Bert George- BSc Business Administration, MSc Strategic Management, PhD Applied Economics
- Full Professor at City University of Hong Kong
Bert George
- BSc Business Administration, MSc Strategic Management, PhD Applied Economics
- Full Professor at City University of Hong Kong
We just published the 6th edition of "Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations" (Wiley).
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89
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Introduction
Bert George is Full Professor of Strategic and Behavioral Public Management at the City University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on strategic planning and management, red tape and admin burden, and behavioral and neuro science in pubic policy. Previous tenured appointments were at Ghent University and Erasmus University Rotterdam. He has won awards from ASPA, EGPA, IRSPM, AOM, EURAM & CIRIEC. He is an editorial board member of PMR, PAR, ROPPA & IJPSM. He likes martial arts and good food.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
September 2019 - July 2022
August 2016 - September 2019
April 2016 - May 2016
Education
January 2013 - November 2016
September 2007 - September 2011
Publications
Publications (89)
Despite the widespread adoption of strategic management by public organizations, the effectiveness and nature of public strategic management is still debated. To address this issue, a conceptual model and systematic literature review are presented which provide insights into (1) the determinants affecting public sector adoption of strategic managem...
New Public Management popularized performance measurement in public organizations. Underlying performance measurement's popularity is the assumption that it injects performance information (PI) into decision‐making, thus rationalizing the ensuing decisions. Despite its popularity, performance measurement is criticized. In part, this criticism resul...
Strategic planning is a widely adopted management approach in contemporary organizations. Underlying its popularity is the assumption that it is a successful practice within public and private organizations that has positive consequences for organizational performance. Nonetheless, strategic planning has been criticized for being overly rational an...
Strategic management is an approach to strategizing by public organizations or other entities which integrates strategy formulation and implementation, and typically includes strategic planning to formulate strategies, ways of implementing strategies, and continuous strategic learning. Strategic management can help public organizations or other ent...
How can we stimulate policymakers to make strategic decisions that enhance public service performance? Traditional strategy theories have not enabled us to answer this question. These theories focus on strategy processes or content in public organizations and networks, and directly link these to public service performance. This article defines and...
Change is inherent to public sector management, yet many change initiatives in public organizationsfail due to a lack of relevant change capabilities within the organization. This article introduces ameasurement scale designed specifically to assess the organizational change capability (OCC) ofpublic organizations. Drawing on a literature search, e...
Due to the exponential increase of publications about red tape over the past two decades, an integrative review is needed to lay the jigsaw puzzle on empirical red tape research and identify blind spots in the literature. This study addresses this issue by reviewing 139 empirical studies across social science disciplines and mapping the nomological...
Although red tape remains a significant policy concern and despite meta-analytical research showing that it impacts employee and performance outcomes, research elucidating why and under which conditions it does so remains scarce. Using social cognitive theory, we first hypothesize that the relationship between red tape and job satisfaction is media...
Performance information is often presented in a ranked format. Rankings aggregate a multitude of performance dimensions into an overall score. Simultaneously, rankings may constrain cognitive processing of performance information because they distract users’ attention away from the information underlying the ranking calculation. We test this advers...
Strategic planning is core to public administration at all governmental levels. Evidence suggests that when conducted well strategic planning impacts several performance outcomes. Yet, public administration and strategy scholars have argued that strategic planning is not only a technical procedure. Its success is contingent upon the people involved...
Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Strategic-Planning-Public-Nonprofit-Organizations/dp/1394274025
- Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations is the comprehensive, practical guide to building and sustaining a more effective organization, delivering a clear framework for designing and implementing a better strategic planning an...
Collaborative and network governance assume that network management and trust matter for network outcomes. We test this assumption by conducting a meta-analysis of public administration studies investigating the correlation between network management and network outcomes (50 effect sizes), and trust and network outcomes (28 effect sizes). While bot...
Strategic planning's popularity in public organizations cannot be denied, with legislative initiatives even making it mandatory for certain public organizations. Due to strategic planning's continued popularity in practice, recent years have seen a surge in research on the topic. A synthesis of said research is necessary to identify empirical, conc...
Literature reviews have become widespread in public administration, especially in the past decade. These reviews typically adopt widely‐accepted approaches with many drawing upon systematized approaches to review in fields like medicine and psychology. Public administration, however, is a professional, design‐oriented discipline, focused on enhanci...
Administrative tasks often are an unavoidable aspect of the daily work of street‐level bureaucrats (SLBs). These burdensome tasks are job demands that can cause stress and put a strain on SLBs' working experience and performance. So far, few studies have searched for job resources that can help SLBs cope with this aspect of their daily work. This s...
Strategic planning positively impacts performance in traditional public organizations, but does it also work in governance networks? This chapter addresses that question using an exploratory single-case study, into examining the characteristics and outcomes of strategic planning in a governance network. We demonstrate that strategic planning can en...
Performance-related-pay (PRP) is a controversial topic. Views about its impact are mixed. Through a meta-analysis of studies in public administration, we aim to provide an evidence-based answer to the question: Does PRP work? Our meta-analysis finds a statistically significant, positive but small population effect size between PRP and employee and...
IMPACT - It is vital that social responsibilities become part of nonprofit or public organizations' strategic management. Strategic management of social responsibilities implies continuous attention to these responsibilities-not only during strategic planning but also throughout strategy implementation. Organizations need to assess whether they are...
For 3 decades, policymakers, educators, and scholars have been appealed to the promises of the learning organisation concept. Drawing from the last Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS 2018), this paper is the first to use a large-scale crosscountry survey to assess the robustness of the relationship between schools operating as learni...
The question whether small or large organisations are associated with the best public service performance has long been a subject of debate in public administration research, and has had profound ramifications for practice. This article seeks to bring clarity to this debate by conducting a meta-analysis of studies scrutinising the relationship betw...
Ideally, people with a migration background identify with the country and city they live in. Such identification is under threat from political discourse on migrants (i.e. othering). To stimulate migrants' identification, city governments brand their city as an inclusive place to live. We assess the effect of inclusive city branding and political o...
Strategy research has recently highlighted the need for ‘opening up’ strategy processes to enhance transparency and inclusiveness. Ideas of openness have long been embedded in public management, especially since the governance revolution. However, public management research on strategy processes has mostly neglected how strategy processes are ‘open...
Organizational goals lie at the heart of strategic public management. While research has centred on the performance impact of organizational goals and goal clarity, the field remains unclear on where organizational goals come from and how they form over time. We argue that research has suffered from the lack of a multi-level, process-focused theore...
Although strategic planning is ubiquitous within public organizations and despite meta-analytical research showing that it impacts performance, important questions about why it does so remain unanswered. This article addresses this gap by identifying the mediators underlying the strategic planning-public service performance relationship. Multi-info...
Op 3 mei 2022 publiceerden we een Story @ UGent @ Work omtrent inactiviteit (i.e. personen die noch werken, noch werk zoeken) in België, op basis van de nieuwste Eurostat-cijfers. Dit kreeg toen brede aandacht in de media en in de communicatie van verschillende beleidsmensen, zoals parlementairen, partijvoorzitters en regeringsleden.
Een vraag die...
Policy learning is an increasingly salient concept in public policy research and practice. With growing theoretical advancements, it offers substantial value for policy analysis. However, the field's conceptual state calls for refinement, and its burgeoning literature calls for a much-needed synthesis. We address these calls by conducting a systema...
This chapter presents and discusses five new avenues for strategic planning research: Transnational and network governance, public values and stakeholder expectations, rules, regulations and bureaucracy, organizational and societal change, and public governance in complex systems.
IMPACT
Policy-makers face significant challenges responding to technically complex, multidimensional, large-scale, and socially-embedded crises such as Covid-19. In this article, the authors call for policy-makers to expand the horizon on expertise at the policy design table. This is by including public management experts and practitioners as polic...
Public organizations are continuously required to change in part due to shifting political and societal preferences.
While there is extant research demonstrating how change can be managed in public organizations, there is a lack of
understanding concerning the holistic and systemic nature of public-sector change. This article aims to integrate
empi...
This study uses survey data among both a random sample (N = 500) and a convenience sample (N = 2,919) of Flemish adults to assess public support for 24 potential labour market reforms. The results show that there is a lot of public support for (both encouraged and mandatory) training and community service for the unemployed and for the so-called 'j...
Although employee performance management (EPM) enhances performance, the effects that these systems have on employee quality of life remain unclear. Such information is particularly relevant for ‘vulnerable’ workers, whose employment situation has the potential to alter their social and economic position in life. Based on data gathered from 111 lea...
Public organizations matter, now more than ever. Be it hospitals providing us healthcare, schools offering us education, police officers keeping our streets safe, museums safeguarding our cultural heritage, one can provide multiple examples of how public organizations impact our daily lives. But running public organizations is complex and expectati...
Karens et. al (2016) conducted an experiment to measure the effect of the European Union (EU) brand on citizens’ trust in policies. Experiments conducted with economics students in Belgium, Poland, and The Netherlands showed a consistently positive and significant effect of applying the EU brand, on trust in the policies. This study presents seven...
Public managers often employ valuation tools to support policymakers. These tools are expected to rationalize decision-making. Using a vignette-based, randomized survey experiment with Flemish politicians, the authors study the effect of the type of valuation tool, valuation outcome, and asset salience on politicians’ willingness to sell public rea...
Policymakers and public managers need to identify, reflect and decide on public values for given policy issues. This process is defined as public values assessment (PVA). We conduct a systematic literature review (n=114 studies) on PVA, and employ a Strategy-as-Practice lens to analyze how the activity of PVA takes place in practice. Based on our i...
Dit artikel gebruikt resultaten van een survey van zowel een toevalssteekproef (N = 500) als een gemakssteekproef (N = 2919) bij meerderjarige Vlamingen om het draagvlak voor 24 potentiële arbeidsmarkthervormingen na te gaan. Enerzijds tonen de resultaten aan dat er een groot draagvlak is voor (aangemoedigde én verplichte) opleiding en gemeenschaps...
De covid-19-epidemie vereist een ongeziene dynamiek en flexibiliteit van bestuurders en onderwijsprofessionals in het hoger onderwijs. Erasmusprogramma’s en andere internationale uitwisseling staan grotendeels in de wachtruimte, instellingen investeren ijverig in digitale capaciteit om online onderwijsactiviteiten te organiseren, docenten moeten zi...
Although there is consensus among scholars that red tape has negative consequences, there is a lack of synthesis on these negative effects. We conduct a meta‐analysis and meta‐regression of public administration evidence and ask: What is the impact of red tape on organizational performance and employee outcomes, and which conditions moderate this i...
Resource competition is assumed to encourage commercial behaviour by publicly funded nonprofit organizations (NPOs). However, this widespread assumption falls short as empirical findings remain equivocal. In this study, we theorize that non-profit commercialism can indeed emerge from resource deficits but also from institutional pressures and organ...
If the COVID-19 pandemic has already taught us anything, it is that policymakers, experts and public managers need to be capable of interpreting comparative data on their government’s performance in a meaningful way. Simultaneously, they are confronted with different data sources (and measurements) surrounding COVID-19 without necessarily having th...
If the COVID-19 pandemic has already taught us anything, it is that policymakers, experts and public managers need to be capable of interpreting comparative data on their government’s performance in a meaningful way. Simultaneously, they are confronted with different data sources (and measurements) surrounding COVID-19 without necessarily having th...
Review of Barzelay, Michael. 2019. Public Management as a Design-Oriented Professional Discipline. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing Inc.
Strategic planning (SP) remains the dominant approach to strategy formulation at all levels of government, and is an enduring topic of public administration research and practice. Simultaneously, little remains known about the conditions under which strategic plans are successfully implemented in government. This Viewpoint essay provides evidence-b...
A growing body of scholars, educators and policy makers has argued for reconceptualising schools as “learning organisations” in the last 25 years as. However, a lack of clarity on the concept has hindered its advance in theory and practice. This study responds to this problem by developing a schools as learning organisations scale that expands and...
This chapter looks at how Georgia can improve schooling through introducing effective quality assurance mechanisms. Schools in Georgia have considerable autonomy, but few accountability measures in place to ensure that schools provide adequate services. Most schools have not undergone school authorisation, and a school evaluation framework is still...
This chapter looks at how student assessment in Georgia contributes to student learning. In Georgia, the concept of assessment is understood as giving summative marks to students in order to judge their performance. Using classroom assessment to improve student learning is not widely practiced by teachers. This understanding and approach to assessm...
This chapter looks at how Georgia’s teacher appraisal system evaluates the country’s teachers and supports them to develop professionally. Several factors are preventing Georgia from creating a more modern and professional teacher workforce. Its teacher professional development scheme is based upon acquiring credits, the accumulation of which do no...
Georgia has seen tremendous recent improvement in educational outcomes. From 2009 to 2015, 15‑year‑old students in Georgia improved their learning in reading, mathematics and science by roughly a full grade level. However, Georgia’s progress has not been equitable across all population groups. Urban students outperform rural ones; socio‑economicall...
Georgia has seen tremendous recent improvement in educational outcomes. From 2009 to 2015, 15-year‑old students in Georgia have improved their learning in reading, mathematics and science by roughly a full grade level. However, Georgia’s progress has not been equitable across all population groups. Urban students outperform rural ones; socio‑econom...
Georgia has made remarkable progress in expanding education access and improving education quality. Nevertheless, the majority of children in Georgia leave school without mastering the basic competencies for life and work. Moreover, students’ background is becoming a greater influence on their achievement. This review, developed in partnership with...
The public sector requires job crafting from employees so that they can better cope with overdemanding jobs due to layer upon layer of public management reforms. Simultaneously, however, red tape and austerity constrain job autonomy. This study therefore tests how job crafting can be fostered in public organizations by studying social resources at...
Does the school as a learning organisation affect staff outcomes? This article examines the relationship between the school as a learning organisation and staff job satisfaction and the school’s responsiveness to staff needs using a purposefully designed “Schools as Learning Organisations Survey” completed as part of an OECD study in Wales. A posit...
Om de strategie-implementatie van een stad of gemeente op een effectieve manier te laten verlopen is het belangrijk dat de betrokken gemeenteraadsleden een gedeelde strategische visie hebben. De vraag is echter of partijlidmaatschapsdiversiteit en politieke roldiversiteit (d.w.z. meerderheidsrol versus oppositierol), naast andere groepsverschillen...
Strategic planning and mergers in Flemish municipalities: An essay on Flemish experiences with new public management reforms
In the past years, Flemish municipalities have been confronted with a plethora of new public management reforms. The two probably most salient reforms include the introduction of a strategic planning system entitled the polic...
To enhance public service performance (PSP), public organizations are challenged to optimize and innovate their processes, techniques, policies and services. But can public organizations go too far when innovating and optimizing? Based on survey data from Dutch water authorities, we show that optimization initially contributes more to PSP than inno...
Management tools are often argued to ameliorate public service performance. Indeed, evidence has emerged to support positive outcomes related to the use of management tools in a variety of public sector settings. Despite these positive outcomes, there is wide variation in the extent to which public organizations use management tools. Drawing on nor...
A shared understanding of strategic priorities within decision-making teams is important for strategy implementation. However, although upper echelons theory argues that group diversity has a negative impact on shared strategic cognition, research on the impact of group diversity measures based on political characteristics is lacking. Consequently,...
Wales (United Kingdom) considers the development of schools as learning organisations as vital for supporting schools to put its new, 21st century curriculum into practice. A growing body of research evidence shows that schools that operate as learning organisations can react more quickly to changing external environments and embrace changes and in...
While a voluminous literature on representative bureaucracy and minority discrimination suggests that characteristics other than qualifications influence hiring decisions, little is known about whether this also pertains to the top positions in political-administrative organizations. To shed light on this question, we ask how candidate ethnicity, g...
In the slipstream of NPM, public organizations worldwide have had to increase their financial performance by adopting management practices. Nonetheless, financial performance (FP) might be mostly predicted by contingencies that are not within direct managerial control. Drawing on evidence from 308 Flemish municipalities, this article shows that org...
Given the lack of insights into the micro-determinants of strategic planning in public organizations, this study uses information-processing theory and self-efficacy theory to investigate individual-level predictors of commitment to strategic plans among planning team members (PTMs). Specifically, we investigate whether plan commitment is contingen...
This study draws on information processing theory to investigate predictors of strategic-decision quality in public organizations. Information processing theory argues that (a) rational planning practices contribute to strategic-decision quality by injecting information into decision-making and (b) decision-makers contribute to strategic-decision q...
It has recently been recognized in the public administration literature that multiple reforms co-exist in public organizations, ranging from the Weberian bureaucracy to new public management and, more recently, new public governance. This study develops a typology of the employment relationship with features of these macro-level evolutions and test...
Strategic planning (SP) is a popular instrument within public organizations. Despite its popularity, it remains unknown whether SP actually ‘works’ in a public sector setting. This article presents insights based on three empirical articles and interviews with five expert stakeholders in Flemish municipalities. These insights suggest that SP is mor...
Surveys have long been a dominant instrument for data collection in public administration. However, it has become widely accepted in the last decade that the usage of a self-reported instrument to measure both the independent and dependent variables results in common source bias (CSB). In turn, CSB is argued to inflate correlations between variable...
The rational planning cycle of formulating strategic goals and using performance information to assess goal implementation is assumed to assist decision-making by politicians. Empirical evidence supporting this assumption is scarce. Our study replicates Nielsen and Baekgaard's (2015) experiment on the relation between performance information and po...
Public sector challenges translate in more complex job demands that require individual innovation. In order to deal with these demands, many public organizations have implemented employee performance management. In a multilevel study, we examine when employee performance management affects individual innovation. We contribute by focusing on consist...
Strategic planning (SP) has conquered the public sector by storm based on the assumption that SP’s approach to strategic decision-making strengthens strategic-decision quality (SDQ) in public organizations. Despite this assumption, it remains unclear if and how SP relates to SDQ. Drawing on survey data from 271 informants within 89 Flemish municipa...
Although organization-wide strategic consensus is considered a prerequisite for effective strategy execution, research analyzing the degree, content, and antecedents of strategic consensus between hierarchically distant employee groups is limited. The present study addresses this issue by using the Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire to examin...
Given the ongoing discussion about the value of strategic planning processes for public organizations, and the lack of knowledge about the micro-characteristics of public strategic planning, the paper at hand addresses the call for more research on the subject by systematically reviewing the available empirical literature. More specifically, the sy...
Questions
Questions (4)
In a new article together with colleagues from Ghent University, we develop an initial guide to benchmarking COVID-19 performance data across governments. Moreover, we offer a set of recommendations that can - hopefully - improve the way these data are used by policymakers, experts and public managers worldwide at all levels of government. The article is a viewpoint article (so only 3.000 - 4.000 words centered on practitioners) published in the journal Public Administration Review. While we are aware of the dynamic nature of data surrounding COVID-19, we hope our guide and recommendations can prove to be helpful in adopting a more reflective approach to benchmarking COVID-19 performance data. The final author version is on ResearchGate:
Over the past couple of years, I have been getting into methods to infer causality (after a strong focus on correlation, survey-based research). Methods such as longitudinal analysis using fixed effects as well as DiD-analysis are contested. But are there other valid methods to infer causality apart from actual experiments or the above-mentioned methods? And what are the benefits and costs of such methods? Looking forward to hearing what you think.
Dear Professor Spector
We have recently published an article on CSB in public administration scholarship which draws heavily on your work. We are quite curious to see what you think:
Sincerely
Bert
To those of you with experience in reviewing papers for public management journals, I wondered how much time you are typically given to do the review. Reading some info online, I often find a period of 4 - 6 weeks in which it is expected that the reviewers submit their reviews. In practice, however, I find that this often differs.
Anyone care to share some insights? It probably also depends on the journal?
Sincerely,
Bert
