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Public managers and employees should be on the same page for successful performance. Managers' self-evaluations of their own management, however, often do not match employees' evaluations. Despite the consistent findings of a discrepancy between managers' and employees' perceptions of management, little research has examined how this perceptual incongruence affects employee job satisfaction. The present study addresses this question using parallel surveys from both managers and employees in the context of public education. The findings suggest managers overestimate their management effectiveness in general. As the perceptual gap between managers and employees increases, employees are less likely to be satisfied with their organization and their profession. We also find that this relationship is nonlinear, and the negative effects of incongruence could be accelerated when employees have considerable consensus about management. This study highlights the role of perceptual congruence in creating a better work environment and promoting job satisfaction for public employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public managers must often cope with competing and conflicting goals. The common formulation is to assume that managers must trade-off goals against each other. But is this always true? An alternative hypothesis is that sometimes managers may instead be able to improve outcomes on multiple goals simultaneously--by altering management practices. We test this 'trade-off' notion using a panel of state-level administrative data from the U.S. unemployment insurance (UI) system from 1997 to 2004 and qualitative interviews from selected states. The trade-off examined is timeliness of UI benefit payments versus the quality of UI determinations. In general, we find that state administrators often adopt management practices that facilitate improved outcomes for both timeliness and quality, indicating no trade-off but instead a synergy between outcomes. We also find evidence of a feedback effect linking higher performance on timeliness to better quality determinations., Introduction Public programs and public organizations typically carry more than one objective, and managers must consider these multiple criteria in strategic and day-to-day decisions. These circumstances, it is often assumed [...]

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.2007.00667.x Byline: RICHARD M. WALKER (1), LAURENCE J. O'TOOLE (2), KENNETH J. MEIER (3) Abstract: Increased complexity in the world of public management has resulted in the growth of networks of actors who, operating interdependently, co-produce public services. Much of the prior networking literature conflates structure (the network) with behaviour (networking). Based on this concern we analyse the managerial networking practices of over 1,000 officers in English local government. We find extensive networking activity amongst three groups of officers and show that corporate officers, chief officers and service managers develop logical patterns of interaction among network nodes and initiation that reflect their level of management. We conclude that where you are in the organizational hierarchy matters for networking behaviour and discuss the implications of these findings for future research. Author Affiliation: (1)Richard M. Walker is a Professor in Public Management and Policy at the Centre of Urban Planning and Environmental Management, University of Hong Kong and School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University. (2)Laurence J. O'Toole, Jr. is the Margaret Hughes and Robert T. Golembiewski Professor of Public Administration and Head of the Department of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia. (3)Kenneth J. Meier is the Charles H. Gregory Chair in Liberal Arts and Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University and Professor of Public Management in the Cardiff School of Business, Cardiff University. Article History: Date received 27 May 2005. Date accepted 12 December 2005.

Scholars and practitioners within the U.S. education system have focused considerable attention on developing new programs aimed at raising educational achievement for disadvantaged students. New programs are only one way to improve student performance, however; recent work in public administration suggests that public management and implementation practices might also have a large impact on student performance. Existing research shows that managerial networking, managerial quality, and effective personnel management can significantly improve the quality of the education received by disadvantaged students. Additional work highlights the contribution of representative bureaucracy. Because these research agendas have targeted the public administration literature rather than the education policy literature, this article seeks to bring this research back to education policy. Using data from several hundred Texas public school districts, spanning 1995 to 2002, and focusing on disadvantaged student performance (Latinos, blacks, and low-income students), this article illustrates how both management and processes to enhance the representativeness of teaching faculty produce benefits for disadvantaged students., How to improve minority student performance is a perennial question in education policy. Although numerous programs have shown promise in small numbers, how to 'get to scale' in education reform [...]

Pathbreaking work in public policy is virtually guaranteed to draw challenges from those whose fundamental beliefs have been systematically destroyed; thus, it is no surprise to see rejoinders from Richard [...]

Many organization theories suggest that divergent goals can hamper an organization's pursuit of its primary mission. An earlier version of this article analyzed the effect of the pursuit of divergent goals on American public schools. This is an update of the original article that adds two years of data to the original study. Using an educational production function, this article assesses the relationships between athletic budgets and various aggregate measures of academic performance. Controlling for various known components of academic performance, athletic budgets have a significant negative relationship with academic performance. Schools that devote a large amount of resources to athletic budgets have lower levels of academic achievement. A focus on athletics seems to institutionalize goals that conflict with the schools' academic missions., American schools are busy places. They do much more than provide the basics of a K-12 education for their students. They are a source of civic pride, a major agent [...]

The seminal work of Derthick and Quirk (1985) argues that public policy changes when the intellectual debate of ideas establishes that policy options are legitimate and current policies are ineffective. (1) Overlooked in their otherwise exceptional analysis is the role that country music plays in the politics of ideas. (2) The thesis of this article is that country music is a crucial part of the politics of ideas, and, in fact, many policy debates are resolved in country music well before the intellectual community of policy analysts reaches a consensus. This article will recap some of the key policy debates in which country music set the agenda, (3) established the key policy alternatives, or resolved the policy debate and permitted the adoption of public policy (Anderson, 1994). (4), Criminal Justice Policy Perhaps the most noteworthy contribution to public policy has been country music's framing of the death penalty debate after Furman v. Georgia. On the one side is [...]

Previous studies indicate that in cases of relatively low issue salience, the interest group model best explains lesbian and gay antidiscrimination policy in the American states. The analysis of state [...]

Camilla Stivers. 2002. Gender Images in Public Administration: Legitimacy and the Administrative State, second edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 184 pp. The distinction in Western liberal thought between public and [...]

Through bringing the concept of status distance to representative bureaucracy and diversity management literature, this article develops new hypotheses that can guide future studies on representation and diversity in public organizations. First, including status distance brings consideration of the tensions that minority representation creates between integration within the workforce and the pressures on minority bureaucrats to actively represent clientele. Second, the way status distance plays out in the interaction of bureaucrats with co-workers and citizen-clients depends on characteristics of the national and organizational environment and type of service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reporting government performance to the public is key tool in improving accountability. Some evidence, however, has shown that individuals' anti‐public sector biases may distort performance information about public organizations. Using an experimental vignette on U.S. nursing homes, this study fills four gaps in the literature: (1) the need to include nonprofit organizations rather than just public and for‐profit, (2) consideration of the credibility of the source of performance information, (3) the use of simple commonly used performance metrics, and (4) the willingness to use services as a performance dimension. We find the public has a general but modest anti‐for‐profit sector bias in nursing home care with nonprofits perceived the most positively. Sector biases generally disappear when clear performance data are presented. The credibility of the source matters, and respondents' willingness to use organizational services is more sensitive to both sector bias and performance ratings than are performance measures. Practitioner Points: In the field of long‐term care, individuals have no anti‐public sector bias, and they have more favorable views of nonprofit organizations than for‐profit organizations.Perceived sector bias disappears when simple and unambiguous performance information is introduced.The source of performance information matters: individuals perceive the information from government and nonprofit sources as more credible than that from for‐profit sources.A high degree of credibility amplifies the effect of performance information in shaping individuals' evaluations of public services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a huge gap between how employees see leaders' behavior and how leaders see themselves regardless of sector and functional area. Because this gap can be a serious problem in managing organizations, scholars have investigated how the gap can be reduced. This article focuses on leadership training and tests whether and under what conditions it narrows the gap. Using quantitative and qualitative data from a randomized field experiment with several hundred Danish leaders from public and private organizations, we find that a yearlong leadership training course decreases the differences between leader and employee perceptions of transformational and transactional leadership behaviors in public sector organizations but not in private organizations. The findings imply that leadership training can be one way for public organizations to align perceptions of leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A bureaucracy representative of disadvantaged groups in a society has been linked to better outcomes for those groups in a wide variety of policy areas. Most of the empirical work identifying this link has used United States data, a highly conducive case for representation. Would the same relationship be seen in more challenging organizational and environmental contexts? Using the K-12 education context in India as a proxy for a challenging environment, this article examines how and when gender representation in K-12 schools leads to enhanced outcomes. We find a modest relationship between the presence of female teachers in a school and the academic outcomes of female students. Contextual factors both within the organization (more class days, longer teacher hours, and a smaller student to teacher ratio) and related to the external environment (infrastructure, rural location) enhance this association between teacher gender and student performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines gender differences in leadership behaviors and whether leadership training would have different effects on leadership behaviors by gender. Using data from several hundred managers of welfare and financial agencies in Denmark, we first investigate whether leadership behaviors differ between female and male leaders. After that, we conducted a year-long field experiment with managers to examine how female and male leaders respond to leadership training interventions. In general, female managers improve more from leadership training even though leadership scores for female leaders were higher before training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]