Social welfare,corruption and credibility

Abstract

Economic development requires that investments by entrepreneurs are not subject to expropriation by government. Unfortunately, public agencies often serve as the instruments by which political elites engage in corruption and extracting rents from the economy. The question is how to design institutions that credibly commit to a stable system of guarantees of property rights and contract enforcement.

Principal agent theory and the new public management favor greater accountability of public managers to elected officials or eliminating public agencies through privatization. We argue for institutional designs that provide a degree of public agency autonomy. We show that public agency autonomy is a by-product of the competition between elites in democracies with multiple veto players. We show that transparency, professionalism, and legality help ensure that public managers do not engage in rent-extraction. The institutional design problem is how to induce public managers to serve the public interest without being fully responsive to elected political officials.     

Agencies and non-departmental public bodies

Abstract

The emergence of Britain's ‘Next Steps’ agencies has spawned a new movement in theorizing about administrative organizations, and the practical example and the seeming theoretical excitement have influenced reformers in many other countries. But there is an older tradition of scholarship about administrative organizations that understands that many other sorts of deviant or ‘irregular’ public bodies have been in use for centuries in Britain and elsewhere. Moreover the executive agency model gets diluted as it travels away from Britain, and it then becomes more like some of those other forms. Some contributions to agencification theory are more accommodating than others about this. It is the contention of this article that many such resemblances do exist, and that all students of administrative organization would benefit if more effort could be devoted to searching for common ground between the executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies generally.     

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.     

Do NPM-Type Reforms Lead to a Cultural Revolution Within Public Sector Organizations?

Abstract

Agencification and granting public sector organizations managerial autonomy in particular is believed to change organizational cultures, away from traditional compliance- and detail-oriented bureaucratic cultures and towards organizational cultures which are more oriented towards external customers. There is however very little empirical information on the relationship between managerial autonomy and organizational culture. Using a unique data set on public agencies in Flanders, we not only test how managerial autonomy affects the strength of a customer-oriented culture within public sectors but also examine whether this culture becomes dominant over traditional public administration culture. Analysis shows that managerial autonomy positively affects a customer-oriented culture; however, it does not make it a dominant culture.     

Graduate Recruitment In the Australian Public Sector

ABSTRACT

Service orientation in the HRM system is a lever for public employees to serve the public even beyond their work roles. Our research seeks to understand how work engagement links service-oriented high-performance work systems (HPWSs) to public employees’ service-oriented behaviours. Employees and their managers from public legal service agencies in the Vietnamese context were recruited as participants in our research project. The research results demonstrated the role of employee work engagement in mediating the relationships between service-oriented HPWSs and service-oriented in-role performance as well as service-oriented organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB). The interactions were also found between service-oriented HPWSs and HRM system strength, as well as between service-oriented HPWSs and public service motivation in catalysing work engagement.     

Interorganisational project dynamics: A longitudinal study of perceptual distance and client-contractor collaborative relationships

Despite the importance of good collaborative relationships in interorganisational projects, clients and contractors often develop adversarial relationships due to perceptual distance about key project issues. In this case study research, we investigated how perceptual distance emerges and changes over time, and how the collaborative relationship between client and contractor develops alongside these dynamics. In this exploration, we built upon agency theory and stewardship theory as complementary perspectives for understanding client-contractor collaborative relationships. We gathered quantitative and qualitative data in two projects, conducting three assessments in about one year. We found that perceptual distance increased and decreased over time, and that a reduction was typically associated with the collaborative relationship being characterized by stewardship rather than agency. These findings suggest that a regular assessment and evaluation of partners’ perceptions of critical project issues is warranted to timely detect and counteract perceptual distance. Moreover, partners would best adopt a stewardship orientation to reduce perceptual distance, although this may take considerable effort given the distributive nature of many pre-project negotiations.     

Leadership for Collaboration

Abstract

‘Leadership’ and ‘collaboration’ are integral to twenty-first century governance and management but, despite a growing literature, understanding about leadership for collaboration is hampered by a lack of specificity and nuance in theory and empirical research. This article responds to these limitations by working within an interpretive framework and employing Q-method to uncover different interpretations of leadership for collaboration operant among public managers in Wales. The article uses the concept of situated agency to explain why public managers offer diverse interpretations of leadership for collaboration despite working within the same governance framework, and to identify challenges to public managers in determining appropriate leadership for collaboration.     

How to foster collaborative performance management? Key factors in the US federal agencies

ABSTRACT

Public employees are urged to be tireless collaborators and skilled performance managers, but can they be both at the same time? We describe two approaches to collaborative performance management observed in the US federal performance system: interagency collaboration to achieve cross-agency goals, and intra-agency collaboration to achieve agency goals. We find that some factors that reinforce intra-agency collaboration – accountability to agency goals, investment in the agency performance system – fail to support, or even undercut, interagency collaboration. However, other factors – seniority, participation in goal-setting, and goal salience – can encourage both types of collaborative performance management.     

Coping with functional collective action dilemma: functional fragmentation and administrative integration

ABSTRACT

Functional fragmentation among city departments has been a critical public administration problem in practice and theory. This paper investigates the political and administrative motivations for the reform from functionally fragmented water governance model towards an integrative agency design. Drawing on the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) framework and the literature on bureaucratic structures, we hypothesize that cities’ decisions for administrative reform are influenced by different types of transactions costs incurred in the negotiation process among local agencies. Empirical results of this study provide strong support for the transaction cost hypotheses on the roles of bargaining cost, enforcement cost, and information cost.     

Bringing Networks In: A model of organizational socialization in the public sector

Abstract

Integrating new employees so that they perform well, fit in well and are committed to the agency is a salient concern for public managers. Organizational socialization is the process by which new employees learn the knowledge, skills and values required to become organizational members. This article develops a model of organizational socialization grounded in newcomer social networks and set within a context of public service identity. Social network theory and methods offer a means for examining and interpreting patterns of interactions between newcomers and organizational members. This article concludes with propositions for future studies of organizational socialization and social networks.     

Boards of Directors and Shark Repellents:Assessing the Value of an Agency Theory Perspective

Because shark repellents decrease the vulnerability of firms (and their incumbent managers) to the market for corporate control, the decision to adopt these devices represents an excellent test of agency theory. In this empirical study, we examined the relationships between the adoption of shark repellents and several mechanisms that, according to agency theory, should align the interests of corporate board members and shareholders and/or make directors more effective monitors of management behaviour. Of the variables included, only board stock ownership (especially by employee directors) was linked to a reduced propensity to adopt shark repellents in the predicted manner. Two variables not immediately as- sociated with agency theory — the proportion of inside directors appointed by the incumbent chief executive officer (CEO) and a lower ratio of CEO compensation to the compensation of other top executives — were linked to higher rates of shark repellent adoption. Given that agency theory explains relatively little of the variance in shark repellent adoption, we advocate serious consideration of other theoretical formulations for corporate governance, including two approaches — stewardship theory and agent morality — that take the moral ('other regarding') obligations of directors seriously.     

An exploratory study of stewardship for Chinese nonprofit organizations

This study examined how Chinese nonprofits practice stewardship and how stewardship principles influence nonprofit–donor relationships and donor retention. Fifteen qualitative in‐depth interviews were conducted with experienced fundraisers in China. Results showed that Kelly's stewardship principles were applicable in China; Chinese fundraisers practiced stewardship principles of reciprocity, responsibility, reporting, and relationship nurturing to maintain relationships with major gift and annual donors. Besides, practitioners also utilized a variety of communication channels, ranging from face‐to‐face, telephones, emails, to digital shared media such as WeChat and Weibo, in communicating with individual and general public donors. Finally, interviewees also provided evidence on the positive role of quality nonprofit–donor relationships in retaining donors. This study illustrated the current status of nonprofit fundraising practice in China and expanded the explanatory power of the stewardship theory. The findings are implicative for Chinese nonprofits professionals on how to develop their unique stewardship practice in managing relationships with donors.     

Relationship marketing in museums: influence of managers and mode of governance

ABSTRACT

On the bases of relationship marketing and social capital, this paper aims to explore whether museums’ external relationships depend on managers and internal relationships as well as on mode of governance. The empirical findings of a hierarchical regression analysis for a sample of 556 museums indicate that close relationships with the external environment require managerial social capital and a supportive culture that favours internal cohesion. Finally, public museums directly run by government entities remain too bureaucratic and lack incentives to promote internal cohesion as well as relationships with customers and other stakeholders. Implications for managers 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.     

The autonomy – control balance in Flemish arm's length public agencies

Abstract

This article aims at contributing to the study of arm's length agencies by focusing on what are considered to be core concepts of agencification: autonomy and control of public agencies. The balance between autonomy and control is studied for a set of Flemish public agencies, from three angles: (1) To what extent can we observe the practitioner model of disaggregation, managerial freedom and results based control in Flanders?; (2) Which autonomy-control balances do we find empirically? Departing from two extreme cases – control loss and false autonomy – I conclude that there is a lot of variation amongst Flemish public agencies as to their autonomy-control balances; and (3) Based on a third set of empirical conclusions, I try to broaden the normative discussion on the accountability debate that surrounds arm's length agencies, by proposing a broader concept of steering and control. I conclude the article by proposing four directions for future research on this specific topic of agency research.     

The firm,the platform and the customer: A “double mangle” interpretation of social media for innovation

The aim of this article was to explore the relationship between human actors and technology in the context of a social media platform, developed by a leading Italian firm in the food industry, and created to keep in contact with its customers, while gathering innovative ideas from them.In order to address these issues, we adopt a theoretical approach that is deeply rooted in Pickering's “mangle” theory, and Jones' subsequent metaphor of “double dance of agency” i.e. human and material agencies. A longitudinal case study has been developed with two rounds of interviews with marketing and R&D managers. A total of 8 recorded interviews, for 22 h overall.We examined conditions in the ongoing functioning of the platform, and considered how the website's dynamic materiality configures and reconfigures the practices and possibilities of different modes of engagement by multiple users (i.e. firm employees and customers) and vice versa. Specifically, dealing with the case of a social media platform developed by a firm to gain clearly defined organizational ends, the entanglement is considered to be double. One entanglement is between the human agency of customers and the material agency of the social media platform. The other is between the human agency of the firm and the material agency of the social media platform, including all actions that human agents (i.e. firm employees) undertake in seeking to channel material agency and shape actions of other human agents, i.e. customers.     

Do professional associations make a difference?: linking municipal managers’ association participation and attitudes toward citizen participation

ABSTRACT

There has been a lingering debate on the relationship between public managers’ professional socialization and their acceptance of citizen participation. In this paper, it is empirically confirmed that association participation strengthens municipal managers’ predispositions toward engaging citizens. It is found that municipal managers that are active in generalist-oriented professional associations will be more likely to realize successful practices for citizen engagement in peer municipalities, which boosts their perceived sense of citizen contribution, and reduces their perceptions on the costliness of engaging citizens. These relationships are found to be mediated by municipal managers’ technocratic orientation and engagement self-efficacy.     

Psychological ownership and stewardship behavior: The moderating role of agency culture

This study investigates whether employees’ psychological ownership results in stewardship behavior and whether this relationship is affected by an employee’s perception of the organization’s agency culture. A survey of the financial managers of 129 firms in Germany generally confirms these expectations. In addition, and surprisingly, our findings suggest a negligible effect of an agency culture on the relationship between psychological ownership and stewardship behavior when managers perceive high psychological ownership. Thereby, our study enriches the literature on the consequences of psychological ownership by providing insights into the boundary conditions of such outcomes at the manager level.     

Good Neighbours or Distant Friends?

Abstract

Agencification has extended and intensified the delegation problem. It has created new (administrative) principals, who are confronted with even more uncertainty as agents operate at arm's length. Trust is suggested as a new mode of governance. Based on the literature seven hypotheses are deduced on conditions that politicians can use to build trust: autonomy; contacts; policy involvement; and involvement in the design of monitoring devices. These hypotheses are tested using survey data on 219 Dutch executive agencies. Contrary to the expectations, executive agencies with low degrees of autonomy have a more trusting relationship with their parent ministry than agencies with high autonomy. Proximity and frequent interactions appear more important to trust than autonomy. Monitoring is not always perceived as a sign of distrust. These findings raise new questions on how principals can reduce the delegation problem and control executive agencies.