Connecting the Dots in Public Management: Political Environment, Organizational Goal Ambiguity, and the Public Manager's Role Ambiguity

Abstract

This article is a systematic effort to study a key theoretical question from the vantage point of public sector organizational behavior. Most political science models, with a primary interest in democratic control of bureaucracy, study the political influence on the bureaucracy from an agency theory perspective. Organization behavior literature, on the other hand, is focused largely on the study of individual-level phenomena in private organizations and does not incorporate political context as part of explanatory models. This article proposes a middlerange theory to ''connect the dots,'' beginning with disparate sources in the polity influencing organizational goal ambiguity, which in turn is expected to increase managerial role ambiguity. An empirical test, using data collected from a national survey of managers working in state human service agencies, supports this theoretical model. We find that certain types of political influence have an impact on organizational goal ambiguity, which in turn has a direct effect in increasing role ambiguity and also an indirect effect in increasing role ambiguity through organizational structure. Despite well-argued briefs in favor of public organizations' distinctive institutional context (e.g., Perry and Rainey 1988; Wamsley and Zald 1973), much of the scholarship on organization behavior and theory subscribes to a generic perspective on management and organizations (Rainey 2003, 56-58). This is not due to a preponderance of evidence in favor of the generic tradition. Rather, there is a paucity of systematic efforts to study key We gratefully acknowledge valuable comments on earlier versions by Richard A. Harris and three anonymous reviewers. An earlier version of this article was presented at 2005 annual meeting of the Academy of Management, where it received the Charles H. Levine Best Conference Paper Award.

Factors Attracting Individuals to Nonprofit Management over Public and Private Sector Management

“…For example, Rainey (1983) found no significant difference between public and private agencies with regard to employee perceptions of role ambiguity. Pandey and Wright (2006) examined state-level administrators of public human service bureaucracies and found that the disparate influences in the political environment led to increased employee role ambiguity, although the individual effects on employees were mediated somewhat through the bureaucratic structure of the organization. Employees in organizations that are more bureaucratically structured may experience greater role clarity because they have a clear chain of command, a clear division of labor among functional units, and clearly articulated policies and standard operating procedures.…”

Torn between state and market: Private policy implementation and conflicting institutional logics

“…We thus formulate contrasting hypotheses on how three major design factors interact with conflicting logics on output performance, from both a topdown, "design" perspective (Howlett 2009) and from a bottom-up, "implementation" standpoint (Saetren 2014). These factors are (1) goal ambiguity (Matland 1995;Chun and Rainey 2005;Pandey and Wright 2006); (2) accountability mechanisms (Klenk and Lieberherr 2014); and (3) the implementation setting's hybridity (Knill and Lehmkuhl 2002).…”

Leadership and Reform: Mapping the Causal Pathways of Performance Information Use

“…This paper provides empirical evidence of one such benefit. Goal clarity (Pandey & Wright, 2006;Rainey 1983). …”

“…Organizational culture is adapted from Zammutto and Krakower's (1991) measure of developmental culture. Employee perceptions of the clarity of the organization's goals were measured using a three-item scale (Pandey and Wright, 2006;adapted from Rainey (1983). Performance information availability is a subset of Brudney, Hebert, and Wright's (1999) measures of administrative reform that deal with the practices of strategic planning, customer service measurement, benchmarking and inclusion of measures in budgets.…”

“…The benefits of clear organizational goals cascade to the job level by eliminating distractions and focusing attention on what individual employees need to do to achieve organizational goals (Pandey and Wright 2006;Wright 2001Wright , 2004. A natural consequence of such clarity at the joblevel is that performance information can now be used profitably.…”