Results-oriented Management Research Articles

The Political Economy of Results-Oriented Management in the “Neoadministrative State”

To comply with the precepts of today’s neoadministrative state, public managers are routinely pressed by elected officials to become results-oriented, customer-focused, and partnership-seeking service deliverers. The magnitude of the cultural change involved has frequently proved daunting at all levels of government in the United States. Although much remains unclear about the prudence and prospects of such cultural-reform efforts, researchers are gradually discerning the political economy of the efforts and challenges they pose to effectiveness and to public accountability. In the process, they are finding how critical the approaches taken in the early stages of cultural reform are to their ultimate success or failure. To advance practice and research on this topic, this article chronicles and analyzes the first 3 years of a critical case study of results-driven, customer-focused, and partnership-oriented cultural change in the Department of Health and Human Services in Montgomery County, Maryland. Identified are nine critical choices made during those years that sorely complicated progress, the flaws in underlying causal theories that spawned these problems, and the challenges to, and opportunities for advancing, accountability that reformers can expect and that researchers can profitably pursue.

The Question of Accountability in Historical Perspective

Grassroots ecosystem management (GREM), and the reinventing government movement, more generally, suggest that the American polity is on the verge of redefining a broadly acceptable system of democratic accountability. The problem is: What does an effective system of accountability look like in a world of decentralized governance, shared power, collaborative decision processes, results-oriented management, and broad civic participation? This article examines how the theory of accountability has been reconfigured to fit the new paradigm for governance and places accountability in historical context to gain perspective for contemporary discussions of bureaucracy in a democracy. It finds that the conceptualization of democratic accountability varies dramatically over time. The Jacksonian, Progressives/New Deal, public-interest-egalitarian, neoconservative efficiency, and GREM models are all distinct conceptualizations of accountability. Each emphasizes different institutions and locates the authority for accountability in differing combinations and types of sectors (public, private, intermediary), processes, decision rules, knowledge, and values.

Performance Measurement in Municipal Government: Assessing the State of the Practice

Performance measurement has been part of the lexicon of public administration in the United States for several decades, but rhetoric has outdistanced practice by far in this area. Currently, however, there is a renewed interest in performance measures as an essential element of the results-oriented management movement that is sweeping the field, as reflected in legislative mandates and administrative initiatives as well as considerable conference and training activity and a revived stream of books and articles on the subject. Nevertheless, the extent to which performance measurement has taken hold in a meaningful way in public agencies is still an open question, particularly with respect to local government. Based on a survey of U.S. cities with populations of 25,000 and over, this article explores the extent to which performance measures are used and how they are used in contemporary municipal government. The Quest For Performance Measurement Performance measurement is an old idea that has taken on renewed importance. Measuring workload and worker efficiency was clearly part of the scientific management approach at the turn of the century, and the International City Management Association produced a publication on measuring municipal activities as early as 1943 (Ridley and Simon, 1943). In more modern times concern for measuring the performance of public programmatic entities arose with the interest in program budgeting in the 1960s and program evaluation in the 1970s. Harry Hatry and colleagues at the Urban Institute began publishing materials that promoted the use of performance measures and provided instruction on how to develop and use them (Hatry and Fisk, 1971; Waller, et al., 1976; Hatry, et al., 1977), while other authors talked about how to incorporate them in larger management processes (Altman, 1979; Epstein, 1984; Steiss, 1985; Wholey, 1983). A related but different stream of articles focused on performance measures as they play into the budgeting process (Grizzle, 1985; 1987; Brown and Pyers, 1988). Yet it has generally been understood that the promise and potential of performance measures greatly exceed their actual usefulness in practice. Indeed, one of the underlying premises of Downs and Larkey's The Search for Government Efficiency (1986) was that for a variety of reasons most governmental jurisdictions did not have the capability of measuring the performance of their programs. Performance Measurement in an Era of Public Management Reform A number of forces in the field of public administration have led to a renewed, or reinvigorated, interest in performance measurement in the 1990s. Taxpayer revolts, pressure for the privatization of public services, legislative initiatives aimed at controlling runaway spending, and the devolution of many responsibilities to lower levels of government have generated increased demands to hold government agencies accountable to legislatures and the public in terms of what they spend and the results they produce. In addition, the reinventing government movement initiated by Osborne and Gaebler in 1992 and Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review in 1993 have called for a new way of thinking about how public agency performance is defined and measured. Driven in part by these external pressures and in part by their own motivation to provide cost-effective public services, public managers have been using a variety of approaches to strengthen the management capacity of their organizations, most notably through strategic planning (Bryson, 1995; Berry and Wechsler, 1995), through more encompassing strategic management processes (Eadie, 1989; Koteen, 1991; Vinzant and Vinzant, 1996), through quality management programs and reengineering processes (Berman and West, 1995; Cohen and Brand, 1993; Davenport, 1994; Hyde, 1995; Kravchuck and Leighton, 1993), and through benchmarking practices (Bruder, 1994; Keehley, et al. 1997), as well as reformed budgeting processes (Joyce, 1993; Lee, 1997). …

Strategic Management in the Public Sector: Concepts, Models, and Processes

Lffective public administration in the age of results-oriented management requires public agencies to develop a capacity for strategic management, the central management process that integrates all major activities and functions and directs them toward advancing an organization's strategic agenda. Strategic management is concerned with strengthening the long-term viability and effectiveness of public sector organizations in terms of both substantive policy and management capacity. It integrates all other management processes to provide a systematic, coherent, and effective approach to establishing, attaining, monitoring, and updating an agency's strategic objectives. Strategic management is integrative in nature in the sense of (a) focusing attention across functional divisions and throughout various organizational levels on common goals, themes, and issues; (b) tying internal management processes and program initiatives to desired outcomes in the external environment; and (c) linking operational? tactical, day-to-day decisions to longer run strategic objectives. Particularly given the dynamic political and institutional environment within which many public agencies operate, an effective strategic management capability is essential for maintaining or strengthening the fit between the organization and its external stakeholders and managing for results within a clearly defined context of mission, mandates, values, and . . vlslon. Strategic management has been addressed in the public administration literature (Koteen, 1989; Nutt & Backoff, 1992; Rabin, Miller, & Hildreth, 1989; Steiss, 1985) but by no means as extensively as has its most critical component, strategic planning, or other management approaches such as total quality management. However, a more recent article by Mlnzant and Vlnzant (1996a) goes a long way toward refocusing appropriate attention on the role of strategic management in the public sector and discussing implementation issues and strategies in an instructive manner. The purpose of the present article is to raise awareness of the central importance of strategic management in government, define the critical elements in a holistic model of strategic management, discuss the strategic management process, and

A Proper Mentality for Benchmarking

The public sector has come a long way in measuring performance and managing for results, but there is much still to do. Delving even modestly into the history of public management yields the discovery that performance measurement and related management initiatives have been encouraged for many years. In that respect, it has been a long haul. The seemingly slow pace, however, should not blind us to the progress that has been made. Consider changes that have occurred over the last 25 years in attitudes toward government performance or even the possibility of creditable performance by the public sector. In the 1970s a lot of people considered government productivity to be an oxymoron, about as illogical as word pairs like alone together, peace offensive, or fresh prunes. Some wisecracking pundits even likened government productivity to the Loch Ness monster. There were occasional sightings reported, they said, but nothing confirmed. In the 1970s and early 1980s, it was difficult to generate much interest in performance of two or more government units. We are unique! government officials said of their organization and its environment. Our conditions are different; our service demands are different (usually meaning greater than the demands faced by any of our counterparts); comparison would be meaningless. As great as resistance was to intergovernmental performance comparison, there was even less interest in trying to adapt private sector practices. Impractical! proponents of adaptation were told. Naive! they were called. Notable Progress As the century draws to a close, optimism is evident among recent converts to the measure-monitor-and-improve school of public service as well as among veterans of that movement. More than 700 people from all levels of government gathered in Austin, Texas, in 1998 for the third in a series of conferences dedicated to celebrating the successes of results-oriented management in the public sector, even as they challenged each other to more. The Loch Ness comparisons have faded. The sightings of government productivity are more frequent--and they are confirmed. Government agencies have established performance standards, many of which are directed toward meeting the expectations of service recipients, and service has improved in documentable ways. Governments themselves are more receptive to performance comparisons, if they are done Reasons for this newfound receptivity are not certain, but two explanations are plausible. One possibility is that government officials eventually resigned themselves to the inevitability of cross-unit comparisons. News reporters love per capita expenditure comparisons--crude as such comparisons are and devoid as they are of any sensitivity to differences among governments in the scope or quality of services, much less any differences in cost-accounting systems. If comparisons are inevitable, some government officials may have said, let's see if we can them properly. By declaring their intention to do them properly, these officials announce their resolve to report differences in the quality of service among governments and rectify accounting disparities in calculating unit costs of service delivery. A second possibility is that government officials had their eyes opened by the corporate experience in benchmarking. Among the pioneers in the benchmarking movement were Motorola, IBM, ATT but none of these pioneers enjoys a more prominent role in that history than does the Xerox Corporation. In perhaps the most repeated story in benchmarking lore, Xerox confronted its own unsatisfactory performance in product warehousing and distribution. It did so not by employing the then-conventional methods of process revision or redesign, but instead by identifying the organization it considered to be the very at warehousing and distribution, in hopes that best practices could be adapted from the exemplar's model. …

The Changing Nature of Accountability: The Role of the Inspector General in Federal Agencies

Federal managers are currently changing the way they business in response to a variety of initiatives from both the executive and legislative branches. Signals from the White House contained in the National Performance Review (1993) and from the Congress in the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 call for managers to focus on programmatic results rather than procedural guidelines as they steer their programs. With the relatively new emphasis at the federal level on results-oriented management, the role of program review and accountability mechanisms also requires reconsideration. The National Performance Review calls upon managers to do more with less, to put customers first, and to identify ways to minimize procedural obstacles to pursuing results. The Office of Management and Budget, also in the executive office, has pressed the agencies to provide measures of performance with their FY 1996 and FY 1997 budgetary submissions. The Government Performance and Results Act calls upon managers to formulate both strategic and performance plans, monitor program delivery by tracking performance indicators, and assess policy and program outcomes. In response to the many executives and legislative initiatives, managers and a host of consultants have been working to identify ways to serve customers better and measure performance. The Jury is still out, however, regarding how managers, or any of the oversight bodies, are truly using these measures of performance in making resource allocation decisions (Newcomer, 1995). The related, as yet unanswered question is: how will managers be held accountable for results? Ronald Moe, among other critics, has questioned the impact that these initiatives have upon lines of statutory authority and responsibility (1994). Moe points out that the entrepreneurial management paradigm underlying the National Performance Review calls for measuring success by customer satisfaction and for valuing flexibility to facilitate change without fear of procedural constraints (114). In fact, the revisions in managerial freedom raise questions about accountability and how traditional oversight mechanisms will be used to hold program managers accountable. Both the National Performance Review and the Government Performance and Results Act call for managerial waivers from traditional regulations to help entrepreneurial managers as they strive to demonstrate performance accountability rather than procedural accountability. Focus of This Study The federal oversight offices of interest in this study are those of the inspector general. These offices are unique among oversight entities in that they were created by statute (The Inspector General Act of 1978 and the Inspector General Act Amendments of 1988) to be independent of either executive or legislative political influence. The inspectors general are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, report directly to the head of their host department and agency, and keep Congress and their agency head fully informed of any problems and deficiencies found in program delivery. The mission of the offices of inspector general, as spelled out in the original statute, is to: * Conduct and supervise independent and objective audits and investigations relating to agency programs and operations. * Promote economy, effectiveness, and efficiency within the agency. * Prevent and detect fraud, waste, and abuse in agency programs and operations. * Review and make recommendations regarding existing and proposed legislation and regulations relating to agency programs and operations. * Keep the agency head and the Congress fully and currently informed of problems in agency programs and operations. The first report issued by the National Performance Review specifically mentioned the offices of inspector general. In 1993, the first National Performance Review volume of recommendations asked the inspector general's offices to broaden the focus of the inspectors general from strict compliance auditing to evaluating management control systems (31). …

MBO in Municipal Government: Variations on a Traditional Management Tool

Management By Objectives, or MBO, is a traditional management approach to directing the efforts of managers and the organizational units for which they are responsible. This technique has been used in government for more than 20 years, and substantial literature has accumulated affirming its utility. Yet, the history of MBO in the public sector has been uneven, and its role and importance in government are unclear. It is frequently criticized as being ineffective or counterproductive, and it often seems to be undervalued by the academic and professional public administration communities. In this article, we seek to clarify these issues at one level of government, focusing on how municipal managers use MBO and how they assess its impact. MBO is intended to motivate stronger performance on the part of managers and employees through goal setting, participative decision making, and objective feedback (Rodgers and Hunter, 1992). In its broadest construction, it is seen as a planning and control system which is designed to encourage self-control over an individual's work while assuring that managers' efforts are aligned with the organization's overall goals and priorities. According to Swiss (1991), the heart of a full-fledged MBO process is the negotiation between a higher level manager and a subordinate manager of a performance contract that has the following components: (1) major objectives to be accomplished by the subordinate manager within specified completion dates, (2) resource commitments to support these objectives, (3) action plans and milestones for accomplishing these objectives, (4) periodic meetings of the manager and subordinate to review progress and make midcourse corrections if necessary, and (5) an assessment at the end of the MBO cycle of the subordinate's performance, which should feed into both personnel appraisal processes and MBO planning for the next cycle. Swiss characterizes MBO as being particularly useful for providing direction and control over project oriented agencies where workloads shift and priorities tend to change frequently, as opposed to another major management approach, performance monitoring, which may be more appropriate for managing the continuing operations of organizations whose outputs are relatively stable. Evolution of Public Sector MBO MBO originated as a business management technique in the 1920s and was implemented on a widespread basis in the private sector during the 1950s and 1960s as it became popularized by the writings of Peter Drucker (1954 and 1964) and others. It was introduced in the federal government by the business-oriented Nixon administration in the early 1970s (Brady, 1973; Malek, 1974). MBO was instituted first in several large executive departments and then on a government-wide basis in the form of presidential MBO intended to help the White House gain control over the federal bureaucracy. However, this latter effort was quickly overtaken by the Watergate crisis, the ensuing demise of the Nixon administration, and the installation of Zero Base Budgeting by the Carter administration as the central tool for managing the federal government. Nonetheless, individual MBO systems have been retained or modified by a number of federal departments including Defense, Health & Human Services (Swiss, 1983; Brumback, 1993), and Commerce (Collamore, 1989). Experimentation with MBO at the federal level spawned considerable interest in the approach (DeWoolfson, 1975; Morrisey, 1976), and MBO systems quickly spread to state and local governments (Odiorne, 1976; Moore and Staton, 1981). For example, several cities including San Francisco, Dayton, Ohio, and Charlotte, North Carolina, have been profiled as using MBO as an integral component of sustained results-oriented management strategies (Epstein, 1984). Mali (1986) examined the use of MBO by the city of Phoenix, Arizona, initiated in the early 1970s, and found that it is closely integrated with several other strategies including organization development, productivity improvement, and employee involvement programs. …

The use of long-range planning/MBO for hospital administrators.

If hospital administrators can use Long-Range Planning/MBO to determine the results expected of them, it will be a giant stride in the move from a crisis situation to a results-oriented management system.

Patterns of management by results: A new classification scheme

The labels that management writers sometimes place on their subjects can be confusing; the terms they use may or may not mean the same thing. The management by objectives programs in different companies are an example; there are five separate patterns of results-oriented management: task management, job management, man/job management, goal-oriented management, and accountability management. The author describes these patterns and their various elements. A manager who sees possibilities for improved effectiveness will be helped by being aware of the alternative levels of results-oriented management, the situations in which each is likely to be effective, and the built-in weaknesses.