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

Gatenby, Mark; Rees, Chris; Truss, Catherine; Alfes, Kerstin; Soane, Emma

doi:10.1080/14719037.2014.895028

Cited by 34 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Elbanna, Thanos, and Colak (2014), Nutt (1999) and Wooldridge and Floyd (1990), in particular, find that such participation results in improved implementation. And, there is good prima facie reason for thinking that such participation will also matter in the public sector, where middle managers, especially, play an increasingly important role in strategy implementation (Gatenby et al, forthcoming;Ridder, Bruns, and Spier 2006). Importantly, it is actually conceivable that the benefits of strategic planning for strategy implementation are attributable to the managerial involvement that thoroughgoing planning processes presuppose.…”

Section: The Role Of Formal Strategic Planningmentioning

confidence: 97%

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

Elbanna

Andrews

Pollanen

2015

Public Management Review

150

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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.

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Section: The Role Of Formal Strategic Planningmentioning

confidence: 97%

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

Elbanna

Andrews

Pollanen

2015

Public Management Review

150

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“…Finally, there are four areas that have seen a significant increase in papers from a very low base. Innovation and change (Borins 2001;Gatenby et al 2015; van Buuren 2015; Van der Voet, Kuipers, and Groeneveld 2016, Torugsa and Arundel 2016), and strategic management and marketing (Burton 1999; Waeraas, Bjørnå, and Moldenaes 2015, Longo and Rotolo 2016; Hansen and Ferlie 2016) have seen significant increases. However, the most startling growth has been the increase in two areas.…”

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confidence: 99%

Public management research over the decades: what are we writing about?

Osborne

2016

Public Management Review

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Public management research over the decades: what are we writing about? Public Management Review (PMR) has just completed its eighteenth volume. It commenced publication in 1999 with Blair as prime minister of the United Kingdom and Clinton as president of the United States, with the transformation of public management (and society) through IT and the internet barely begun, and with Lou Bega ruling the pop charts as a one-hit wonder with 'Mambo No. 5'. As part of a review of the evolution of PMR I recently completed a review of papers published in the journal then and now. This review comprised 103 papers from 1999 to 2002 covering 14 issues of the journal and 108 from 2015 to 2016 covering 16 issues-211 papers in total. 1 Of course, such a review has to be treated with utmost caution. It represents only one journal, not the field, can be skewed by special issues (though these do also represent topics that are/were central to the discipline), and is very much a survey of the 'quick and dirty' variety. Each paper was classified once only, against its prime topic. Nonetheless, it presents an interesting snapshot of the evolution of our preoccupations as public management researchers. Three trends are apparentthose topics that have decreased in interest, those that have increased, and those that have remained stable (Table 1). The first group is those topics that have decreased in researcher interest. There has been a slight decrease in papers focusing on public and social policy, i.e. from 9 to 5 per cent. The early period saw an interest with topics such as policy globalization and convergence (Carroll 1999), volunteering policy (Brudney and Williamson 2000) and the governance of the policy process (Sibeon 2000). More recently the focus has shifted to the policy process in relation to policy evaluation (Pattyn 2015), to policy professionals (van Engen et al. 2016), and to public policy and reform and social cohesion (Andrews, Guarneros-Meza, and Downe 2016). There has been a significant drop, however, in those papers exploring public management reform in general (from 16 to 4 per cent) and the New Public Management (NPM) and its implementation in particular (from 19 to 7 per cent). Thus the early period saw a plethora of empirical papers exploring such issues as privatization (Kawashima 1999), contracting (Christensen and Laegreid 2001) and managerialism (Doolin 2001). The more recent papers have moved towards a more evaluative and/or critical deconstruction of the NPMsuch as Aoki (2015), Wynen and Verhoest (2015), Alonso, Clifton, and Díaz-Fuentes (2015) and Dan and Pollitt (2015). The second group of topics are those where interest has maintained at a stable level between the two periodson performance management and accountability

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“…Contrary to what some scholars have described as the impossibility of entrepreneurship in the public sector and warnings against attempting it (Currie, Humphreys, Ucbasaran, & McManus, 2008;Gatenby et al, 2015), we agree with those who say that such entrepreneurs do exist and get things done (Dacin, Goodstein, & Scott, 2002; Klein, Mahoney, McGahan, & Pitelis, 2010; Levy & Scully, 2007), although they behave differently from private sector entrepreneurs because of the different institutional context (Catney & Henneberry, 2016;Coyne, 2004; and the constraints, on them in trying to change institutions, which also differ from those in the private sector (Klein et al, 2010;Ostrom, 1965). Furthermore, it is argued that the success or failure of such entrepreneurs depends on the state, and whether it shows an active or a passive interest in what such entrepreneurs are doing.…”

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confidence: 82%

Administrative leaders as institutional entrepreneurs in developing countries: A study of the development and institutionalization of performance management in Ghana's public service

Ohemeng

Kamga

2019

Public Admin & Development

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Summary Performance management (PM) has become one of the most important reforms in the public sector in both developed and developing countries. Unfortunately, institutionalizing PM in the sector continues to be a major problem. Although a number of scholars continue to study the PM in the public sector from different theoretical perspectives, there has been paucity of research concerning the process of institutionalization. The few studies that have attempted to look at the process have done so from a “coercive isomorphism” perspective, especially through legislation. The lack of studies to examine the process of institutionalization has therefore created a gap, which needs to be filled. We therefore attempt to contribute to this discussion by exploring the role of institutional entrepreneurs and their impact on the development and institutionalization of PM in developing countries, with a particular focus on Ghana, a country obsessed with PM but was only able to institutionalize one in 2013 under the leadership of its Public Services Commission. How was the leadership of the PSC able to succeed where previous leaders could not? What characteristics did they display, and what strategies did they use to get things done? The research is a qualitative one.

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

Cited by 34 publications

References 33 publications

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

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

Public management research over the decades: what are we writing about?

Administrative leaders as institutional entrepreneurs in developing countries: A study of the development and institutionalization of performance management in Ghana's public service

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