A New Measure of Red Tape: Introducing the Three-Item Red Tape (TIRT) Scale

ABSTRACT

Much empirical red tape research utilizes the General Red Tape (GRT) scale, which asks respondents to rate the level of red tape on a scale of 0 to 10 (Rainey, Pandey, and Bozeman 1995). Because “popular usage of the term ‘red tape’ requires no precision” (Bozeman and Feeney 2011, 3) and the GRT scale “assumes that respondents understand the terms to which they are responding” (101), evaluating red tape in this way may be theoretically disadvantageous. This article proposes a new measure—the Three-Item Red Tape (TIRT) scale—consisting of three items drawn from previous rules research on rule characteristics to which respondents characterize organizational rules by how burdensome, unnecessary, and ineffective they are. This measure has several advantages over existing measures: it includes several indicators; it does not include the term “red tape”; and it is drawn directly from Bozeman's (1993; 2000) operational definition of red tape. Using structural equation modeling to model survey data from two local government organizations (n = 1,666), this article evaluates the theoretical and empirical validity of this TIRT scale, compares it with the GRT scale, tests its relationship with formalization, which is known as a distinct concept, and addresses implications of this scale on red tape theory.

Notes

Bozeman and Feeney (2011, 84) claim it has been used in over 20 research articles in peer-reviewed journals.

See Chapter 4 of Bozeman and Feeney (2011) for an in-depth discussion of measures of red tape used in the literature. Other studies, such as Scott and Pandey (2000) and Coursey and Pandey (2007), also provide valuable overviews of red tape measures. For brevity's sake, the author here does not restate what these studies have expertly done and instead directs the reader to these studies for more information.

Bozeman (1993, 283) originally defined red tape with slightly different wording: “rules, regulations, and procedures that remain in force and entail a compliance burden for the organization but have no efficacy for the rules’ functional object.” While the intent is the same, the more recent definition is the one to keep in mind.

Pandey and Garnett (2006) posit that there are three dimensions of communication performance: interpersonal communication, internal communication, and external communication.

The model is identified so that the latent variance is set to 1.00. Each loading can be multiplied by 1.00 and itself to get the variance explained. Since that latent variance is 1, that first step is unnecessary.

A just-identified model is one in which there are equal numbers of known values and unknown estimates, meaning that there is “a single set of parameter estimates that perfectly reproduce the input matrix” (Brown 2006, 66). Put another way, just-identified constructs have “only one unique solution that optimally captures the relations among the items” (Little et al. 2002, 162).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erin L. Borry

Erin L. Borry ([email protected]) is an assistant professor of public administration with the Department of Government at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She received her PhD from the School of Public Affairs and Administration at the University of Kansas. Her research focuses on the intersection of organizational ethics, rules, and red tape.