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Little research has been done on employee desire to transfer jobs within public sector organizations. This article explores the factors that explain this behavior for a large sample (N = 1248) of employees in the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). These factors include, for example, mission change, employee burnout, and staffing levels. The findings indicate that radical mission change, among other variables, significantly influences the desire of employees to transfer jobs within the agency.

In this article, we use original survey data from Wisconsin school board members to determine the extent of conflict present on Wisconsin school boards and the determinants of different types of perceived board conflict. School boards, by virtue of overseeing a public good with readily measurable performance variables, offer an ideal case for testing a relationship between board governance performance and conflict. Using multivariate regression analysis, we find that that the perceived level of conflict on Wisconsin school boards is dependent on the quality of superintendent–board relations, the demographic profile of the school district overseen by the school board, and the age and experience level of school board members. Notably, we do not find a clear relationship between conflict and measures of school district academic performance.

Local governments are under increasing pressure to effectively represent various political interests within communities. This study attempts to measure and explain city council member perceptions of local government representational effectiveness for a sample of communities in New York state. The authors hypothesize that variables from seven categories are related to representational effectiveness. Using survey methodology and regression techniques, the authors find, for example, that female council members rate their local governments lower in representational effectiveness than their male counterparts, and also that council members perceive a strong relationship between program/service delivery and representational effectiveness.

AbstractNeighborhood organizations have become more important players in urban areas in recent years due to a renewed interest in social capital and an emphasis on the continuing development of community. With this elevated status comes more responsibility for the delivery of services to citizens and scrutiny by these very citizens, the press, and government officials. Much of what we know about neighborhood organizations comes from our observations of board deliberations. Through these deliberations board members make decisions that affect neighborhood constituents. In this study we examine the context in which neighborhood boards in the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, make decisions. Using theory borrowed from the literature on local government boards, we develop a series of testable hypotheses relating to the level of conflict on these boards. Our findings indicate that conflict is relatively low across boards in Milwaukee; however, the number of board member and certain behavioral variables explain a significant amount of the variance in the level of conflict.

Discusses conflict among political actors serving on elected boards or councils, focusing on town governance; based on survey of public officials conducted in Winter 2002-03.

In this article, we build on the existing literatures on small group dynamics and public and nonprofit governance by exploring the link between small group dynamics, governance, and nonprofit performance. The results provide evidence that nonprofit governing boards can improve organizational performance by improving their governance behaviors. Specifically, we link survey data from Minnesota nonprofit charter school board members to hard measures of organizational performance in a path analysis predicting school-level math and reading proficiency levels. We find that boards exhibiting better group dynamics are more active in key governance areas, and that active governance is linked to increased organizational outcomes. Our findings advance scholarly understanding of nonprofit governance by identifying a pathway between nonprofit board governing dynamics and sustainable organizational performance gains. We conclude with practical advice on how nonprofit boards can increase their organizational performance through improved small group dynamics.

In this paper we use the case of U.S. school boards to compare small group governing dynamics across suburban and rural school boards serving fewer than 1,000 students. Using a national dataset, we find that rural school board members are less diverse, perceive higher levels of interpersonal conflict, and higher levels of interest group influence compared to their suburban colleagues. The results reveal the need to consider contextual factors such as urbanity when researching small group governing dynamics on public boards, and the importance of place-based policy making. The results are relevant to scholars of small group dynamics, municipal governance, and school boards.

In this article, we use data collected from Wisconsin superintendents to determine the extent to which the curtailing of collective bargaining facilitated local public management reform adoption. The results show the near elimination of collective bargaining did spur substantial reform adoption in areas of performance pay and recruitment, and that longer serving superintendents and those with partisan ideologies were more likely to adopt management reforms. However, the results also indicate that curtailing collective bargaining appeared to hurt employee morale and made it more difficult to recruit and retain quality teachers. The results contribute to the public human resource literature by providing a real life case study of how public management practices change when collective bargaining is eliminated.