A Task Environment Approach to Organizational Assessment

Abstract

In recent years, interest has grown in the comprehensive and systematic measurement of organizational behavior. One reflection of this interest is the increased use of organizational assessment which is the process of measuring the effectiveness of an organization from a social systems perspective.' An organizational assessment is grounded in conceptual models of organizations and is typically holistic, i.e., focused on the task-performance capabilities of the organization . . . and the human impact of the system on its individual members. 2 When assessing the task-performance dimension of effectiveness, client evaluations and objective indicators are normally used to judge the extent to which an organization has met its goals.3 Input from officials in an organization's task environment is a third source of data that is traditionally ignored in organizational assessments, but one which is widely recognized as important.4 This study explores the use of effectiveness measures gathered from officials whose jobs require them to interact with federal organizations. By focusing on such inside respondents, a different view may be secured of federal agencies than that provided by private citizens.' Respondents include members of Congress, state and local welfare officials, private contractors, and naval ship commanding officers. Being mainly government employees, they should have a relevant comparative perspective from which to evaluate other agencies' and workers' effectiveness, and they should be knowledgeable about service quality because of their stable interactions with the agencies. Of course, evaluations by both private citizens and insiders suffer from the limitations of perception and knowledge. But so far, evaluation studies have focused on private citizens with varying degrees of success.6 By using task environment respondents, we hope to provide another part of the evaluation picture, one previously overlooked, but one which can add to the external validity of organizational assessments. 7 The concept of task environment not only directs use of a different set of respondents but also requires sensitivity to domains of activity as they vary across organizations.8 Prior organizational assessments have not explored how domain characteristics such as the location or type of service provided by the governmental unit may affect its perceived effectiveness. However, sup-