Relational Co-ordination and Stigma at Work: How Frontline Employees Compensate for Failures in Public Health Systems

Co-ordinating collective work and communicating a shared understanding of tasks is necessary to accomplishing organizational goals. Stigma could exacerbate co-ordination challenges between public and private organizations by further widening differences in goals and incentives among employees. Using relational co-ordination theory, we explore how stigma can influence employee behaviour in the context of healthcare delivery. We study healthcare professionals and frontline workers involved in the fight against AIDS in India to examine how public health systems fail due to a lack of communication and co-ordination, and that these failures are worsened by stigma. When stigma is present, relationships between employees become strained due to misaligned work routines, lack of information sharing and cooperation failure. Our findings reveal emergent responses from frontline employees that mitigate co-ordination failures through: (1) role adaptation to improve predictability of tasks; (2) social purpose identification to promote a common understanding and engage stigmatized clients; and (3) affective attachment that encourages extra-role behaviours and task ownership. We draw implications for relational co-ordination and stigma, as well as public-private co-ordination in public health systems.     

Public–Private Partnerships in Health Services Delivery

Abstract

In this article, we conceptualize public–private partnerships (PPPs) from a network organizations perspective, and apply interorganizational relations (IOR) to study fifteen PPPs in a district health system in the state of Rajasthan in India. We find that the Government occupies a dominant position in the network because of the centrality of its functions, authority and control over resources and information. There is greater reliance on formal mechanisms of co-ordination. For effective network governance, it is imperative to reduce the power asymmetry, develop horizontal co-ordination, trust and social capital, and enhance public managers’ capacity for effectively managing interorganizational relationships.     

Resource allocation in the nationalized energy sector of the United Kingdom

Resource allocation in the energy sector of the United Kingdom is a difficult area to plan, because demand and supply projections need to embrace both the large private sector oil industry and the public sector fuel industries. In addition, relationships between the latter are complex as they involve both competition and co-ordination. One approach to the problem has been to find common ground in the concept of marginal cost pricing, but there are practical difficulties in application. Government has encouraged the use of analytical techniques, such as corporate planning, by the fuel industries as a means of co-ordination in areas where market mechanisms may no longer always be effective.     

Evidence of the impacts of public e-procurement: The Portuguese experience

This paper analyses public e-procurement implementation and emphasizes its main difficulties and impacts in relation to the type of public organizations. The primary impacts and changes in the Portuguese public sector are analyzed within the new legal framework, which adopts mandatory e-procurement for any open, restricted or negotiated procedure. In this sense, two surveys carried out in consecutive years were conducted to assess the implementation difficulties and impact of e-procurement in the Portuguese public sector.The major value of this research is that it presents and discusses, for the first time, evidences about difficulties and impacts on the mandatory adoption of public e-procurement, based on the case of Portugal. The results show that the entities’ administrative level influences the e-procurement implementation, which is influenced by the innovation adoption process.     

Organizing work to support relational co-ordination

Service operations that are highly uncertain, interdependent and time constrained require a competency that I call relational co-ordination – co-ordination that is carried out by front-line workers with an awareness of their relationship to the overall work process and to other participants in that process. Relational co-ordination is characterized by frequent, timely, problem solving communication, and by helping, shared goals, shared knowledge and mutual respect. Previous work reports significant positive effects of relational co-ordination on performance in such settings. This paper addresses how organizations achieve, or fail to achieve, high levels of relational coordination. I find significant correlations between relational co-ordination and the use of cross-functional liaisons, IT, supervisors, cross-functional performance measurement, employee selection, conflict resolution and flexible work roles. I explore the implications for team effectiveness and organization design, and for the theory of organizational social capital.     

中国现代传媒组织的绩效指标设计思路研究

转型时期中国公共组织的绩效评估日益受到组织内外实践者的关注。特别是具有经济和社会双重目标的公共企业组织,当前急切需求一套合理的简洁有效的绩效管理工具用于支持其制定科学的决策。本文基于电视传媒产业的个案分析发现,直接运用成熟的绩效指标设计思路会遭遇到诸多的难题。为此,在实际的绩效指标设计过程中,结合组织的决策支持的需求和实际的行业特性,提出了一种新的绩效设计思路,为同类型其他组织的绩效指标设计提供了有益的启示。     

Cross-Sectoral Coordination of Disaster Relief

Abstract

Coordinating organizational activity across different sectors is crucial in disaster management. We analysed the response of 291 aid workers to the Haiti earthquake in 2010 and found that common incentives and a high degree of equality among aid organizations positively affected perceived network coordination. Large and public organizations were more likely to take leadership roles and high numbers of public organizations involved in the disaster response network led to improved network coordination. These results indicate the need for mechanisms that enable smaller and non-profit organizations to participate in network coordination and leadership.     

城市规划管理中的传播理论研究

城市规划管理过程是各种城市信息传播的过程.从城市规划的角度,分析传播者,传播技巧,媒介,符号及受传者等内容,研究人居环境作为传播媒介的本质功能,阐明传播绩效与建立在公众城市认识论基础上公众参与规划的关系.注重传播理论与方法在规划编制、社会协调与公众参与中的运用,强化公众参与、协调各类公共关系,保障城市空间的公众利益,促进城市和谐健康发展.     

Robotic Process Automation in purchasing and supply management: A multiple case study on potentials,barriers, and implementation

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has received growing attention within the digital transformation as this cutting-edge technology automates human behavior and promises high potentials. However, the adoption in purchasing and supply management (PSM) is still in its infancy and has hardly been explored, particularly in the public sector. Based on a multiple case study including 19 organizations of the public and private sector, this paper narrows that gap and presents comprehensive insights into potentials, barriers, suitable processes, and best practices and components for RPA implementation. The findings indicate that adoption depends on the organizations’ digital procurement readiness and maturity. Application areas of RPA enlarge with increasing experience and range from transactional and operative tasks within the procure-to-pay process to more strategic use cases in sourcing and supply relationship management. Potentials mainly comprise employee reliefs, cost savings, and increased operational efficiency and quality. We uncover multiple technical, organizational, and environmental barriers related to IT infrastructure and human resources, internal communication, financial resources, top management support, organizational structures, supplier-related issues, and government regulations. Furthermore, our study indicates several differences between the private and public sectors for RPA implementation. We outline implications for the emerging research on RPA and pivotal directions for organizational practice.     

The Practice and Process of Delivering Integration through Strategic Planning

This paper explains how strategic planning is able to deliver strategic integration within organizations. While communication and participation within planning processes are perceived to have an integrative effect, we argue that these effects are unlikely to arise simply from bringing people together. Rather, we suggest that, given the varying interests of actors in different business units, integration will only arise from active negotiations and compromises between these actors. The paper is based upon a case of strategic planning in a multinational that was attempting to develop greater strategic integration across Europe. Drawing upon an activity theory framework, we examine how a common strategy emerges over time through modifications to the planning process and to different actors' roles within it. The findings are used to develop a process model that shows how different business unit characteristics of planning experience and relative power shape different experiences of communication and participation activities and different processes for achieving integration. The paper concludes with a discussion of how this process model contributes to the literature on strategic planning, political processes of strategy-making, and strategy-as-practice.     

An optimization model for volunteer assignments in humanitarian organizations

One of the challenges facing humanitarian organizations is that there exist limited decision technologies that are tailored specifically to their needs. While employee workforce management models have been the topic of extensive research over the past decades, very little work has yet concentrated on the problem of managing volunteers for humanitarian organizations. This paper develops a multi-criteria optimization model to assist in the assignment of volunteers to tasks, based upon a series of principles from the field of volunteer management. In particular, it offers a new volunteer management approach for incorporating the decision maker's preferences and knowledge into the volunteer assignment process, thus allowing him or her to closely examine the tradeoffs between potentially conflicting objectives. Test results illustrate the model's ability to capture these tradeoffs and represent the imprecision inherent in the work of humanitarian organizations, and thus demonstrate its ability to support efficient and effective volunteer management.     

Decision support for disaster management

Disaster response and recovery are crucial phases of disaster management. Decision-support systems used in disaster management must cope with the complexity and uncertainty involved with the scheduling and assignment of differentially-skilled personnel and assets to specific tasks. Operational constraints—such as workload and labor requirements, precedence constraints, resource availability, and critical deadlines among others—make timely and appropriate task assignment and sequencing difficult. Failure to assign personnel in an efficient and effective manner may result in unnecessary fatalities and significant additional loss of property as well as damaging the reputation of the disaster management organizations. Therefore, this paper proposes a decision-support system for disaster response and recovery using hybrid meta-heuristics.     

Natural Disaster Preparedness in the Private Sector: A Model to Refrain from Isolation

Executive leadership operating in isolation may be a subliminal issue that has an impact upon how resources are allocated for preparing organizations to react to a sudden natural disaster. Two forms of isolation that are of particular interest are upper executive aloofness from management and an indifference to groups external to daily operations. Executive leadership may need to expand its attention to establishing a more inclusive strategy by engaging employees at all levels directly as well as those in leadership positions in organizations in both the public and nonprofit sectors.     

Planning and performance in public organizations An empirical analysis

The impact of planning on organizational performance in the public sector has been widely debated but has never previously been tested empirically. We develop a statistical model of planning effects that contains five explanatory variables: the extent of organizational analysis, the extent of environmental scanning, the number of precise performance targets, the existence of formal action plans for service improvement and the attitudes of staff involved in the planning process. This model is applied to data obtained from seventy services in Welsh local government. The statistical evidence shows that organizational performance is positively related to favourable attitudes towards planning processes, but negatively related to the number of targets that are set. On balance, the results are consistent with a small positive effect of planning on the performance of public organizations.     

Resource allocation, equity and public risk: Dying one at a time vs dying all together

This paper focuses on the evaluation, from an individual and societal perspective, of risk in terms of possible loss of life due to an exposure to two different types of events over a period of time. The two types are: risk of death from a catastrophic event (a sudden death of many people in a disaster at a yet unknown point in time) expected to occur during a planning period, or risk of death from another event (e.g. disease, road accident, etc) which claims fewer lives each year. but for which the expected total number of deaths over the planning period is equal to the expected number of deaths from the catastrophic event. Our analysis considers the extreme case in which these two types of events have the same probabilities of death every year and the same expected number of fatalities over the planning period. The individual's decision problem is described using a von-Neumann Morgenstern (vNM) utility function. The model suggests that the choice between these types of events depends on the value of the following variables: the probability of death over the planning period, the length of the planning period, the individual's time preference pattern, and the utility of being in different anxiety states. Stochastic extensions that may direct the public decision making process (involving aggregated preferences) are discussed. We also discuss issues of implementation.     

建筑工程施工的动态安全分析方法

在建筑工程中，施工作业人员的人身安全、施工设备以及各种设施经常受到这些不安全因素的威胁。结合建筑工程的结构、施工作业特点，提出了施工作业安全管理的动态危险性指标，建立了施工作业危险性动态的跟踪分析方法。通过该方法的使用，可以得出施工作业危险度在时间、空间上的变化趋势和规律，找出了影响施工作业危险性指标的主要因素和主要作业工序。分析的结果将为施工安全管理提供客观、实时的动态跟踪信息，提高施工安全管理的目的性和效率。文章最后结合某工程实例，给出了动态安全分析结果以及安全管理建议。     

An empirical investigation of scheduling performance criteria

Planning and scheduling significantly influence organizational performance, but literature that pays attention to how organizations could or should organize and assess their planning processes is limited. We extend planning and scheduling theory with a categorization of scheduling performance criteria, based on a three-stage survey research design. Particularly, the results show that, next to schedule quality, the planning process factors timeliness, flexibility, communication, and negotiation are important performance criteria, and especially so in organizations that are faced with high levels of uncertainty. The results suggest that organizational and behavioral aspects of planning and scheduling cannot be mitigated with advanced models and software that solely focus on good schedules. Rather, high quality schedules and high quality scheduling processes need to be facilitated simultaneously to attain high planning and scheduling performance.     

通过立法提升社会公德意识,利用技术增加社会管理措施

社会管理问题由公平、福利到现在秩序几个关键阶段,政府在自由市场环境下的职能主要是社会秩序管理,核心问题是培养社会道德和公共意识并最终提升为自发管理和自我管理,在这个意识的培养过程中,利用现代先进的实用技术作为辅助手段会取得更大的效果。这就需要政府首先用统一发展的市场观进行全面战略规划和公共设施的投资规划,建立一个统一的数据中心,建设电子身份证、电子政务、视频监视和面部识别系统,更新和整合社会管理体系,同时配套建全法律规划体系和执行的联动体系,最终引导社会发展成为一个以自动化管理为手段、以全民自治管理为核心的和谐社会。     

Individual employee voice: renegotiation and performance management in public services

Periodically, the ‘zone of acceptance’ within which management may use its authority to direct employees' work needs to be adapted to the changing needs of organizations. This paper focuses especially on the non-codified elements of employees' work, such as those commonly the subject of ‘psychological contracts’, and considers the role of individual employee voice in the process of adaptation, and how it relates to more familiar forms of collective employee voice. It is argued that the process can be analysed as a form of integrative bargaining, and applies the framework from Walton and McKersie. Employee voice enters into this process by virtue of consideration of the respective goals and preferences of both parties. The element of employee voice may be very weak when new work goals and priorities are imposed unilaterally by management, and they may be strong when full consideration is given to the changing needs of both parties. Two examples from work on performance management in the public services are used to illustrate these processes. The paper concludes with a discussion of the ways in which collective employee voice may help to reinforce individual-level integrative negotiation. The paper seeks to contribute to the recent work on why employers choose employee voice mechanisms by broadening the range of policies that should be taken into account, and in particular looking at the potential of performance management as one such form.