An Analysis of Departmental Effectiveness, Participative Budgetary Control Processes and Environmental Dimensionality Within the Competing Values Framework: A Public Sector Study

The competing values framework (CVF) has emerged as an integrative and consolidating mechanism to facilitate an examination of those factors that contribute to effectiveness in organizations. The CVF is adopted to investigate systematically the extent to which specific dimensions of the environment impact on the effectiveness of participative managerial control processes in terms of enhancing performance. The results based on a sample of 323 section managers from a wide range of public sector organizations throughout Australia suggest that they find complexity to be the crucial environmental dimension that influences the effectiveness of participative control processes in enhancing performance. The findings suggest that public sector managers may not be subject to the same environmental constraints as their counterparts in the private sector.