Week3 rainey chapter_6
- 1. Understanding and Managing Public Organizations Chapter 6 Organizational Goals and Effectiveness
- 2. Chapter Overview • Major issues about organizational goals and the goals of public organizations • Models of effectiveness and their implications for organizations • How expectations about goals and the effectiveness of public organizations (especially in comparison to the private sector) have played a major role in political and governmental reforms
- 3. General Organizational Goals • Organizations are goal-directed, purposive entities, and their effectiveness in pursuing those goals influences the quality of our lives and even our ability to survive. • An organizational goal is a condition that organizations seek to attain.
- 4. Types of Goals • Official goals • Mission statements and annual reports contain what organization theorists refer to as official goals. These • Specify official value statements • Enhance organization legitimacy • Guide and motivate employee behavior • Operative goals are relatively specific intermediate ends.
- 5. General Organizational Goals • Literature offers useful insight into nature of goals. For example: • Goals are expressions of an organization’s values; they orient employees toward the organization’s mission. • Clarification of goals can improve efficiency and productivity.
- 6. General Organizational Goals • Literature also underscores problems (for theorists and practitioners) with the concept of goals. • Goals are multiple (a goal is one of a set). • Goals often conflict. • Short-term and long-term goals can conflict. • Goals are arranged in hierarchies and chains. • One goal leads to another or is operative for a higher or more general goal.
- 7. Goals of Public Organizations • The most often repeated observation about public organizations is that goals are particularly vague and intangible compared to those of business firms. • What is the reason for this? • What implications might this have to employee motivation, commitment, satisfaction?
- 8. Goal Ambiguity: Reasons and Implications • One reason is because of vague mandates. • Studies suggest that goal ambiguity may create problems in motivating employees. • Goal ambiguity presents problems for developing clear performance indicators. In turn, this may raise questions about accountability and lead to performance evaluations on the basis of rules.
- 9. To What Extent Does an Organization Reach Its Goals? • This question assumes that organizations have goals, that the goals can be discovered, that the goals are at least somewhat stable, that abstract goals can be converted into specific, objective measures, and that data relevant to those measures can be collected, processed, and applied in a timely and appropriate manner. • Much of academic organizational theory has observed that these are problematic assumptions. Organizational theorists challenged this commonsense understanding of formal organizations.
- 10. More Assumptions • Organizations will perform better if goals are clarified and progress is measurable. • Public organizations need to do much better. • Public organizations will do better if they adopt business practices. • The federal nature of the U.S. system does not matter much to goal attainment. – Multiple authorities at multiple levels agree on goals.
- 11. Models for Assessing Organizational Effectiveness • Scholars are not in agreement on one model. • Goal approach • Systems-resource approach • Participant satisfaction models • Human resource and internal process models • Government performance project
- 12. Goal Approach • It is the simplest approach, based on the link between stated goals and effectiveness. • Its shortcoming is that it does not consider complications. It is concerned with the output side and whether the organization achieves its goals in terms of the desired level of output. – It implies a view of management as a rational and orderly process with a single expression of goals. • Its indicators include operative goals . • It does not consider goal conflict, hierarchy, and goal types and sub- types.
- 13. The Systems-Resource Approach • This approach concentrates on whether an organization can obtain valued resources from its environment. • It places effectiveness criteria in a hierarchy with the organization’s ability to exploit external resources and opportunities as the ultimate criterion. • This criterion is ultimately un-measurable; it has to be inferred by measuring the next-highest or penultimate criteria.
- 14. Systems-Resource Approach • Observes the beginning of the process and evaluates whether the organization effectively obtains resources necessary for high performance • Indicators: • Bargaining position—the ability to exploit its environment • The ability to interpret the real properties of the external environment • Maintaining of internal day-to-day activities • The ability to respond to changes in the environment • Usefulness: when other indicators are difficult to obtain or are hard to measure
- 15. Participant Satisfaction Models • The ecological model or the participant satisfaction model defines organizational effectiveness according to organizations’ abilities to satisfy key strategic constituencies in their environment.
- 16. Internal Process Approach • Looks at internal activities and assesses effectiveness by indicators of internal health and efficiency • Indicators: – Strong corporate culture and positive work climate – Team spirit, group loyalty, and teamwork – Confidence, trust, and communications between workers and management – Decision making near information sources, regardless where those sources are on the organizational charts – Sharing of relevant facts and feelings (horizontal and vertical) – Rewards to managers for performance, growth, and development of subordinates and for creating an effective working group – Interaction between the organization and its parts, with conflicts that occur over projects—resolves in the interest of the organization
- 17. Human Resource and Internal Process Models • Refers to such factors as communications, leadership style, motivation, interpersonal trust, and other internal states assumed to be desirable • University of Michigan (Likert and others, 1961): Specified two leadership behaviors: job-centered and employee-centered
- 18. The Government Performance Project • The GPP is a source of information about state management. • Its stated mission is to improve service to citizens by strengthening government policy and performance. • The GPP systematically evaluates how well states manage their money, people, information, and infrastructure—four areas critical to ensuring that states’ policy decisions and practices actually deliver their intended outcomes. • The GPP produces a report card.
- 19. Conceptual Framework of the Government Performance Project Management Subsystems Financial Management Human Resources Management Capital Management Information Technology Management Leadership as Driver Information as Connector Managing for Results Management Capacity Program Delivery Performance Measurement
- 20. Organizational Effectiveness Dimensions and Measures 1. Overall effectiveness 2. Productivity 3. Efficiency 4. Profit 5. Quality 6. Accidents 7. Growth 8. Absenteeism 9. Turnover 10.Job satisfaction 11.Motivation 12.Morale 13.Control 14.Conflict / cohesion 15.Flexibility / adaptation 16. Planning and goal setting 17. Goal consensus 18. Internalization of organizational goals 19. Role and norm congruence 20. Managerial interpersonal skills 21. Managerial task skills 22. Information management and communication 23. Readiness 24. Utilization of environment 25. Evaluations by external entities 26. Stability 27. Value of human resources 28. Participation and shared influence 29. Training and development emphasis 30. Achievement emphasis Source: Campbell, 1977, pp. 36-39.
- 21. Effectiveness Dimensions for Educational Institutions Perceptual Measures Objective Measures 1. Student educational satisfaction Student dissatisfaction; student complaints Number of terminations; counseling center visits 2. Student academic development Extra work and study; amount of academic development Percentage going on to graduate school 3. Student career development Number employed in major field; Number receiving career counseling number of career-oriented courses 4. Student personal development Opportunities for personal development; Number of extracurricular activities; emphasis on nonacademic development number in extramurals and intramurals 5. Faculty and administrator employment satisfaction Faculty and administrators’ satisfaction with Number of faculty members and school employment administrators leaving 6. Professional development and quality of the faculty Faculty publications, awards, conference attendance; Percentage of faculty with doctorates; teaching at the cutting edge number of new courses 7. System openness and community interaction Employee community service; emphasis on community Number of continuing education courses relations 8. Ability to acquire resources National reputation of faculty; General funds raised; drawing power for students; drawing power for faculty previously tenured faculty hired 9. Organizational health Student-faculty relations; typical communication type; levels of trust; cooperative environment; use of talents and expertise Source: Adapted from Cameron, 1978, p. 630. See original table for numerous additional measures for each dimension.
- 22. The Competing Values Framework Output Quality Human Relations Model Internal Process Model Open-Systems Model Rational Goal Model Flexibility Internal External Control Means: Cohesion; morale Ends: Human resource development Means: Information management; communication Ends: Stability; control Means: Flexibility; readiness Ends: Growth; resource acquisition Means: Planning; goal setting Ends: Productivity; efficiency Source: Quinn and Rohrbaugh, 1983. Reprinted by permission of the authors. Copyright 1983. Institute of Management Sciences.
- 23. The Balanced Scorecard • Incorporates multiple dimensions and measures for assessing organizational performance and effectiveness • A performance measurement framework that added strategic nonfinancial performance measures to traditional financial metrics to give managers and executives a more “balanced” view of organizational performance
- 24. Effectiveness in Organizational Networks • Networks are “structures of interdependence involving multiple organizations or parts thereof, where one unit is not merely the formal subordinate of the others in some hierarchical arrangement” (O’Toole, 1997, p. 44). • Networks are common to public management.
- 25. Networks and Effectiveness • Brings up questions about measuring effectiveness • Effectiveness should not be focused on one part, but the entirety (Provan and Milward, 1995). • These are most likely to be effective when core agency integrates the network, the mechanisms for fiscal control are not fragmented, resources are plentiful, and network is stable (Milward and Provan, 1998, 2000).
- 26. Managing Goals and Effectiveness • The information presented in this chapter raises important issues concerning the goals of public organizations that allegedly influence their operations and characteristics. • Later chapters will build on these issues.
- 27. Effectiveness in Public Organizations • The information presented in this chapter raises important issues about the distinctions between public and private sectors and the problems using the private sector as a benchmark for comparative assessments. • Yet beliefs and perceptions have influenced reforms while ignoring the complexities in assessing performance that have been discussed in this chapter.