Hal Griffin Rainey

• University of Georgia

Merit principles have served as central tenets of the U.S. civil service system since the late 19th Century, but in recent decades reforms have been proposed and implemented that weaken central aspects of merit. This makes it important to seek evidence about how government employees perceive the status of merit principles and to examine relationshi...

Surveys of government personnel have shown that they are much more likely than their counterparts in business firms to say that it is hard to fire a poor performer, to raise the pay of a good performer, and to base promotion on performance. Yet the same surveys find that most government respondents indicate high levels of motivation, meaningful wor...

This article presents a conceptual perspective on the distinctive characteristics of public organizations and their personnel. This perspective leads to hypotheses that public organizations deliver distinctive goods and services that influence the motives and rewards for their employees. These hypotheses are tested with evidence from the Internatio...

Prominent authors have claimed that government organizations have high levels of goal ambiguity, but these claims have needed clarification and verification. We discuss the complexities of organizational goals and their analysis, and review many authors' observations about public agencies' goal ambiguity and its good and bad effects. Then, we propo...

Globalization, migration, initiatives for social justice, and other developments have made the representation of diverse groups and relations among them an important issue for organizations in many nations. In the United States, government agencies have increasingly invested in managing demographic diversity effectively. This study examines how per...

Feedback is critically important for improving performance in organizations, but an employee’s feedback preferences can play a significant role in how that feedback is received and the extent to which it is effectively leveraged to improve performance. Although there is a substantial amount of literature devoted to examining different types of feed...

Public services touch the majority of people in advanced and developing economies on a daily basis: children require schooling, the elderly need personal care and assistance, rubbish needs collecting, water must be safe to drink and the streets need policing. In short, there is practically no area of our lives that isn't touched in some way by publ...

This article tests hypotheses about the effects of two types of work motivation (i.e. intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation) and four types of social communication on three important work dispositions (i.e. job involvement, red tape, and perceived organizational effectiveness) among 790 managers employed in public agencies in the states of...

The title of this lecture refers to organizations, politics, and public purposes to emphasize developments in the analysis of public organizations and their management and the need for that analysis to include politics as an influence on those organizations. The Gaus Award recognizes contributions in the joint tradition of public administration and...

Research comparing public and private organizations and otherwise analyzing "publicness" involves complex challenges. These include the challenge of designing and attaining adequate samples to represent the two complex categories of "public" and "private," as well as dimensions of publicness, and subcategories and control variables needed for valid...

Academics and journalists have depicted government bureaucracies as particularly subject to administrative constraints, including the infamous red tape and personnel rules that sharply constrain pay, promotion, and dismissal and weaken their relations to performance. Research on these topics has often focused on public organizations alone or on com...

Prominent scholars have observed that public organizations and policies tend to have ambiguous goals, but research on these assertions is scarce. This analysis adds to a recent set of studies that developed measures of organizational goal ambiguity and found that federal agencies vary on these measures due to differences in funding patterns and oth...

Diversity in the workplace is a central issue for contemporary organizational management. Concomitantly, managing increased diversity deserves greater concern in public, private, and nonprofit organizations. The authors address the effects of diversity and diversity management on employee perceptions of organizational performance in U.S. federal ag...

As scholars have observed, government agencies have ambiguous goals. Very few large sample empirical studies, however, have tested such assertions and analysed variations among organizations in the characteristics of their goals. Researchers have developed concepts of organizational goal ambiguity, including ‘evaluative goal ambiguity’, and ‘priori...

Some authors have claimed that ambiguous goals frustrate public service motivation (PSM). This study uses data from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget’s Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART)1 to develop organizational goal ambiguity measures for U.S. federal agencies. These measures, from this very separate and independent source, are then si...

Despite being a major topic in public administration for many decades, evaluating the performance of governmental activities has received increased attention in recent years. As part of this trend, the Performance Assessment and Rating Tool (PART) was created by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget in 2003 to assess the performance of federal p...

This analysis of over 6,900 federal employees’ responses to the Merit Principles Survey 2000 examines the influences of leadership and motivational variables, and especially public service motivation, on the “outcome” variables job satisfaction, perceived performance, quality of work, and turnover intentions. CFA confirms a factor structure for tra...

This study examines the constructs and the effects of three subdimensions of federal employees' organizational commitment--affective, normative, and continuance. Using the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) 2000 survey instrument and employing an exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, multivariate regression, and a structural equation mod...

Charles Rossotti took the helm at the Internal Revenue Service in 1997 amid complaints of abuse of both IRS workers and taxpayers. Did he succeed at improving the agency’s image without sacrificing its principal mission to enforce the tax code fairly and effectively? This retrospective on Rossotti’s five-year tenure suggests that he, his leadership...

Much organizational theory, research, and practice emphasizes the value of organizational members having clear perceptions of the organization's goals. For years, authors have asserted that public organizations have particularly vague goals, goals more vague than those of business firms. Yet, researchers have not devoted a lot of attention to ways...

Introduction Assertions that goal ambiguity in public organizations has a major influence on those organizations abound in the public management literature (for a review, see Rainey 1993). For instance, the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993 assumes that the reduction of goal ambiguity will improve organizational performance in U...

In spite of numerous observations that government organizations have high levels of organizational goal ambiguity that exert major influences on their other characteristics, few researchers have measured goal ambiguity and tested these frequent assertions. In previous research, we developed measures of four dimensions of goal ambiguity: mission com...

Observations that government organizations have particularly high levels of organizational goal ambiguity, and that this goal ambiguity has major influences on their other characteristics, abound in the literature on public bureaucracy. Few researchers, however, have developed quantified measures of goal ambiguity and tested these frequent assertio...

Privatization has been a major issue around the world, but research on public opinion about it has been scarce. The German Social Survey provides an opportunity to compare citizen opinions from a formerly socialist-authoritarian regime with those from a democratic regime, in their opinions about privatizing banks, electrical power, and hospitals. A...

A major total quality management initiative by the Malaysian government provided the opportunity to survey over 400 managers in twelve of the twenty-four government agencies about the implementation and impact of TQM, and to compare agencies that have won quality awards to those that have not. Managers from award-winning agencies gave higher rating...

Research comparing public and private organizations and examining the publicness of organizations represents a substantial and growing body of empirical evidence, relevant to many international issues in political economy and organization theory such as the privatization of public services. This article assesses several major streams in this resear...

This article draws on theory and research comparing public and private organizations to propose ways to study innovative attitudes among employees in the two types of organizations but especially the public organizations. A literature review finds inconclusive the research and theory about whether public agencies show more change resistance and les...

Much of the theory and discourse on public bureaucracies treats them negatively, as if they incline inevitably toward weak performance. This orientation prevails in spite of considerable evidence that many government organizations perform very well, and in spite of many examples of their excellent performance. This article draws on the literature a...

Theory: Theories of the bureaucratic personality by Victor Thompson and Robert Merton hold that personal characteristics of certain bureaucrats make them prefer elaborate rules and regulations, so this study tests such a model. Yet some organizations really do need more rules, so the study also tests a bureaucratic organization model that predicts...

Transformational leadership has become one of the most prominent topics in current research and theory on leadership. Much of the work on the topic, however, has focused on higher-level executives, with less attention to middle managers. Writers on middle managers often depict them as working under sharp constraints and limitations. This raises man...

Do managers in government perceive higher levels of red tape in their organizations than managers in industry? Most people would think so, but organizational researchers have often found that government organizations do not necessarily have higher levels of rule intensity than business firms. If there are higher levels in government, what explains...

The pressures on city officials warrant much more research into their evaluations of the sources of information available to them. In more complex times, are they turning more to technical and professional informational supports? How does their reliance on such sources compare to their use of other sources such as the media and contacts with the pu...

This study reports findings from a survey of managers in public, private, and hybrid organizations. The results augment the evidence about some of .the most frequent assertions about differences among those types of organizations. Public managers perceive more emphasis on rules, channels, and procedures, and more constraints on authority. Contrary...

Public and private managers' perceptions of flexibility of personnel procedures, authority over personnel actions, and approval times for basic personnel tasks are compared. A phone survey of 78 top managers of Syracuse, New York area organizations followed by 210 responses from middle and upper managers to a mail survey constitutes the data source...

Recent years have seen increased attention to citizen preferences for taxation and spending for public services. Yet, the sources of these attitudes, and of apparent inconsistencies among them, remain something of a mystery. This study integrates divergent disciplinary perspectives on citizen fiscal policy attitudes to develop a more comprehensive...

Public management has been rapidly developing as a subfield. Since other recent reviews have discussed many disciplinary and paradigmatic issues, this one concentrates on developments in research on the distinctive characteristics of public managers and the organizations in which they work. It takes aframework developed over a decade ago to describ...

Executive-level transition is a topic that merits far more consideration in the literature of public administration than it has been accorded to date. Transition, while frequently connected to political events, is also of great organizational significance. This article reviews the status of current research and proposes a conceptual framework for a...

Scholars have devoted increasing attention to similarities and differences between public and private organizations. This paper critiques the comparative literature on these organizations in order to assess the usefulness of the public-private distinction in organization theory and concludes that further analysis of this distinction is valuable. Se...

In recent years numerous studies have compared such work-related attitudes of employees of public and private organizations as work satisfaction, organizational commitment, and perceived relations between performance and rewards ("reward expectancies"). These comparisons are rele vant to various theoretical and institutional design issues, includin...

There is an increasing interest in applying organization theory to public organizations as such, and a need for clarifying the distinction between public and private organizations. This quantitative case study compares questionnaire responses by middle managers in nonprofit public agencies and private profit-making corporations, to test hypotheses...

Public agencies and public employees are increasingly berated as inept and inefficient. We argue that the public bureaucracy in the United States is more valuable and effective than generally recognized. Where public agencies do perform badly, the problem is often due to external factors. We discuss the oversimplified calls for more businesslike ef...

Surprisingly little research has been reported on what is frequently asserted to be a serious personnel problem in government-the harmful impact of civil service systems upon incentives and motivation. This study reports a comparison of questionnaire responses by government and business managers which indicates that the government managers: 1) perc...

Common assertions about government-business differences are tested with questionnaire responses by government and business managers. The government managers: 1) express weaker performance-extrinsic reward "expectancies," 2) are lower on satisfaction measures, 3) perceive personnel rules —civil service systems—as constraints on incentives, and 4) sh...

In an investigation of interpersonal pleasuring, defined as the administration of positive physical stimulation to one person by another, a total of 439 undergraduates used the Brock Pleasure Machine to give 30 intensity-graded waves of pleasure to a confederate recipient's buttocks. Exp I showed that pleasuring increased across trials and more ple...

Abstract In this paper we explore some implications of the Miles and Snow (1978, 2003) typology of strategy types for public organizational adaptation and effectiveness, particularly as they are linked to organizational ambidexterity and dynamic capabilities. We see ambidexterityas referring to “the synchronous pursuit of both exploration and explo...