scholarly journals Lla evaluación de los gerentes públicos frente a la opinión pública

1969 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-80
Author(s):  
Anabelle Castillo López

A nivel mundial, la crítica al sector público -que tiene mucho de verdad-, está alcanzando niveles de tal magnitud que ha llevado a los ciudadanos a una enorme pérdida de confianza en dicho sector, tanto así que han sido fácilmente convencidos de que los asuntos públicos deben y pueden resolverse fuera de la institucionalidad de dicho sector. Dichas críticas han conducido también a académicos a proponer cambios en la organización y funcionamiento del sector público. El presente trabajo parte del hecho de que toda esa crítica debe ser conducida a la luz de criterios objetivos, del conocimiento profundo sobre el funcionamiento propio de este sector y tomando en cuenta las características que lo distinguen del sector privado. Se parte aquí de la premisa de que el sector público tiene una serie de complejidades que lo hacen diferente al sector privado y que no se pueden resolver fácilmente, puesto que la cobertura de su funcionamiento requiere llegar a todos los ciudadanos de un país con productos y servicios de alta dificultad, lo que lo obliga a diseñar y poner en funcionamiento sistemas administrativos muy complejos para la prestación de los servicios; siendo ello diferente al sector privado, que tiene mercados cautivos, para productos muy bien delimitados. Desde esta perspectiva, tampoco es suficiente con trasladar la producción de bienes y servicios al sector privado, puesto que estaríamos trasladando todas esas complejidades a ese sector, con lo cual caeríamos en la misma situación, solo que en un sector diferente. Por tal razón, este análisis trata de aportar sobre cuáles son esas características propias del sector público que debemos tomar en cuenta a la hora de evaluarlo y sobre cuáles son parámetros que sí podríamos utilizar para llevar a cabo una evaluación objetiva de las actuaciones del sector público. ABSTRACTPublic sector mal-functioning has long been criticized and, as a result, great disappointment and a loss of confidence have grown among citizens who are now convinced that public activities should be transferred into the private sector. Because of that, academics all over have dedicated time to study this phenomenon and suggested new academic approaches, many of which are oriented to the adoption of alternative methods to manage public organizations as private enterprises or to definitively transfer public activities to private sectors. Therefore, this work tries to point out that, in order to give appropriate judgments or assessments about the public sector, it is necessary to clarify certain complexities that characterize it. These clarifications are important because misjudgments are usually expressed by different evaluators –journalists, auditors, etc. – through the media. That ends up in misunderstandings and a lack of support to public affairs. Clarifications are also necessary not only because people deserve unbiased assessments of the public sector, but also because, probably for them, it is not easy to recognize what is good and what is wrong with the public sector. Moreover, this work shows that there are no easy ways to go around many public affairs because, even though some activities can be transferred to the private sector, not all of them can, and, at the end, due to specific complexities, we will be simply transferring those complexities from one sector to another keeping the problems intact.  It is recognizable that, in the public sector, things can be improved, but expectations over performance should be in accordance with reality. Finally, this study shows some parameters to positively measure public activities in order to monitor and contribute to better governance. KEYWORDS:  PUBLIC MANAGEMENT, PUBLIC SECTOR, EVALUATION, PUBLIC OPINION, EFFICIENCY, EFFECTIVENESS.

Author(s):  
C. C. Hinnant ◽  
S. B. Sawyer

The rapid adoption of computer networks, such as the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW), within various segments of society has spurred an increased interest in using such technologies to enhance the performance of organizations in both the public and private sectors. While private sector organizations now commonly employ electronic commerce, or e-commerce, strategies to either augment existing business activities or cultivate new groups of customers, organizations at all levels of government have also begun to pay renewed attention to the prospects of using new forms of information and communication technology (ICT) in order to improve the production and delivery of services. As with many technologies, the increased use of ICT by government was in response not only to the increased use of ICT by government stakeholders, such as citizens or businesses, but also in response to a growing call for governmental reform during the 1990s. As public organizations at the federal, state, and even local level began to initiate organizational reforms that sought to bring private sector norms to government, they often sought to employ ICT as means to increase efficiencies and organizational coordination (Gore, 1998; Osborne & Gaebler, 1993). Such attempts to reform the operations of public organizations were a key factor in promoting an increased interest in use of new forms of ICT (Fountain, 2001). This growing focus on the broader use of ICT by public organizations came to be known as digital government. The term, digital government, grew to mean the development, adoption, and use of ICT within a public organization’s internal information systems, as well as the use of ICT to enhance an organization’s interaction with external stakeholders such as private-sector vendors, interest groups, or individual citizens. Some scholars more specifically characterize this broader use of ICT by public organizations according to its intended purpose. Electronic government, or e-government, has often been used to describe the use of ICT by public organizations to provide programmatic information or services to citizens and other stakeholders (Watson & Mundy, 2001). For example, providing an online method through which citizens could conduct financial transactions, such as tax or license payments, would be a typical e-government activity. Other uses of ICT include the promotion of various types of political activity and are often described as electronic politics, or e-politics. These types of ICT-based activities are often characterized as those that may influence citizens’ knowledge of, or participation in, the political processes. For instance, the ability of an elected body of government, such as a state legislature, to put information about proposed legislation online for public comment or to actually allow citizens to contact members of the legislature directly would be a simple example of e-politics. However, ICT is not a panacea for every organizational challenge. ICT can introduce additional challenges to the organization. For example, the increased attention on employing ICT to achieve agency goals has also brought to the forefront the potential difficulty in successfully developing large-scale ICT systems within U.S. government agencies. For example, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) recent announcement that it may have to scrap its project to develop a Virtual Case File system that was estimated to cost $170 million (Freiden, 2005). The adoption of new ICT is often marked by setbacks or failures to meet expected project goals, and this characteristic is certainly not limited to public organizations. However, adherence to public sector norms of openness and transparency often means that when significant problems do occur, they happen within view of the public. More significantly, such examples highlight the difficulty of managing the development and adoption of large-scale ICT systems within the public sector. However conceptualized or defined, the development, adoption, and use of ICT by public organizations is a phenomena oriented around the use of technology with the intended purpose of initiating change in an organization’s technical and social structure. Since the development and adoption of new ICT, or new ways of employing existing ICT, are necessarily concerned with employing new technologies or social practices to accomplish an organizational goal, they meet the basic definition of technological innovations (Rogers, 1995; Tornatsky & Fleischer, 1990). If public organizations are to improve their ability to adopt and implement new ICT, they should better understand the lessons and issues highlighted by a broader literature concerning technological innovation.


The evolution of artificial intelligence boosts its usage in the private sector, however the public administration seems to lag behind. This paper intends to identify the advantages and potential challenges for the implementation of the artificial intelligence in the public sector. The practical value of this paper lies in the fact that becomes a useful tool for decision makers that aim to adopt this technology in public organizations.


2008 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-47
Author(s):  
Cho Tae Jun ◽  
Faerman Sue R.

One hundred thirty on responses from public employees and 154 responses from private employees were analyzed to compare employee attitudes towards individualism-collectivism across public and private sector organizations. The present study provides knowledge to public management by showing that some organizational characteristics of public sector organizations (i.e., goal ambiguity, red tape, and public-service motivation) make the public-private distinction, whereas others do not. Additionally, we found that the distinction has been blurred as New Public Management (NPM) has been adopted recently in the public sector. Finally, we support the two-factor model of organizational collectivism and individualism, as well as report that organizational individualism differentiates public and private sector organizations. The theroretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.


Author(s):  
Derek McAvoy

One of the most common arguments used to justify the outsourcing of defence activities is that the private sector is more innovative than the public sector. New Public Management has been widely promoted as the most effective means by which the public sector can engage with markets and gain access to the greater entrepreneurial capabilities offered by the private sector. However, a major obstacle to generating the improvements sought by having greater access to entrepreneurial businesses is bound up in the inherent tensions generated by divergent institutional logics. Government departments are motivated to move towards stasis while the entrepreneurial market spirit ideally embraces institutional change. This chapter examines the challenges faced by defence acquisition in changing these potentially opposing institutional logics before concluding with suggestions on how to progress an applied research agenda for defence acquisition in order to make better use of entrepreneurial capabilities.


Author(s):  
Oliver James ◽  
Ayako Nakamura ◽  
Nicolai Petrovsky

The heart of public management is that the public sector context matters in ways that generic management research typically neglects. Generic management scholarship has found that the degree of match between top managers’ career experience and the characteristics of their current organizations creates managerial fit or misfit. However, public sector management adds the insight of “publicness fit” and the empirical finding that managers appointed from outside of public organizations tend to have shorter tenures, and in some contexts, weaker performance than managers with experience managing inside public organizations. This chapter reviews the current state of research on managerial publicness fit. First, the publicness fit on dimensions of public ownership, funding, and regulation is presented and a systematic review of broader studies of managerial fit for their relevance to the topic is given. Then, review evidence on publicness “insider/outsider” fit and its consequences for the public sector is offered. The third section concludes with an agenda for integrating publicness fit with the other dimensions of managerial fit identified in the review.


2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 67-86
Author(s):  
Jonghwan Eun

The demand for innovation in public organizations is increasing. In this study, I explore factors that contribute to the innovative behavior of civil servants at the individual level. The theoretical distinction between public and private organizations has long been a subject of debate, and certain characteristics of innovation in public organizations mimic innovation in the private sector, even though the purpose of innovation in public organizations is to secure public goods. In order to examine the innovative behavior of public employees who face such contradictory circumstances, I parameterized the characteristics of each sector, using whether or not the employee had worked in the private sector prior to entering the public service as the characteristic for the private sector and the effect of public service motivation on innovative behavior as the characteristic for the public sector and found that at the individual level, the two are not mutually exclusive.


Author(s):  
Vishanth Weerakkody ◽  
Marijn Janssen ◽  
Ramzi El-Haddadeh

AbstractThe realisation of citizen-centric services in the public sector requires breaking traditional silos and transforming existing institutional structures and processes. Recent transformation efforts undertaken in government institutions have embraced business process re-engineering (BPR) concepts championed by the private sector over decades ago to facilitate such change. While public opinion continues to differ about these transformation efforts' success, there is little evidence to explain the influence of BPR on their success or failure. This paper explores BPR led public sector transformation efforts in two local authorities in Europe to evaluate the outcomes realised for both government and citizens. Empirical evidence reveals that while transformation efforts contributed towards improving efficiency and integrating processes across functions in the public sector, the institutional structures evolved into a collection of reshaped and newly formed siloes, which were distinctly focused on delivering a citizen-centric service.


Author(s):  
Peter Leisink ◽  
Lotte B. Andersen ◽  
Christian B. Jacobsen ◽  
Eva Knies ◽  
Gene A. Brewer ◽  
...  

The concluding chapter synthesizes the insights and gives a comprehensive answer to the volume’s overall question. It sets directions for future research and discusses implications for public organizations’ practice. There is ample evidence that management contributes to performance, both directly and indirectly, through influencing employees’ (public service) motivation, organizational commitment, and job performance. There is also evidence that management contributes to employee outcomes, both positive, such as their job satisfaction and employability, and negative, such as stress and burnout. The chapter reflects critically on the state of public management research and outlines four key issues for future research: (1) work toward an integrated theoretical framework; (2) develop more comprehensive theoretical models; (3) pay attention to the public sector context; and (4) increase methodological rigor. The chapter contends that public management–performance research remains relevant in the era of inter-organizational networks and co-production, if and when studies pay explicit attention to the public sector context and to the frontline employees involved in service production. The chapter advises public organizations to invest in service provision policies that fit the organizational mission and create the conditions for their implementation by frontline managers who can help public employees create public value.


Author(s):  
Antoine Vauchez ◽  
Samuel Moyn

This chapter maps out the rapidly growing field of public–private brokerage by assessing the scope and breadth of French revolving doors. The media discussion stirred up by the so-called pantouflages — a slang word for the practice of civil servants and politicians joining the private sector — focused almost entirely on politicians and the rising risks of conflict of interests. It therefore failed to adequately reflect the breadth and diversity of the movement that started in the 1990s between the politico-administrative elite and major business law firms in Paris. By drawing a collective sociological portrait of these pantoufleurs, the chapter reveals a structural view of the new pattern of relationships that have been consolidated at the interface between the state and markets: the type of public positions and resources that are prized by the business bar, and also the type of companies and law firms that hire from the public sector, and the sectoral pathways followed by recruits. As we are able to map out the total social space in which these crossovers move, on either side of the public–private border, it is possible to sketch the field of intermediation and influence that has developed over the course of two decades of the French state's neoliberalization.


Author(s):  
Peter Leisink ◽  
Rick T. Borst ◽  
Eva Knies ◽  
Valentina Battista

Human resource management (HRM) scholars studying HRM in a public-sector context hold that the public-sector context is distinctive despite decades of reforms oriented on private-sector management principles. Distinctive characteristics include (1) the multiple goals that public organizations serve, making vertical alignment of HRM difficult; (2) the constraints on managerial autonomy resulting from red tape and trade union involvement; and (3) employees’ public service motivation, which is antithetical to performance management. However, there is a lack of evidence on public- versus private-sector differences in the human resource practices that are actually applied. Using Cranet 2014/15 survey, this chapter examines whether public-sector institutional characteristics affect the application of human resource practices as theoretically expected. The results show that, compared to the late 1990s, HRM in public organizations continues to differ in some respects from HRM in private-sector organizations, but not in other respects. The traditional belief that public-sector HRM is not outright aimed at efficiency and effectiveness still holds. The public service ethic and the resilience of collectivized industrial relations likely contribute to this. However, the traditional public-sector HRM orientation on employee well-being is less distinctive, which will likely affect the position of public organizations in the labor market.


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