures: female managers are coaching more

Despite the increasing popularity of managerial coaching in organizations worldwide, little is known with regard to how gender and culture may affect managerial behavior. The present study is the first empirical study on managerial coaching on a global scale. Based on social role theory, role congruity theory, and cross-cultural theory, we first expect female leaders to engage in more coaching behavior than male leaders. Second, we expect that male leadership, particularly coaching behavior, is more influenced by societal culture than female leadership. Survey data were obtained from more than 600,000 employees, assessing coaching behavior of more than 130,000 practicing managers from 51 countries/areas. Results support both expectations. Taken together, this study has advanced our empirical and theoretical understanding of managerial coaching on a global scale.     

Factors Influencing a Manager's Decision to Discipline Employees for Refusal to Work with an HIV/AIDS Infected Coworker

This research investigates the influence of gender, fear of AIDS, and the likelihood that a manager will share AIDS-related health information about an HIV/AIDS infected coworker with subordinates on a manager's decision to discipline an employee for refusing to work with the HIV/AIDS infected coworker. Data was obtained using questionnaires administered to 194 managers employed in service, manufacturing, and government organizations. Both fear of AIDS and sharing AIDS-related health information exhibited a significant unique negative relationship with the decision to discipline. No significant unique relationship was found between gender and the decision to discipline. However, gender was found to moderate the relationship between fear of AIDS and the decision to discipline. There was a significant negative relationship between fear of AIDS and the decision to discipline among male but not among female managers. Study findings, implications, and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Testing two mechanisms linking work-to-family conflict to individual consequences: do gender and gender role orientation make a difference?

Based on social role theory and a gender role orientation perspective, this study extended the two mechanisms (i.e. resource depletion and source attribution) that link work-to-family conflict to perceived accomplishment in the family and work domains by testing the moderating effects of gender and gender role orientation on the relationships. Data were collected from managers via questionnaires in China, and 225 cases were analyzed with hierarchical regression models. The results showed that compared with female managers, the negative relationship between work-to-family conflict and perceived family accomplishment was stronger for male managers. Within the male group, we found that the negative relationship between work-to-family conflict and perceived family accomplishment was stronger for male managers with an egalitarian gender role orientation than those with a traditional gender role orientation. In addition, for male managers with a traditional gender role orientation, there was a positive relationship between work-to-family conflict and perceived work accomplishment. The theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.     

Strategic Planning and Implementation Success in Public Service Organizations: Evidence from Canada

In this article, we examine the role that formal strategic planning plays in determining the success of strategy implementation in a set of more than 150 public service organizations from Canada. We also analyse the mediating effects of managerial involvement in strategic planning and the moderating effects of stakeholder uncertainty on the planning-implementation relationship. A structured online questionnaire was used to collect the data. Our findings suggest that formal strategic planning has a strong positive relationship with implementation, which, though mediated by managerial involvement, becomes even more salient in the face of stakeholder uncertainty. Several implications of these findings are discussed.     

Tensions in local government employment relationships

Abstract

A wide variety of initiatives characterized under the umbrella term of new public management have been introduced over the past two decades to improve efficiency and cost-effectiveness in the public sector. The implications of these initiatives for public sector employment relationships have been the subject of on-going debate. This article contributes to this debate through examining how employees within local authorities are managed in a time of personal crisis with a particular focus on long-term sickness absence in the context of increased management drives for efficiency under the NPM agenda. The findings reveal that for managers in two local authorities that form the focus of this study there is a tension in struggling to achieve a workable balance between the needs of employees and wider operational requirements, resulting in role ambiguity for line managers and detrimental effects for vulnerable public service workers.     

Managerial skill utilization: work environment,gender, and training incentive

Past studies have demonstrated that a supportive work environment can positively influence managerial skill utilization. Adopting the instrumentality-expressiveness perspective, the present study extended the past research by illustrating the moderating effect of gender on this relationship. It found that the relationship between the work environment and managerial skill utilization is stronger among female managers than among male managers and further, that this interactive effect is more pronounced in a low incentive situation than in a high incentive situation in terms of reaching a high level of training performance. The theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.     

Modernizing Public Healthcare Governance in Hong Kong: A Case Study of Professional Power in the New Public Management

This article examines Hong Kong's experience in modernizing and corporatizing public healthcare governance in order to enhance management autonomy and service efficiency, against the background of a previous regime of centralized departmental control and amid the worldwide trend of new public management. The reform, culminating in the establishment of a hospital authority, is found to be wrought with intense intra-bureaucratic conflict, as well as rivalries between professional and administrative bureaucrats, between professionals of different sectors, and between medical and para-medical providers. Instead of breaking up traditional professional monopoly and opening up the system to non-medical general management, corporatization has resulted in an unplanned entrenchment and re-empowerment of medical professional power.     

Hold the Line: An Examination of Line vs. Staff Differences

Despite common perceptions about the differences between line and staff personnel, few studies have provided answers as to which group is more effective. This study explores in detail key differences in managerial strengths between 46 line managers and 52 staff professionals in one of the fastest growing, highly service‐oriented retail organizations in the United States. Using behavioral data from a developmental multirater feedback effort, results suggest that staff personnel were more modest and accurate in their self‐assessments, while line managers were more service‐oriented but significantly weaker at relationships, openness to new ideas, demonstrating respect, and adaptability to change. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Human resource policy in social work management: a response to enforced market orientation

This article is a contribution to the study of public service organizations converting to a market orientation. The case examined here is that of a social services department which opted for the strategy of restructuring on the lines of budget autonomy but accompanied it by an unusual focus upon managerial skills. The effect was to personalize the change. The conflict between old ways and new thinking was congealed into personal debate by the focus on skills so that changes had to be resolved internally. The rationale for this strategy is located in the antipathy between professional social work values and the practice of management.     

Managing Change,or Changing Managers? The role of middle managers in UK public service reform

Abstract

Drawing upon interview data from three case study organizations, we examine the role of middle managers in UK public service reform. Using theory fragments from organizational ecology and role theory, we develop three role archetypes that middle managers might be enacting. We find that rather than wholesale enactment of a ‘change agent’ role, middle managers are balancing three predominant, but often conflicting, change-related roles: as ‘government agent’, ‘diplomat administrator’ and, less convincingly, ‘entrepreneurial leader’. Central government targets are becoming the main preoccupation for middle managers across many public services and they represent a dominant constraint on allowing ‘managers to manage’.     

Interpreting IS alignment: A multiple case study in professional organizations

This paper centers on the interpretation attributed by organizational members to the information systems (IS) alignment concept. Its objective is to study IS alignment in professional organizations. Specifically, it reports on an interpretive study conducted in five Chilean organizations; four professional and one entrepreneurial, of which two are private and three are public. The theoretical background of our study is derived from three IS strategic alignment conceptualizations: managerial, emergent and critical. These concepts formed our theoretical framework that guided data collection and analysis. The study centers on the meanings organizational members assigned to IS strategic alignment, as well as their views on the barriers that hinder achieving this level of organizational integration. The analysis results are summarized in seven hermeneutic themes that point out the different connotations the organizations assigned to IS alignment. The significance of the findings are summarized in four insights that formulate theoretical and practical implications. These insights refer to: (1) the difficulties of achieving alignment for professional organizations, particularly public ones, (2) the limitations these organizations have in being agile, (3) the rationale for acquiring technology and determining IT skills, and (4) the imperative meaning that CIOs attribute to IS alignment. The paper concludes with a reflection on the limitations and relevance of the research.     

How Offshore Professionals' Job Dissatisfaction Can Promote Further Offshoring: Organizational Outcomes of Job Crafting

This paper investigates the process that leads from job dissatisfaction to new business opportunities in organizations that offshore R&D activities to emerging countries. Specifically, we investigate a major source of job dissatisfaction for offshore professionals: the misalignment between the work that they perform and their professional identity. Our findings indicate that offshore professionals react against the perception of a threat to work‐identity integrity through individual and collective job crafting. A significant outcome of job crafting is the introduction of new markets, industries, and services, which in turn may change a professional's job design. The perceptions of the compatibility of organizational identity with professional identity and with new idea recognition on the one hand, and of distant and local social support on the other, act as intervening conditions in the process. We discuss theoretical contributions to the evolution of offshoring, job crafting, and the interplay between organizational and professional identity, together with managerial implications.     

Managerial Objectives and the Governance of Public and Non-Profit Organizations

By investigating managerial objectives, we test the simultaneous need for both control (agency theory) and collaboration (stewardship theory) in public and non-profit governance. We construct a discrete choice experiment to elicit preferences of managers in Belgian public and non-profit nursing homes. The results confirm that boards of nursing homes may experience pressure to simultaneously control and collaborate with their managers, thereby suggesting that agency and stewardship theory can be combined into a more general internal governance framework. We conclude by providing some policy implications to improve public and non-profit governance.     

NPM Can Work: An optimistic review of the impact of New Public Management reforms in central and eastern Europe

Abstract

This article reviews the New Public Management (NPM) literature in central and eastern Europe (CEE) with the aim of assessing whether reforms have ‘worked’. Increasingly, academics have tended to argue against the suitability of NPM instruments in this region. To understand the impact of this much-debated policy, we first propose a classification of the impacts of NPM geared to the realities of central and eastern European states. Then, we use this classification to carefully review empirical studies across the region over the past 10 years. Unlike much of the recent academic literature, we suggest that NPM can work. NPM policy has not always been successful to the extent expected and promoted, but there is enough evidence to show that some of the central ideas in NPM have led to improvements in public service organization or provision across different organizational settings. An adequate degree of administrative capacity, sustained reform over time and a ‘fitting context’ are the main factors that can tip the scale for the success of these management instruments. The article provides a fresh and transparent assessment of a major administrative development in a growing region with implications for other parts of the world that experience similar challenges and opportunities.