Collaborative Behavior and the Performance of Government Agencies

ABSTRACT

While collaboration among individuals, work groups, and organizations is central for understanding the performance of public agencies, most studies have focused on collaboration between organizations or sectors. We develop a model that focuses on two types of collaborative behavior: between persons (both horizontal and vertical) and between work units. We empirically test our hypotheses using data on work collaboration and perceptions of public agency performance from the United States federal government. We introduce a method for estimating the impact of different types of collaborative behavior that also accounts for nonlinear effects and a dependent variable that takes ordered values. We find that intra-organizational collaborative behavior has a large impact on organizational performance and that horizontal collaborative behavior between workers has the greatest impact among the specific types.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Research Fund of 2010.

Notes

*p = .01; **p = .001.

*p = .01; **p = .001.

This is related to the issue of “what” is being measured and “how” (i.e., subjective or objective) the measures are assessed (Bommer et al. 1995, 596). Especially in terms of what is being measured, performance can be measured more precisely through performance indicators that have a single appropriate construct than through performance indicators using multiple proxy constructs. Therefore, the correlation between subjective and objective indicators of a single performance construct can be greater than that of performance measures using multiple constructs.

By parallel, we mean that, across levels of the outcome variable, the slope coefficients are identical and each probability curve is assumed to differ only in being shifted to the left or right.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew B. Whitford

Andrew B. Whitford ([email protected]) is Professor of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia. His research on bureaucratic politics, political economy, and research methodology has been published in the Administrative Science Quarterly, American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and the British Journal of Political Science. His book Presidential Rhetoric and the Public Agenda: Constructing the War on Drugs, coauthored with Jeff Yates, was published by The Johns Hopkins University Press in 2009.

Soo-Young Lee

Soo-Young Lee ([email protected]) is an assistant professor of Public Administration at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Korea. He received his PhD in Public Administration at the University of Georgia. His research has been published in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory and the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis. His research interests include human resource management, organization theory, organizational behavior, turnover, etc. He is the corresponding author of this article.

Taesik Yun

Taesik Yun ([email protected]) is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia. His dissertation examines effects of job choice motivation on organizational outcomes, including satisfaction, performance, and absenteeism in public and nonprofit organizations.

Chan Su Jung

Chan Su Jung ([email protected]) is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Public and Social Administration at the City University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia. His research interests include organizational goal properties such as goal ambiguity, performance measurement and management, turnover, motivation, and leadership in public organizations.