Person:

Kelman, Steven

One of the most-pervasive debates in literature on managing people is whether using “hard” or “soft” approaches produces better organizational performance -- those seeking to influence behavior by pressuring or by nurturing. This paper examines this question in the context of a cross-organizational collaboration in English local government between police, probation, social work, and other organizations designed to reduce crime. Using a survey to gather data about cultural features of these collaborations and actual crime data, we find interaction effects between the joint presence of “hard” and “soft” cultural features in explaining crime reduction. Taking a phrase from pop psychology, it appears that cultures characterized by “tough love” perform better than those with only “hard” or “soft” features by themselves. We suggest that further research be conducted surrounding the relationship of the “tough love” construct to organizational performance.

How are senior government executives who attempt to execute an ambitious vision requiring significant strategic change in their organizations able to succeed? How do they go about formulating a strategy in the first place? What managerial and leadership techniques do they use to execute their strategy? In this paper, these questions are examined by comparing (so as to avoid the pitfalls of “best practices” research) management and leadership behaviors of a group of agency leaders from the Clinton and Bush administrations identified by independent experts as having been successful at executing an ambitious strategy with a control group consisting of those the experts identified as having tried but failed at significant strategic change, along with counterparts to the successes, who had the same position as they in a different administration. We find a number of differentiators (such as using strategic planning, monitoring performance metrics, reorganizing, and having a smaller number of goals), while other techniques either were not commonly used or failed to differentiate (such as establishing accountability systems or appeals to public service motivation). We find that agencies that the successes led had significantly lower percentages of political appointees than the average agency in the government. One important finding is that failures seem to have used techniques recommended specifically for managing transformation or change as frequently as successes did, so use of such techniques does not differentiate successes from failures. However, failures (and counterparts) used techniques associated with improving general organizational performance less than successes.

Debates over the role of government — often phrased as “big government” vs. “limited government” — are at the center of our political life. We debate the government’s role in health care and in regulating the environment. We debate levels of taxation. Yet there are crucial benefits of government that should be appreciated whether you are a person who thinks of yourself as liking government or not. These benefits come about because government has created an environment where we can in our everyday lives normally take the reliability and trustworthiness of others for granted. We flag down a taxi on the street, get into the driver’s car, and don’t worry this stranger might kidnap us. We walk on a sidewalk, and do not worry it will buckle beneath us. We drive a car, and do not worry the brakes won’t work. These are the unnoticed benefits of government, which we notice no more than a fish notices it is swimming in water.

Senior government executives make many decisions, not-infrequently difficult ones. Cognitive limitations and biases preclude individuals from making fully value-maximizing choices. And the “groupthink” tradition has highlighted ways group-aided decision-making can fail to live up to its potential. Out of this literature has emerged a prescriptive paradigm Janis calls “vigilant decision-making.” For this paper, we interviewed twenty heads of subcabinet-level organizations in the U.S. federal government, asking each questions about how they made important decisions. Ten were nominated by “good-government” experts as ones doing an outstanding job improving the organization’s performance, ten chosen at random. The vigilant decision-making approach is designed for difficult decisions, presumed to be informationally, technically, or politically complex. However, we found that when we asked these executives to discuss their most difficult decision, most identified decisions that were not informationally complex but instead mainly required courage to make. In this context, the vigilant decision-making paradigm might be more problematic than the literature suggests. We discuss here the different demands for decisions involving complexity and those involving courage, and suggest a contingency model of good decision-making processes that requires executives and advisors to be ambidextrous in their approaches.

Senior government executives make many decisions, not-infrequently difficult ones. Cognitive limitations and biases preclude individuals from making fully value-maximizing choices. It has been suggested that, done properly, involving advisors or other outside information sources can compensate for individual-level limitations. However, the “groupthink” tradition has highlighted ways group-aided decision-making can fail to live up to its potential. Out of this literature has emerged a paradigm Janis calls “vigilant problem-solving.” For this paper, we interviewed twenty heads of subcabinet-level organizations in the U.S. federal government, asking each questions about how they made important decisions. Ten were nominated by “good-government” experts as ones doing an outstanding job improving the organization’s performance, ten chosen at random. Our research question was to see whether there were significant differences in how members of those two groups made decisions, specifically, to what extent executives in the two categories used a “vigilant” decision-making process. We found, however, that similarities between the two groups of executives overwhelmed differences: at least as best as we were able to measure it, decision-making by U.S. subcabinet executives tracks vigilant decision-making recommendations fairly closely. The similarity suggests a common style of senior-level decision-making in the U.S. federal government, which we suggest grows out of a government bureaucracy’s methodical culture. We did, however, develop evidence for a difference between outstanding executives and others on another dimension of decision- making style. Outstanding executives valued decisiveness in decision-making – a “bias for action” – more than controls. Perhaps, then, what distinguishes outstanding executives from others is not vigilance but decisiveness. Contrary to the implications of the groupthink literature, the danger in government may be “paralysis by analysis” as much or more than groupthink.

This report discusses four issues with regard to government procurement in South Africa. These are: (1) contracting for municipal infrastructure delivery, (2) public-private partnerships (PPP’s), (3) large capex procurements in Transnet and Eskom, and (4) the DPE “Competitive Supplier Development Program.” Recommendations are made in each area. For example, for municipal infrastructure delivery, the report recommends that municipalities rated by National Treasury as “poor” in terms of capacity would continue to receive municipal funding from national government, and to determine priorities for local infrastructure spending, but they would no longer be allowed to contract for delivery of these services. Instead, they would be required to use either a sector-specific national organization or another national organization willing to provide the services in question. Regarding PPP’s, the report suggests that, although there are reasons for concern about this approach, on balance South Africa should consider expanding use of PPP’s, which often provide better quality, a pre-commitment to maintenance spending, and another remedy against corruption. Recommendations in other areas involving procurement are made as well.

Little empirical work exists measuring if interagency collaborations delivering public services produce better outcomes, and none looking inside the black box at collaboration management practices. We examine whether there are collaboration management practices associated with improved performance of Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships, a crossagency collaboration in England and Wales. These exist in every local authority in England and Wales, so there are enough of them to permit quantitative analysis. And their aim is crime reduction, and crime data over time are available, allowing actual results (rather than perceptions or self-reports) to be analyzed longitudinally. We find that there are management practices associated with greater success at reducing crime, mostly exhibited through interaction effects such that the practice in question is effective in some circumstances but not others. Our findings support the arguments of those arguing that effective management of collaborations is associated with tools for managing any organization, not ones unique to managing collaborations: if you want to be a good collaboration manager, you should be a good manager, period.