Cutbacks revisited: the relationship between resources and performance

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the effects of staffing and employee cutbacks in public safety agencies in the context of county governments in California, Texas, and Florida (2002–2014). Although resources have been regarded as one of the most important determinants of performance, we argue that the potential endogeneity and the autoregressive nature of public service performance should be considered to clarify the relationship between resources and performance. This study provides evidence of the inverted-U shape relationship between employee cutbacks and performance, implying that the initial benefit of cutbacks is subject to diminishing returns, and eventually degrades performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Cutbacks
• staffing
• resource
• performance
• public safety agencies

Acknowledgement

I wish to thank Kenneth J. Meier, Jae-Hyun Gwon, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments that greatly improved the manuscript. I also thank Mackenzie Case and Thomas Strauss for their research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. There are three literature streams of cutback management, each with a distinctive research focus: the content of cutbacks and their impact, management strategies to deal with cutbacks and organizational decline in the life-cycle approach (for details, Cepiku and Savignon 2012; Raudla, Savi, and Randma-Liiv 2015; Schmidt, Groeneveld, and Van De Walle 2017).

2. For example, slashing the number of employees by organizational changes such as merging, contracting, or relying on part-time employees or volunteers, as well as several cost-saving methods including hiring freezes and layoffs, reduced pay or work hours, deferring maintenance costs, cancelling planned projects, and cheese-slicing or across-the-board cuts (Behn 1980; Kickert 2012; Levine 1979, 1985; Scorsone and Plerhoples 2010; Jimenez 2014; Raudla et al. 2017; Cepiku, Giordano, and Savignon 2018).

3. Unincorporated areas refer to a territory that is not governed by municipalities. They are usually small, fragmented, with a lack of capacity to regulate their own service, and depend on higher administration such as counties and states.

4. Despite some advantages, a per capita measure is not an exact reflection of the unit input and may bias the trend data as county population has to be divided out. In particular, it is criticized as a ‘totally inappropriate’ basis for police staffing decisions (International Association of Chiefs of Police).

5. The natural logarithmic difference approximates the growth rate of a variable: $log(x_2-x_1)\approx \frac{x_2-x_1}{x_1}$.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the Paul A. Volcker Junior Endowment Scholar Research Grant Award through the Centennial Center for Political Science and Public Administration Section of the American Political Science Association.

Notes on contributors

Sanghee Park

Sanghee Park is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Service at Boise State University, Boise, ID. Her research efforts include public management, public sector governance, and representative bureaucracy.