Meta-analysis of Collaboration and Performance: Moderating Tests of Sectoral Differences in Collaborative Performance

Over the past few decades, collaboration has flourished in the public administration and policy fields as a rational means to solve complex issues and improve public service performance. Through a meta-analysis of 26 studies with 251 effect sizes, this investigation provides novel perspectives for understanding the effects of different collaborative partnerships on performance. To test these mechanisms, we applied various social science theories, such as institutional theory, resource dependence theory, a resource-based view, and transaction cost theories. Our findings indicate that the overall effect of collaborative performance is positive and significant. Moreover, meta-regression results show that public–public collaboration results in better performance than public–nonprofit or public–business collaboration, while involving all three entity types in collaborative efforts yields similar outcomes to public–public collaboration. Several implications of these findings are outlined for researchers and practitioners.

Moderating Diversity, Collective Commitment, and Discrimination: The Role of Ethical Leaders in the Public Sector

Despite public administration’s growing interest in personnel diversity and ethical leadership, little is known about the effectiveness of ethical leadership in managing diverse public workforces. Can ethical leadership moderate the relationships between demographic diversity and key organizational outcomes? To answer, we synthesize four theories about demographic diversity, ethical leadership, and inclusion: social categorization theory, social exchange theory, social learning theory, and optimal distinctiveness theory. These theories illuminate the interrelationships between diversity, ethical leadership, and two types of collective organizational outcomes: affective commitment climate and race-based employment discrimination. Using panel data from the US federal government, feasible generalized least squares models indicate that racial diversity is negatively related to affective commitment climate and positively related to race-based employment discrimination. The results also show that ethical leadership beneficially moderates the associations of racial diversity with the two organizational outcomes. These findings suggest that ethical leadership aids public managers and personnel in racially diverse public agencies.

The forest ranger (and the legislator): How local congressional politics shape policy implementation in agency field offices

Research on political control over government bureaucracy has primarily focused on direct exercises of power such as appointments, funding, agency design, and procedural rules. In this analysis we extend this literature to consider politicians who leverage their institutional standing to influence the decisions of local field officials over whom they have no explicit authority. Using the case of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), we investigate whether field-level decisions are associated with the political preferences of individual congressional representatives. Our sample encompasses 7,681 resource extraction actions initiated and analyzed by 107 USFS field offices between 2005 and 2018. Using hierarchical Bayesian regression, we show that under periods of economic growth and stability, field offices situated in the districts of congressional representatives who oppose environmental regulation initiate more extractive actions (timber harvest, oil and gas drilling, grazing) and conduct less rigorous environmental reviews than field offices in the districts of representatives who favor environmental regulation. By extending existing theories about interactions between politicians and bureaucrats to consider informal means of influence, this work speaks to: (1) the role of local political interests in shaping agency-wide policy outcomes; and (2) the importance of considering informal and implicit means of influence that operate in concert with explicit control mechanisms to shape bureaucratic behavior.

Community Foundations as Network Conveners: Structuring Collective Agency for Child Education & Development System Impact

The resource investment and flexibility necessary to support the development of collective agency among autonomous organizational actors can be substantial. Public agencies, with their rigid budget cycles and regulatory burdens, often struggle with providing the resources needed to forge this type of system building to address complex community issues. Community foundations, as anchor institutions in communities, exhibit financial and social power, flexibility, and a reputation for broad community interests that position them to be such conveners. Framing our examination with structuration theory, we conducted a longitudinal mixed methods action research project from Fall 2015 to Spring 2019 to document how a community foundation dislodged schemas and convened a purpose-oriented network to forge collective agency. Data collection included surveying 40 system providers before the launching of the network and 49 providers three years later, interviews with 10 network participants and field observations of 21 network meetings. Network analysis was employed to examine the changes to the system while qualitative methods were used to analyze the processes behind those changes. The implications of this study are that emphasizing the resources and processes that contribute to building collective action broadens perspectives about which organizations may be well suited to convening networks in the public sphere.

Political (Over)Representation of Public Sector Employees and the Double-Motive Hypothesis: Evidence from Norwegian Register Data (2007-2019)

Countries have widely diverging regulations regarding the eligibility of public sector employees for political office, and the stringency of such regulations remains fiercely debated. Building on a demand and supply model of political selection, this article contributes to such debates by studying whether and how the incentives of public employees as both consumers and producers of public services (their ‘double motive’) affects their descriptive political representation. Our analysis employs population-wide individual-level register data covering four Norwegian local elections between 2007 and 2019 (N>13 million observations). Using predominantly individual-level panel regression models, we find that public employees are strongly overrepresented on election lists and have a higher probability of election (conditional on running). Looking at underlying mechanisms, we provide evidence consistent with the ‘double motive’ of public employees inducing their self-selection into standing for elected office (at higher-ranked ballot positions). Demand-side effects deriving from party and voter selection receive more limited empirical support. We discuss ensuing concerns about the potential substantive representation of policy self-interests by elected public employees.

Public-Sector Honesty and Corruption: Field Evidence from 40 Countries

This study presents a theoretical model of honest behavior in the public sector (public-sector honesty) and its relationship with corruption. We test this model empirically by utilizing and extending a unique data set of honest behavior of public- and private-sector workers across 40 countries, gathered in a field experiment conducted by Cohn et al. (N = 17,303). We find that public-sector honesty is determined by country-level societal culture and public-sector culture; public-sector honesty predicts corruption levels, independently from the effect of incentive structures—in line with the Becker–Stigler model. We find no support for a global mean difference in honest behavior between public- and private-sector workers, alongside substantive cross-country variation in sector differences in honest behavior. The emphasis assigned to honesty of public-sector workers within each country appears to be locally determined by the prevailing public-sector culture. These results imply that beyond cross-national variation in the scope of publicness, it is very content may vary across countries. Lastly, the results of this study consistently fail to support the selection thesis, and we discuss the practical implications of this result for anticorruption policy.

Bureaucratic Control and Strategic Compliance: How Do Subnational Governments Implement Central Guidelines in China?

Bureaucratic control, the constraint that a superior imposes on subordinate agencies’ discretion through guidelines, is ubiquitous in administrative organizations. Despite scholarly discussions on the merits and shortcomings of bureaucratic control, we still know little about the impact of the extents of bureaucratic control on subordinates’ compliance patterns. In this article, we argue that bureaucratic control might intensify subordinates’ burdens and incentivize them to strategically reduce compliance with the central guidelines which impose such control on them. We build a database containing 42 social regulatory guidelines issued by the Chinese State Council (central government) and 848 implementation documents issued by provincial governments between 2003 and 2012. As bureaucratic control in a central guideline increases, provincial governments might postpone the release or withhold the implementation documents and reiterate less content of the corresponding central guideline. Interestingly, when provincial governments lack financial resources, the aforementioned reactions to bureaucratic control is weakened and even reversed to be positive. Moreover, central mobilization alleviates the negative impact of bureaucratic control on the surface but might fail to address subordinates’ decrease of compliance in hidden ways. Central monitoring raises the overall level of subordinates’ compliance but does not moderate how subordinates circumvent central guidelines with high degree of control.

Thanks, but no thanks. Preferences towards teleworking colleagues in public organizations

Over the last decades, one of the most significant changes in the workplaces of government agencies around the world has been the introduction of telework. The relatively scant public administration research on this innovation and on its semantic or substantive variations such as telecommuting, home-work, remote work and smart work, has examined its effects on teleworkers and only recently on non-teleworkers. However, scholars have overlooked the relational dynamics triggered by telework. This is the focus of our study. We start by connecting telework with specific features of public bureaucracies, such as control, modularity and the separation of professional and personal life. Next, we explore through a mixed methods design a relational dynamic overlooked by previous studies, i.e. the preferences of non-teleworkers towards teleworking colleagues and the motives behind them. Results from a discrete choice experiment with over 1,000 non-teleworking public employees revealed a remarkably strong preference toward non-teleworkers. A qualitative follow-up based on semi-structured interviews found the workplace collective as the locus of the tensions caused by telework and illuminated critical issues perceived by non-teleworkers, ensuring a more fine-grained understanding of the impacts of flexible work arrangements on the functioning of public organizations.