Organizational Performance and Multiple Constituencies

Abstract

Agency performance represents ongoing results of public organizational processes. Evaluating it has long been a central concern of public administration, in part because it is primary means of judging consistency of agency decisions with policy mandates, and in part because it provides principal way to observe how agencies satisfy diverse public needs in a plural society. In short, organizational performance is a basis for measuring agency accountability and reflects who gets represented more and who less in organization's complex allocation of public resources. Most of literature on performance, however, is disappointing. On whole, it does not incorporate some important realizations about how intergovernmental relations have changed in response to scarce (even nonexistent) resources and how agency constituencies need to be defined for a more competitive plural society. To wit, public agencies have operated for more than a decade under severe fiscal constraints brought on by taxpayer revolts, resulting in continued budget crises, service interruptions, and indecisive planning. For purpose of bringing cost savings and multiple perspectives to bear on these stubborn issues, response has been to take formerly loose-coupled agencies and make them parts of overlapping systems of planning and coproduction. Being especially visible at metropolitan level, we see cases of this where specific problems become joint responsibility of a set of agencies brought together by problem's overlapping reach into their respective jurisdictions. Take, for example, multiple and simultaneous effects of homeless on police, transit, and health services. The new realities have also meant a reallocation of resources away from fragmented entitlement programs and toward cooperative agency investments in regional economic development. The joint venture between City of San Antonio, Bexar County, and VIA (the regional transit authority) to build and operate Alamodome is an illustration of shift. Hence, agencies find themselves in a metapolicy' environment (Gustafsson, 1983) where they must consider policy making from several perspectives and design programs and services in light of their overlapping impacts (positive and negative) on each other. Such a setting involves widely varying but interdependent views on agency performance. In mass transit, for example, taxpayers expect use of quantitative business methods to yield more efficient operations. In conflict with this, other constituencies compel transit agencies to make policies consistent with nontransit service demands such as cooperative land-use planning, retrofitting for handicapped, providing de facto homeless shelters, and cost sharing of urban development projects of indirect value to transit. This metapolicy dash and others like it in education, water resources, health, and other areas bring us to realize how dicy agency performance evaluation has become from any single perspective. But it raises a second realization as well. Much of our current understanding about agency performance hinges on a singular dedication to the client. Probably influenced by literature on excellence (Peters and Waterman, 1982), many have lost sight of fact that a public organization has many different and frequently competing constituencies or stakeholders. Beside clients (who may be multiple and conflicting, there are also taxpayers, agency's service delivery workers, its executive managers, operations managers, and other groups having a derivative stake in agency's organizational processes. Their needs must be addressed as well if democratic administration is to be viable in an increasingly diverse society. Performance: Overlooking Multiple-Constituencies The metapolicy environment and this enlarged notion of constituencies are serious developments for those seeking to determine how well public organizations perform. …