Policy innovation and public organizational performance: a moderated mediation analysis of Taiwan’s Bookstart program

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to explore the association between adoption of policy innovation and public organization performance, with the case study of innovative Bookstart Programme in Taiwan. This research employed the method of moderated mediation analysis, as we treat organizational commitment as mediator and mandatory/voluntary public libraries as moderator in our SEM model. Our empirical results suggested that while mediator is insignificant, it does facilitate the association between adoption of policy innovation and public performance. Our SEM model also revealed that mandatory adoption of policy innovation does moderate the relation between organizational commitment and public performance with significance.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy innovation
• organizational commitment
• public organization
• structural equation modelling
• Bookstart
• Taiwan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Baron and Kenny (1986, 1173) defined mediator as ‘it represents the generative mechanism through which the focal independent variable is able to influence the dependent variable of interest.’ Whereas, moderator as ‘it partitions a focal independent variable into subgroups that establish its domains of maximal effectiveness in regard to a given dependent variable.’

2. This is the so-called ‘FAAMG’, in the New York Stock Exchange.

3. Richardson, Simmering, and Sturman (2009) investigated three statistical techniques to test for CMV and found only the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) method useful. Williams, Hartman, and Cavazotte (2010), Kock and Lynn (2012), and Kock (2015) confirm Richardson’s research results by employing CFA techniques to deal with CMV issues.

4. The telephonic survey was conducted between October 1st and 24th, 2016. Because our questionnaire was very large (88 questions, including the basic information of respondents and indicators raised by other empirical research), we contacted the respondents first to schedule the interview. At the scheduled time, we used the Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI) system to survey our respondents. All the answers to the question were immediately coded as SPSS dataset by trained surveyors. Due to our cooperation with National Taiwan Libraries and all 22 city/county governments, we had a high response rate (342/360) in the telephone survey. The high response rate mainly results from an official letters requested by the Ministry of Education and local bureau of education, mailing to every library branch prior to the survey conducted.

5. The first wave of the survey enquired about respondents’ attitude towards policy innovation; the second wave solicited respondents’ attitude to organizational commitment.

6. Traditional measurement of public libraries, such as how many books were held, and how many people were served, has been criticized for being too limited to assess public library’s performance. New assessing methods were proposed to evaluate public library’s performance (Blixrud 2003). Nevertheless, while new assessing methods were argued to capture library’s performance better than traditional measurement, data availability is a big issue in this research. Taiwan’s Public Library’s Databank remains collect traditional output data, rather than new performance data. As a result, we still utilized readily available output data as a proxy for library performance.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, PG009-P-14.

Notes on contributors

Louis C. Liu

Louis C. Liu is currently an Associate Professor at Department of Public Management and Policy, Tunghai University. He received his Ph.D. from School of Public Policy, University of Maryland College Park, USA. His research interests include public policy analysis, quantitative research method, and public finance and budgeting. He has published in numerous journals such as Public Administration and Development, Journal of Asian Public Policy, Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting, and Financial Management, Taiwan Journal of Democracy, and Public Administration Research.