Suchergebnisse

Les spécialistes de la comparaison soulignent que l'administration publique doit être comprise en termes de modèles d'organisation et de prise de décision liés au contexte. Les agences situées dans un même contexte afficheront plus de points communs que celles situées dans un autre contexte. En parallèle, des données empiriques attestent de la variation au niveau organisationnel dans la prise de décision. Par exemple, toutes les agences d'un pays ne se voient pas déléguer des niveaux similaires d'autonomie dans la gestion du personnel. Le présent article développe une argumentation théorique sur la manière dont la tradition administrative modère l'effet des moteurs organisationnels de l'autonomie dans la gestion du personnel. Nous considérons le degré d'uniformité ancré dans la tradition administrative comme un facteur explicatif clé de cette relation. En termes empiriques, l'article compare la perception de l'autonomie dans la gestion du personnel des agences dans dix pays européens nichés dans trois groupes de pays (scandinaves, latino-napoléoniens et continentaux). L'analyse confirme les attentes théoriques concernant les effets propres au contexte des caractéristiques organisationnelles sur l'autonomie dans la gestion du personnel dans les agences. Remarques à l'intention des praticiens Le présent article explique pourquoi le degré perçu d'autonomie dans la gestion du personnel du côté des directeurs d'agence varie selon les différentes traditions administratives. Nous verrons que certains contextes présentent une plus grande hétérogénéité dans la délégation de l'autonomie de gestion du personnel aux directeurs d'agence, alors que d'autres contextes se caractérisent par des pratiques homogènes de délégation à des agences de même forme juridique. Cette observation suggère que les changements dans la forme juridique des agences sont des instruments importants de réforme efficace dans les contextes caractérisés par une forte uniformité, alors qu'ils n'auront qu'un effet limité dans les contextes à l'uniformité limitée.

Public sector innovation scholarship has not yet systematically explored how the target context (or output phase) of innovations impacts the early phases of innovation processes. This study theorizes and tests whether innovating organizations are more sensitive to ideas from particular stakeholder groups depending on the target group of said innovation. Using a large-scale dataset from the Australian Public Service, the results show that innovations with external target groups are more likely to be built on ideas from external stakeholders (compared with internal stakeholders) and—within the group of internal stakeholders—on ideas from managers (compared with non-managerial employees). Practical and scholarly implications are discussed.Points for practitioners: Innovations benefit from the inclusion of internal and external stakeholder ideas, both substantively (appropriate knowledge leads to better end products) and symbolically (innovations need to be deemed legitimate, and receive support from the actors that will be primarily impacted by the innovation). Innovating organizations need to be aware of the perceptions of the stakeholders affected by the innovation, and properly sense, capture and translate the ideas of those stakeholders in the innovation process.

AbstractThe extent to which public organizations contribute to crosscutting policy programs is a question of organizational commitment, resource allocation, and monitoring. In this paper, we triangulate survey and interview data to study the explanatory power of organizational factors to understand the extent of organizational adaptation to crosscutting policy programs. In line with the hypotheses, the organizational task, culture, and the portfolio minister's level of control seem to explain the extent of adaptation. Policy development as a task has a positive effect on organizational adaptation. However, this effect disappears if we add cultural variables. The second model indicates that a customer-oriented culture has a negative effect on organizational adaptation, and an innovation-oriented culture has a positive one. The portfolio minister's level of control has a strong positive effect on organizational adaptation. Apparently, incentives are needed to hold organizations accountable and provide them clear direction regarding their contribution to crosscutting objectives.

Why do public sector organisations target different stakeholder audiences in their reputation management? Despite the recognition that reputation management is an audience-based exercise, the field lacks studies that systematically analyse which audiences matter for reputation management by different public service organisations. This article examines reputation management by public service organisation in a multi-audience framework. The relevance of different audiences is surveyed at public service organisations that differ in formal-legal distance from government, task, size and environmental turbulence. The strongest and broadest effects are found for more autonomous organisations, who focus their reputation management more on politicians in general and the media and less on their directly responsible Minister.

Comparative scholars emphasise that public administration should be understood in terms of context-bound patterns of organising and decision-making. Agencies in the same context will display more commonalities than those in another. At the same time, there is good empirical evidence for organisational-level variation in decision-making. For instance, not all agencies in one country are delegated similar levels of personnel management autonomy. This article develops a theoretical argument about how administrative tradition moderates the effect of organisational drivers of personnel management autonomy. We identify the degree of uniformity embedded in administrative tradition as a key explanatory factor for this relationship. In empirical terms, the article compares the perceived personnel management autonomy of agencies in 10 European countries nested in three country clusters (Scandinavian, Latin-Napoleonic and Continental). The analysis confirms theoretical expectations about the context-specific effects of organisational characteristics on personnel management autonomy in agencies.Points for practitionersThis article explains why agency managers' perceived degree of personnel management autonomy varies between different administrative traditions. It shows that some contexts display a greater heterogeneity of delegating personnel management autonomy to agency managers, whereas other contexts are characterised by homogeneous practices of delegation to agencies of the same legal type. This finding suggests that changes in agencies' legal type are important instruments of effective reform in high-uniformity contexts, whereas they will have only a limited effect in low-uniformity contexts.

In the last decade, reforms in the public sector have been implemented at an ever‐increasing pace. Hereby, organizations are repetitively subject to mergers, splits, absorptions, or secessions of units; the adoption of new tasks; changes in legal status; and other structural reforms. Although evidence is largely missing in the literature, there is a growing belief that such intense reform sequences may be damaging to organizations. This article aims to fill this gap in the literature by empirically examining the existence of such repetitive change injury for public organizations. To do so, we employ organizational absenteeism rates as an indicator for repetitive change injury and link this to the reform sequences an organization experienced. Results indicate that intense reform sequences disproportionally increase organizational absenteeism rates, supporting the existence of repetitive change injury and suggesting that reforms remain rooted in organizational memories for a longer time than is often assumed.

Through recurrent structural reform programmes governments are on a quest to design public organizations that will stand the test of their environment. One of the approaches to uncertain or sensitive issues has been to create various forms of (semi‐)autonomous organizations with substantial strategic discretion. However, while governments repeatedly experiment with designs, one might simultaneously expect that such interference through repeated structural change may limit the degree of strategic policy autonomy perceived by senior managers. More specifically, we propose that intense structural reforms may inadvertently reduce strategic policy autonomy perceptions through two mechanisms. First, intense sequences of structural reforms may lead to perceptions of relatively controlling political principals. Second, they may reduce an organization's ability to accrue resources beneficial to autonomy, such as a strong internal culture, network embeddedness and expertise. Results indicate that strategic policy autonomy perceptions will indeed be detrimentally affected for organizations that experience intense sequences of structural reform.

Using data from the U.S. Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, this article seeks to provide an insight into the effect of the financial and economic crisis on turnover intention within the U.S. federal government. By constructing panel data and applying a first difference estimator, the effect of the crisis on turnover intention is examined, while dealing with a possible issue of endogeneity. Not only does this approach allow us to examine the effect of the crisis, but it also enables us to analyze whether the specific effect of independent variables identified by turnover literature has changed due to the crisis. Results highlight that the crisis has a negative impact on turnover intention, while the effects of pay, training, and gender on turnover intention appear to have changed.