Creating desirable organizational characteristics

Abstract

What are the factors that lead to desirable organizational characteristics? This article examines this question by proposing a model to explain the ability of some organizations to create a focus on results and high levels of managerial authority. The new public management literature points to these two organizational characteristics as key steps for improving public performance and providing results-based accountability. Employing a national survey of US state government health and human service agency managers we find that political support for the organization and purposeful reform efforts do lead to desirable organizational characteristics. In addition, strong internal communication fosters a focus on results, and organizational culture shapes the decision-making authority of managers.

Key words:

• Results
• autonomy
• communication
• new public management
• organizational culture

Acknowledgements

Data analyzed in this article were collected under the auspices of the National Administrative Studies Project (NASP-II), a project supported in part by the Forum for Policy Research & Public Service at Rutgers University and under a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to the Center for State Health Policy also at Rutgers University. Naturally, this support does not necessarily imply an endorsement of analyses and opinions in the article.

Notes

1 The portrayal of culture in NPM doctrine is somewhat simplistic – an organization has either an entrepreneurial or bureaucratic culture. However, the data we use to measure culture allow greater variation. Because there are both entrepreneurial and bureaucratic cultural indexes variables we allow for the fact that the same organization can have characteristics of both cultures. Second, these indexes are continuous rather than dummy variables, i.e. organizations will have varying levels of each culture, rather than be classified as purely entrepreneurial or not.

2 To determine whether ordinary least square was the appropriate estimation technique, we examined our data for heteroskedasticity, multicollinearity and influential data. A histogram of the standardized residuals shows that they are normally distributed. A scatter plot illustrates that the errors are relatively constant (homoskedastic) and independent of one another. We examined the bivariate correlations and the square root of the variance inflation factor (VIF) to detect multicollinearity (Fox 1991: 11). The highest correlations are between the entrepreneurial/goal-oriented culture and internal communication (.513) and results-based reform (.453), and between client influence and public opinion (.460). None of the other correlations between the independent variables exceed 0.4. The square root of the highest VIF was 1.316 for the entrepreneurial/goal-oriented culture variable in the focus on results model, and 1.205 for the same variable in the managerial authority model. The condition indices for the focus on results model is 23.595 and 24.455 in the managerial authority model, both well below the measure of 30 that indicates a serious collinearity problem with a model.

3 The sampling frame was developed with the aid of the most widely used directory of human service agency managers, namely the American Public Human Services Association. Application of study criteria resulted in a sampling frame made of 570 managers from the 50 states and Washington, DC, but this frame was later reduced to 514 because of managers that had left the organization, retired or died before survey administration efforts. Given the small size of the sampling frame, the survey was administered to the entire sampling frame. As with most survey research projects, minimizing non-response, both to the survey and to specific questionnaire items, was a primary goal in the survey administration. We followed Dillman's (2000) comprehensive tailored design method approach to maximizing the response rate. The data collection phase of the study began in fall of 2002 and concluded in winter of 2003.