Abstract
In the literature on the public-private organizations is well known that public organizations have more ambiguous elements than private ones, such as ideology and objectives, that negatively influence the enthusiasm (Brunsson, 1986), motivation and performance of public employees (Pandey & Raney, 2006), as well as organizational performance (Chun & Raney, 2005). The close relationship with performance led many public administration scholars to deepen the concept of goal ambiguity in public management. However, given the lack of a univocal conceptualization of the phenomenon, the present work aims to contextualize goal ambiguity in the public administration, carrying out a systematic literature review. The results bring out goal ambiguity methods of measurement, its antecedents and consequences and the relationship between goal ambiguity and performance. From a theoretical point of view, the study allows systematizing the contributions on goal ambiguity, while from a practical point of view, a thorough knowledge of the concept allows public managers and policy-makers to obtain valuable information for the achievement of good organizational performance.
Highlights
In the literature on the public-private differences, it is known that public organizations have more vague and ambiguous goals than private organizations
It is not excluded that, in certain contexts, goal ambiguity can be functional to the government of public organizations (Ravishankar, 2013) as it enhances the possibility of compromise between the parties (Matland, 1995)
The work of the two authors paves the way for a new line of research that gives way to a decade full of contributions in the field of goal ambiguity (Jung, 2014) that is studied at organizational (Chun & Rainey 2005a; Jung, 2011), at individual (Stazyk & Goerdel, 2010) and at programs level (Jung, 2014)
Summary
In the literature on the public-private differences, it is known that public organizations have more vague and ambiguous goals than private organizations. The ambiguity affects both goal formulation (Sawyer, 1992) and goal communication (Chun & Rainey, 2005a) and this makes it a concept difficult to measure. The close link between goal ambiguity and performance has increased the interest in this issue; in literature there is not a shared position on the factors that produce goal ambiguity, on the consequences generated by it and on the measurement methods. For these reasons we conducted a systematic literature review that allows answering to the following research questions: 1) RQ1: how is goal ambiguity measured?. 3) RQ3: what is the relationship between goal ambiguity and organizational performance?
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