William G. Resh

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Southern California

In recent years, public administration scholars have started paying attention to intersectionality of government workforce identities and its implications for diversity management. This study unpacks how the intersection of multiple identities increases the transaction costs inherent to underrepresentation by looking at employee engagement in uncom...

Global recognition that there are universal human rights and that governments have a duty to respect them, was one of the most important developments of the 20th century. In this century, though, human rights are challenged in many places. What role do scholars and practitioners in public administration play in protecting human rights? This questio...

We examine the implications of anti‐statist populist leaders' inattention to competence and service delivery, and their embrace of a particular form of dysfunctional politics: government shutdowns. This paper explores the effects of US government shutdowns on agency policy implementation and personnel and using survey data from several hundred thou...

We examine the influence of discretionary agency outlays on the relative length of Senate‐confirmed presidential appointee vacancies over time. We argue that key Senate pivots in the appointment process are more (or less) likely to extend a vacancy based on an agency's discretionary spending outlays to the Senator's state. We combine a uniquely tho...

This research (1) examines how employees’ recollections of public engagement are associated with their willingness for future engagement (WFE), (2) assesses whether employees’ discrete recollections are driven by their procedural environments, and (3) tests whether employees’ recollections interact with their perceptions of red tape in affecting WF...

We analyse United States presidential appointee positions subject to Senate confirmation without a confirmed appointee in office. These “vacant” positions are byproducts of American constitutional design, shaped by the interplay of institutional politics. Using a novel dataset, we analyse appointee vacancies across executive branch departments and...

In a survey of local officials in Los Angeles County we test individual-level job-related assessments as a function of a public employee’s induced recall of discrete citizen engagement and one’s intrinsic prosocial motivation through a randomized survey experiment. We explore whether tangible retentions of public service influence the relationship...

Despite the proliferation of published work using the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) data, the scholarly community to date lacks a review of the practices and value associated with how scholars have used the survey data in their research. We turn a lens at the public administration research that...

This article assesses the field of public administration from a conceptual and methodological perspective. We urge public administration scholars to resolve the ambiguities that mire our scholarship due to the inadequate treatment of levels of analysis in our research. Overall, we encourage methodological accountability through a more explicit char...

The author takes the opportunity to review two compelling contributions to the field of Public Administration (PA) to expose how either would not ostensibly identify with the scholarly field of PA itself. Both of the works advance their theses through the integration of disciplines, though less than a self-identifying “public administration” schola...

Public and nonprofit organizations often emphasize the prosociality of their employees as critical to performance, given the prosocial nature of the missions of these organizations. However, whether prosocial motivations translate to prosocial work behaviors is not always clear. Such assessments are complicated by the inherent difficulty in accurat...

We introduce an Implicit Association Test whose purpose is to measure implicit—or unconscious—prosocial motivation. In doing so, our aim is to provide researchers with a tool that can serve as a complement to explicit, survey-based measures of prosocial and public service motivation. We present the results of a series of tests designed to probe the...

The authors use an online experiment to test the proposal that “mission match” leads to persistent prosocial work effort, whereby employees go above and beyond remunerated job responsibilities to deliver a public good. First, the importance of mission match to persistent prosocial work effort in public and nonprofit organizations is discussed. Then...

In this study, we evaluate the “success” of adopted innovations in public organizations as a function of the relative source of innovation vis-à-vis the organizational environment. We argue that the source of the innovation will be varyingly associated with subsequent perceptions of implementation success depending on locational characteristics o...

Why do presidents face so many seemingly avoidable bureaucratic conflicts? And why do these clashes usually intensify toward the end of presidential administrations, when a commander-in-chief’s administrative goals tend to be more explicit and better aligned with their appointed leadership’s prerogatives? In Rethinking the Administrative Presidency...

Since 2002, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management has used the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) to monitor efforts by federal executive agencies to manage human capital. Public management researchers have used FEVS data to produce dozens of peer-reviewed publications on a range of topics of interest to policy makers, practitioners, and ac...

This research takes a different approach from most studies of presidential transitions by examining transition preparations from the unique perspective of the career bureaucrats that provide a critical connection between transitions and governance. I examine how career senior executives perceive management techniques that are commonly prescribed to...

The growth in the use of collaborative governance arrangements has been accompanied by burgeoning scholarship in the field of public affairs that seeks to understand the benefits of engaging diverse stakeholders in common venues. However, few scholars have formally assessed the role of government actors in facilitating outcomes for individual parti...

For passive representation to translate into active representation, bureaucrats must have discretion. Despite its importance to representative bureaucracy theory, though, discretion has received little empirical attention in public administration. We seek to address this shortcoming by examining the determinants of bureaucratic discretion, paying p...

Theories of goal conflict suggest that public organizations confront two possibilities when they face multiple policy goals: (1) organizations attain synergy among lower-order, instrumental goals in order to achieve higher-order objectives, or (2) organizations face a zero-sum trade-off among goals. Implicit in this debate is the proposition that t...

Federal contracting is complicated by the conflict between system maintenance and the more intangible, normative goals of government. This study focuses on a federal procurement program that explicitly pursues equity as a normative goal in the contracting of services from small and disadvantaged businesses. For many federal agencies, low contract m...

Public managers who operate within cross-jurisdictional governance regimes face substantial difficulties in facilitating network collaboration. Scholars have long suggested that non-congruence of geographic borders can create coordination problems among the political communities within polycentric administrative units. A frequently reoccurring exam...

This study seeks to investigate two primary questions. One, I examine how technological changes to the opportunity for participation in the notice-and-comment stage of the rulemaking process affect the quality, quantity, and content of information provided to governmental decision-makers by different types of interests. To do so, I present findings...

George W. Bush assumed the presidency with the ill-fated political aim of creating a permanent electoral alignment favoring Reagan Republicanism in America by pursuing a “big government conservatism”, agenda with human resource management (HRM) strategies lying at its heart. In the process of setting the other HRM-focused contributions to this symp...

In theory, students of democracy hold that voting is the hallmark of a responsive government. One measure of responsive government is the fit between citizens’ policy expectations and those of their agents, the elected officials. We examine fluctuations in federal awards and assistance to House districts over three election cycles (2002 through 200...

How do nongovernmental (NGO), international (IO), and military organizations cope with their dependencies and address their perceptual and real differences in order to coordinate their field operations? This question is addressed through the creation of a matrix grouping civilian (NGOs andIOs) and military operations into four general types: peacek...

This article identifies what is known, what is not known, and what needs to be studied to inform better both practice and theoretical debates over the efficacy of five major administrative tools: centralizing policy making in the White House, establishing regulatory clearance and program evaluation in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), reor...

This article reviews how students of the presidency, policy implementation, public policy, public management, and public administration have identified three sets of factors as critically affecting the success or failure of policies pursued administratively. It also shows how much literature that is relevant to the study of the administrative presi...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Since 2002, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management has used the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) to monitor efforts by federal executive agencies to manage human capital. Public management researchers have used FEVS data to produce dozens of peer-reviewed publications on a range of topics of interest to policy makers, practitioners, and ac...