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Outcome based policies promote the use performance accountability models. However, the impact these policies have on the ethical culture of public sector organizations has not been adequately assessed. This research examines performance accountability reforms by examining the City of Atlanta’s implementation of federal and state performance policie...
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... Public administration scholars have extensively explored two aspects of organizational scandals. The first line of research focuses on inside stories to investigate the main causes of organizational scandals (e.g., Eikenberry et al., 2007;Molina, 2018;Mujkic & Klingner, 2019;Nelson & Afonso, 2019;Patrick et al., 2018;Schneider, 2005). The second line of literature explores the effects of scandals on trust in government and government officials (Bowler & Karp, 2004;Solé-Ollé & Sorribas-Navarro, 2018;Wang, 2016;Zhang & Kim, 2018), government reform (Bozeman & Anderson, 2016;Grimmelikhuijsen & Snijders, 2016;Rauh, 2016), and public financing (Liu & Mikesell, 2019;Liu et al., 2021;Liu et al., 2017). ...
Public administration scholars have extensively explored organizational scandals through two lenses: (1) inside stories of organizational scandals examining the main causes of scandals and (2) the effects of scandals on trust in government, trust in governmental officials, and public financing. Yet, we know little about how organizational scandals affect government employees' work attitudes. Understanding how public employees react to organizational scandals deserves scholarly attention because public employees not only execute their agencies' key functions and programs but are involved in actively addressing the orga-nization's failures. To address this gap, we apply a quasi-experimental approach using the 2014 Department of Veterans Affairs waitlist scandal, with a specific focus on the effects of the scandal on employee job satisfaction and perceived organizational attractiveness. Empirical results using the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey from 2011 to 2017 show that the organizational scandal had a negative effect on both outcomes.
... Experimental studies have also demonstrated that, when confronted by challenging performance goals, subjects tend to overstate their productivity more than when confronted with the "do your best" stimulus (Welsh & Ordóñez, 2014). Furthermore, the achievement of too ambitious goals and/or excessively high stakes may conduce to opportunistic behavior (Madaus & Clarke, 2001;Patrick et al., 2018). ...
... Nonetheless, as noted by Amrein-Beardsley et al. (2010, p. 5), a high pressure to perform might induce a person "to engage in practices that ordinarily are not typical of that person." As performance pressure tends to be conceived as the main driver of cheating in public accountability systems (Patrick et al., 2018), it has been generally assumed that the higher the stakes, the higher the likelihood that school actors will engage in non-desired behaviors such as cheating (e.g., Ferrer-Esteban, 2013;Nichols & Berliner, 2005). According to Nichols and Berliner (2005), cheating would be even "inevitable" when the stakes are high. ...
Under test-based accountability, side-effects-including practices to inflate test results, often seen as cheating-are usually associated to so-called high-stakes policies. However, the influence of different types of stakes in the generation of this type of practices has been overlooked in education research. Based on a survey experiment, our results indicate that the type and level of stakes of accountability systems (e.g., high-vs. low-stakes, material vs. symbolic) do not differ in triggering side-effects. Counterintuitively, individual symbolic consequences trigger similar reactions among teachers than material incentives. In-depth interviews give insights into the social mechanisms that lead to symbolic effects having such an influence in understanding teachers' reactivity to accountability.
... Hinnerich and Vlachos (2017) on Sweden), to outright cheating (e.g. Buckner and Hodges (2016) on Jordan and Morocco; Patrick et al. (2018) on Atlanta). Statistical analyses of assessment data have found answering patterns indicating test score manipulation in Sweden (Diamond and Persson, 2016), the US (Dee et al., 2019;Jacob and Levitt, 2003), southern Italy (Angrist et al., 2017), Mexico (Martinelli et al., 2018), India (Johnson and Parrado, 2020;Singh, 2020), Indonesia (Berkhout et al., 2020), and on a regional assessment of southern and eastern African countries (Gustafsson and Nuga Deliwe, 2017). ...
There is increasing interest in measuring management in schools. This paper discusses a popular measurement tool: the World Management Survey (WMS) for schools. Drawing on WMS data, secondary sources, and the recent literature on school management, we take stock of the WMS and make recommendations for its use in future research and policy. We conclude that the WMS remains a highly useful tool for its stated purpose—the standardized measurement of (a subset of) management practices within schools—and make two sets of recommendations. First, we encourage those seeking to benchmark management practices in schools to take a systems perspective by extending the WMS approach upwards into the education bureaucracy. Second, when measuring practices within schools, we recommend that researchers consider: how best to assess alignment across practices in the operations domain; the challenge of measuring student learning for monitoring and target-setting; and the context specificity of people management.
... The above assertions mirror the arguments about the tradeoff between accountability and performance, an area of long-standing interest for public administration scholars (Bovens et al., 2014;Dubnick, 2005;Halachmi, 2002;Jones & Bouckaert, 2017;Patrick et al., 2018;Yang, 2011). While accountability has been argued by its proponents as leading to greater transparency and openness (Schedler et al., 1999), expanding the opportunities for challenging abuses of authority (Elster, 2004), and improving the quality of government services (see Thompson & Riccucci, 1998), it has a darker side that dampens PA scholars' enthusiasm for it. ...
The public administration literature on the accountability-performance relationship depicts a mixed picture, with some studies arguing that accountability leads to a deterioration in performance and others finding that it leads to an improvement in performance. To reconcile this paradox and in response to recent calls for quantitative examination of the relationship in different contexts, we examine the impact of accountability on effectiveness in the context of policing, where some have suggested that accountability can have deleterious impacts on public and police officer safety. Using survey data and panel data modeling, we examine the impact of citizen oversight of police on two measures of effectiveness—the violent crime rate and line-of-duty homicides of police officers (HPOs). We find that while oversight with a broad scope of authority decreases the violent crime rate and HPOs, oversight with a narrow scope of authority leads to an increase in the violent crime rate. Our findings suggest that it is not merely the existence of an accountability mechanism that influences performance; instead, it is the scope of authority of an accountability mechanism that determines its impact.
... Most reporting on fraud and corruption in the charter school sector has been via the medium of the mainstream press. The Atlanta test-cheating case offers a unique perspective into charter sector expansion, as the recent research began to contextualize the events by clarifying the role of overlapping interests of the larger market-based educational reform movement, and the political and corporate elites that benefit from real estate development, gentrification, and charter school expansion in the city of Atlanta (Catalano & Gatti, 2017;DeBray, Hanley, Scott, & Lubienski, 2020;Freeman, 2015;Patrick, Plagens, Rollins, & Evans, 2018;Robinson & Simonton, 2019;Royal & Seriki, 2018). Scholars who analyzed media coverage of the investigation and the criminal prosecution of African-American educators demonstrated that "the specific interests of the educational reform movement and the corporations that benefit from it" (Catalano & Gatti, 2017, p. 59) and "the external dynamics of the metro Atlanta community" (Freeman, 2015(Freeman, , p. 1014 were absent in the narratives. ...
Charter school legislation permits new actors to compete for public funds to provide education to K-12 students across the United States. Proponents of market-oriented policies predict that privatization cuts costs and improves service quality, by removing bureaucracy and boosting creativity. These schools were predicted to become laboratories of innovation that would use their flexibility from state and local requirements to improve public education. This study suggests that the less regulated service systems may have also propagated an environment susceptible to managerial and accountability inadequacies, if not outright integrity violations and corruption. Using systematic document review and the existing literature on corruption in education, a typology of integrity violations and corruption in the charter school sector is developed in this paper. A better understanding of the characteristics of the institutional environment that enable corrupt behavior is necessary to develop effective strategies to prevent corruption, protect children, and manage public funds effectively.
... Most reporting on fraud and corruption in the charter school sector has been via the medium of the mainstream press. The Atlanta test-cheating case offers a unique perspective into charter sector expansion, as the recent research began to contextualize the events by clarifying the role of overlapping interests of the larger market-based educational reform movement, and the political and corporate elites that benefit from real estate development, gentrification, and charter school expansion in the city of Atlanta (Catalano & Gatti, 2017;DeBray, Hanley, Scott, & Lubienski, 2020;Freeman, 2015;Patrick, Plagens, Rollins, & Evans, 2018;Robinson & Simonton, 2019;Royal & Seriki, 2018). Scholars who analyzed media coverage of the investigation and the criminal prosecution of African-American educators demonstrated that "the specific interests of the educational reform movement and the corporations that benefit from it" (Catalano & Gatti, 2017, p. 59) and "the external dynamics of the metro Atlanta community" (Freeman, 2015(Freeman, , p. 1014 were absent in the narratives. ...
... While the aforementioned research enhances our understanding of how performance information regarding public bureaucracies affects the attitudes of citizens and public employees, we still know very little about how performance information regarding public sector professions affects the attitudes of citizens and public employees. This represents an important gap in the literature, given that the performance of some public sector professions, namely public school teachers and police officers, are the subject of significant public discourse, and it is thus important to assess the impact of that discourse (Jacobsen & Saultz, 2016;Patrick, Plagens, Rollins, & Evans, 2018). ...
Despite an increase in research on how performance information regarding public agencies affects citizens’ evaluations of public agencies, we know very little about how performance information regarding public employees affects citizens’ evaluations of public employees and public employees themselves. This represents an important gap in the literature, given that judgments are made about whole public sector professions−not just about government bureaucracies. This article features two experiments. The first experiment assesses the effects of positive and negative perceptions regarding teacher performance on citizens’ support for public school teachers along five dimensions. The second experiment assesses the effects of negative perceptions regarding teacher performance on the morale of public school teachers themselves along six dimensions. We find that positive perceptions regarding teacher performance does not affect the attitudes of citizens or public school teachers along the dimensions that we studied. Negative perceptions regarding teacher performance, however, affected citizens’ attitudes toward three outcomes: support for teacher tenure, the likelihood that respondents' would recommend a career as a public school teacher, and respondents perceived prestige of a career as a public school teacher. Negative perceptions regarding teacher performance affected one outcome for public school teachers; their perceptions regarding the prestige of the profession.
Public agent (un)ethical behavior or ethical leadership has been a topic of interest as well as a hot debate in terms of “bounded ethicality” in complex organizations. This article extends the study of public agents’ (rule-breaking) unbureaucratic behaviors with three contributions:1) employee empowerment is used as an organizational factor affecting public agents’ rule-breaking behaviors; 2) an agency-level panel dataset comes from three different sources; 3) panel data analysis and structural equation model are applied. The results imply that policy makers and HR manager should recognize the possibility of negative unintended consequences of over-empowerment or excessive discretion practices in public organization.
Organisational culture is assumed to be a key factor in large-scale and avoidable institutional failures (e.g. accidents, corruption). Whilst models such as “ethical culture” and “safety culture” have been used to explain such failures, minimal research has investigated their ability to do so, and a single and unified model of the role of culture in institutional failures is lacking. To address this, we systematically identified case study articles investigating the relationship between culture and institutional failures relating to ethics and risk management (n = 74). A content analysis of the cultural factors leading to failures found 23 common factors and a common sequential pattern. First, culture is described as causing practices that develop into institutional failure (e.g. poor prioritisation, ineffective management, inadequate training). Second, and usually sequentially related to causal culture, culture is also used to describe the problems of correction: how people, in most cases, had the opportunity to correct a problem and avert failure, but did not take appropriate action (e.g. listening and responding to employee concerns). It was established that most of the cultural factors identified in the case studies were consistent with survey-based models of safety culture and ethical culture. Failures of safety and ethics also largely involve the same causal and corrective factors of culture, although some aspects of culture more frequently precede certain outcome types (e.g. management not listening to warnings more commonly precedes a loss of human life). We propose that the distinction between causal and corrective culture can form the basis of a unified (combining both ethical and safety culture literatures) and generalisable model of organisational failure.
