Summary of the book Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, Fifth Edition by Rainey, Hal G. Summary is completely written in English.
Book is used in courses related to the management of public organizations.
Chapter 12 can be seen as a bit short but I felt like most information in there...
1. The challenge of effective public organization and management
Organizational Behavior
Focuses on individual and group behavior in organizations through:
● Analyzing motivation
● Work satisfaction
● Leadership
● work-group dynamics
● attitude & behavior of members of the organization.
Organizational Theory
Focuses on topics that concern the whole organization such as:
● Organizational environments
● goals & effectiveness
● Strategy
● Decision making
● Change & innovation
● Structure & design
The generic tradition:
The analysis and practice of such functions as leading, organizing, motivating, planning and
strategy making, evaluating effectiveness, and communication.
Public vs private organizations according to economists
Economists analyzing public bureaucracy emphasize that there is an absence of markets for
the outputs of public organizations.
Due to this absence they conclude that public organizations are more bureaucratic,
inefficient, change-resistant, and susceptible to political influence than private firms.
Effective public management
Doig & Hargrove argue that public bureaucracies perform better than is often acknowledged.
Government organizations need continued evaluation into their performance.
→ Does it perform well?
→ Why does it perform well?
→ Why is it not performing well?
,Ineffective public management
It is argued that public managers often fail to:
● Engage and motivate their subordinates
● to effectively design their organizations and work processes.
Public managers both elected and appointed face:
● Short terms in office
● Complex laws and rules constraining what they can and cannot change
● intense external political pressure
● amateurism
elected public managers face problems with:
● Lack of managerial experience
● Their managerial skills going against what experts advice
● political showmanship - securing reelection.
unelected public managers face problems with:
- Being heavily restrained by their leaders.
- Little room for authority
The challenge of sustained attention and analysis:
● Management involves paradoxes that require organizations and managers to
balance conflicting objectives and priorities. Public management often involves
particularly complex objectives and especially difficult conflicts among them.
● General management and organization concepts can be applied to public
organizations, for this it's important to take into account the unique aspects of public
organizations.
, 2. Understanding the study of organizations: A historical review
Theories and experts over the years have moved from highly bureaucratized organizations
to flexible organic organizations.
Organic flexible organizations:
Humans tend to change their behavior based on various inputs in order to adapt to their
environment.
Frederick Taylor and Scientific management (taylorism)/classic theory - the one best
way
● Scientific management movement
● Advocates for the use of systematic analysis (time motion) to design efficient
procedures for work tasks (high specialization & task simplification)
● Workers should be rewarded for efficiency through increasing pay. Taylor sees salary
as the highest motivator
critics:
- inhumanity and underestimation of psychological and social influences on worker
morale and productivity.
- oversimplified the needs of humans in the workplace
Weber: Bureaucracy as an ideal construct
A movement away from authority based tradition (monarchical power) and towards legal and
rational forms of authority.
Bureaucracy according to weber:
1. Specialization of labor
2. a formal set of rules and regulations
3. well-defined hierarchy within organizations
4. impersonality in the application of rules
Webers view: qualified career officials, structured hierarchy, and clear rule-based
specifications of duties and procedures, treating clients without favoritism, officials picked on
the basis of merit instead of birthright/favoritism, constraining bureaucrats power through
rules.
,Administrative management school :
● Sought to develop ‘principles of administration’ that could provide guidelines for
effective organization in all types of organizations. Emphasis on specialization and
hierarchical control.
○ Division of work: Division on the basis of task requirements, geographical
location, or interdependency in the work process.
○ Coordination of work: Work units coordinated through other principles:
● Span of control: A supervisor should control 5-10 subordinates
● One master: Report back to one superior
● Technical efficiency: Grouped together for maximum technical
efficiency
● The Scalar Principle: Authority based on hierarchy
Hawthorne studies
Places importance on social and psychological factors in the workplace: Work-group
experience, sense of importance, the feeling of attention and concern from the supervisor,
and the work environment (simple things like room illumination)
Human relations school
Builds further on Hawthorne's studies and the importance of social and psychological factors
in motivating workers.
Maslow - The needs hierarchy
Maslow argued that human needs fall into a hierarchy when the first one is fulfilled then the
next one should be looked at.
1. Psychological needs(Food, Freedom from extremes)
2. Safety and security
3. love and belonging
4. self esteem
5. self actualization. (= Need to fulfill one’s own potential).
McGregor - Theories X and Y
Building on Maslow, McGregor argues that management in industry is guided by theory X =
workers are passive and without motivation → management needs to take complete control
in motivating and directing them. Workers should be motivated through Theory Y which
implies higher order motives and worker capacity for self motivation/direction drawing on
Maslow's principles.
- Job enrichment
- management by objectives
- participative decision making
- improved performance evaluation
Lewin: Social psychology and group dynamics
Did research in the influence of different types of leaders in groups and the influence of
group members attitudes and behaviors on other members.
- Social psychology
- Group dynamics movement
- Involving workers in decision making
- using group processes for personal and organizational development.
, ● Chester Barnard and herbert Simon
○ Chester Barnard
■ → Functions of the executive
■ An organization is an economy of incentives, in which the executive
must obtain resources to use in providing incentives for members to
participate and cooperate
● Organization Sociology and bureaucratic dysfunction
● Following the tradition of Weber, sociologists began studying characteristics of
organization and bureaucracies.
○ Merton: Bureaucratic Structures and Member personalities
■ Bureaucratic characteristics as observed by Weber could lead to bad
or dysfunctional conditions when they interacted with human
characteristics such as personality.
■ Setting up specific procedures and rules leads to trained incapacity,
the inability to react to the unexpected.
○ V. Thompson: Bureau Pathology
■ → Members of an office can become overly concerned with protecting
their own authority leading to impersonal relations with clients and
other members of the organization
○ Selznick: Leadership and Institutionalization
■ Analyzed the way in which organizations and their leaderships
develop relationships with external environments, through processes
as co-optation or drawing external groups into the decision-making
process.
Organizational behavior and organizational psychology
■ Extensive research has led to the creation of extensive theory on
topics such as the psychology of individuals in organizations, work
motivation, and work related attitudes such as:
● Job satisfaction
● Leadership
● Group processes in organizations
■ The group dynamics movement contributed to the developing of:
● Organization development.
● providing an understanding of human:
○ Human behavior
○ Psychology in organization
○ Organization theory and design (p73)
■ Adaptive Systems and Contingency Theory
● This perspective regards organizations as being varied in their
characteristics because of their needs to adapt to the
conditions they face.
● examples of Influential adaptive system and
contingency-theory studies and analyses:
○ Burns and Stalker showed that the type of
management structure depends on the type of
company.
■ Stable and predictable firms → classic
bureaucratic
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