The Implementation of Welfare Reform Policy: The Role of Public Managers in Front‐Line Practices

Abstract

This study examines the extent to which staff in local welfare systems have embraced new welfare reform goals and, if so, the extent to which local management practices contribute to the alignment of staff priorities with policy objectives. It looks at agency structure and several aspects of public management from a microperspective that prior research has linked to agency performance including training, performance monitoring, staff resources, leadership characteristics, and personnel characteristics. The research indicates that front-line workers in welfare offices continue to believe that traditional eligibility determination concerns are the most important goals at their agencies. It also finds that management practices and the structuring of agency responsibilities matter: To the extent that public managers want to redirect local staff to focus their attention on the new goals associated with welfare reform, they can create the conditions under which staff have clear signals about what is expected and could provide them with the resources and incentives to realign their priorities.The ability of public managers to influence their employees' commitment to policy and agency goals has long been an interest of scholars and practitioners of public administration. A common challenge for all public organizations is creating a commitment on the part of front-line workers to the policy decisions made by government officials. While this is key to the way that public policy is ultimately delivered, public administrators at all levels recognize the difficulty in achieving this commitment. This research builds on prior studies of goal congruence, public management, and policy achievement in government organizations to examine the extent to which staff in local welfare systems have embraced new goals established by federal and state welfare reforms and, if so, the extent to which local management practices may have contributed to the alignment of staff priorities with policy objectives. These objectives, articulated in federal and state laws during the 1990s, explicitly redirected the efforts of cash assistance programs from income maintenance to work enforcement. Implicitly, they created a new expectation that all welfare staff-from eligibility workers to employment specialists-would help to move clients off welfare and into jobs.We consider both agency structure and several aspects of public management from a microperspective that prior research has linked to agency performance-including training, performance monitoring, staff resources, leadership characteristics, and personnel characteristics.

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