Goal Ambiguity in U.S. Federal Agencies

Abstract

Observations that government organizations have particularly high levels of organizational goal ambiguity, and that this goal ambiguity has major influences on their other characteristics, abound in the literature on public bureaucracy. Few researchers, however, have developed quantified measures of goal ambiguity and tested these frequent assertions with large samples of government organizations. We develop measures of four dimensions of goal ambiguity: mission comprehension ambiguity, directive goal ambiguity, evaluative goal ambiguity, and priority goal ambiguity. Confirming hypotheses developed from the literature on public organizations, the last three variables show relations to organizational age, financial publicness (proportion of funding from government allocations), competing demands, policy problem complexity, and regulatory status. The success of the measures of goal ambiguity demonstrates the feasibility of measuring the concept and conducting empirical tests of observations that are often repeated without such testing, and will support further theoretical and methodological development of this important topic. In the literature on the distinctive characteristics of public organizations and their management, the most frequently repeated observation concerns the greater vagueness of their goals, as compared to the goals of private business firms, and the greater difficulty that public organizations face in assessing goal achievement (e.g., Allison 1983; Dahl and Lindblom 1953; Downs 1967; Drucker 1980; Lowi 1979; Lynn 1981; Wildavsky 1979; Wilson 1989). Although scholars and expert observers further contend that this goal ambiguity has many serious consequences, mostly dysfunctional ones, conceptual analysis and empirical research on the topic have been quite limited. We present a new way to conceptualize and measure organizational goal ambiguity and then test a set of propositions about the construct’s relation to variables that we hypothesize to be antecedent to it, using data on a sample of 115 U.S. federal agencies. We suggest a definition of organizational goal ambiguity and introduce four dimensions of the construct. These are mission comprehension ambiguity (How understandable is the mission statement?), directive goal ambiguity (measured by a ‘‘rules to law’’ ratio), evaluative goal ambiguity (as indicated by a coding scheme for the agencies’ performance