Do NPM-Type Reforms Lead to a Cultural Revolution Within Public Sector Organizations?

Abstract

Agencification and granting public sector organizations managerial autonomy in particular is believed to change organizational cultures, away from traditional compliance- and detail-oriented bureaucratic cultures and towards organizational cultures which are more oriented towards external customers. There is however very little empirical information on the relationship between managerial autonomy and organizational culture. Using a unique data set on public agencies in Flanders, we not only test how managerial autonomy affects the strength of a customer-oriented culture within public sectors but also examine whether this culture becomes dominant over traditional public administration culture. Analysis shows that managerial autonomy positively affects a customer-oriented culture; however, it does not make it a dominant culture.

Key words:

• New public management
• organizational culture
• autonomous agencies

Notes

¹ For more information, see http://soc.kuleuven.be/io/cost/index.html

² The representativeness of the data was tested using Chi-square goodness of fit tests. The number of agencies per type in the sample was compared with the number of agencies per type in the population.

³ This index includes properties of a traditional public administration/Weberian culture (see e.g. Bendix 1977: 425); however due to data limitations, we were unable to include an extra focus on rules and procedure compliant behaviour.

⁴ A Lagrange Multiplier was used to test for heteroscedasticity; no problems were detected (the dummy type was used for the heteroscedasticity term).