Do NPM Strategies Lead to Negative Organizational Behavior? Lessons from the Differential Effects of Contracting Out on Voluntary Turnover

While public sector organizations have increasingly utilized New Public Management (NPM) strategies as a means of increasing the values of the market, a growing body of literature suggests that market-based reforms may generate indirect costs associated with negative organizational behaviors in the public sector. Focusing on probable consequences of government contracting out for the public workforce, this study examines the relationship between contracting out and voluntary turnover relying on a panel data of U.S. federal agencies from 2010 to 2017. The results present that contracting activity is associated with voluntary quits in the opposite direction depending on the level of job satisfaction. This finding disentangles the previous discussion on the relationship between NPM strategies and employee behavior.

Practice and Theory: The Diffusion of State Legislative Budget Reform

We question why some state legislatures responded to public discourse promptly while other state legislatures resist change. We use the choice of performance-based budgeting (PBB) to set the stage in answering this compelling question. We employ a logit model as a discrete event history analysis (EHA). We use the EHA to determine how and what variables influence the probability of an organization’s qualitative change (or “event”) at a given point in time. In this study, the organizations are states, and the event to be analyzed is the enactment of PBB law. Our data set is a modified panel of 50 states between the years 1993 and 2008. We study the factors that would influence state legislators to pass PBB laws across the nation. While our empirical result shows that political preferences are not statistically significant factors for states to pass PBB law, state legislators seem to favor the factors associated with the financial management explanation to adopt PBB. Also, the factors of path dependence and mimicking influence states to adopt PBB.

Retiring the Golden Hammer: Identifying Situational Practices for Public Strategy Implementation

While scholars and practitioners increasingly embrace contingent approaches to public strategic management, they have done so tepidly. In an increasingly perilous and turbulent governing environment, both groups must move past time-honored tools and concepts and embrace the complexity inherent to the strategy implementation process. In response, this article proposes a contingent, micro-organizational process model of public strategy implementation based on Whittington’s (2017) framework of strategy as a practice and a process. Through regression analysis of 205 strategic initiatives from 43 U.S. municipalities, the study concludes that the relationships between implementation practices and proximate outcomes do indeed vary over time and across context, offering a specific list of recommended practices tailored to the intersections of implementation phase and initiative type. Public strategy implementation scholars can best aid practitioners by rejecting strategic reductivism and embracing micro-organizational implementation activity surrounding a strategic initiative, in all of its temporal and contextual splendor.

Local Opt-Out Provisions in a State Gambling Expansion: An Analysis of Pennsylvania Municipalities

A 2017 gambling expansion bill in Pennsylvania included a provision that gave municipalities the option to ban a new casino from opening within their borders. This paper examined how different factors influenced local decisions on whether to allow casino gambling. Multilevel linear probability models indicated that municipalities were influenced by economic characteristics, as evidenced by a higher likelihood of allowing casinos in communities with lower levels of household income. Results also suggested that municipalities were influenced by variables related to tax competition and the percentage of residents who were black. The findings of this study identify factors that may influence municipal governments when given the authority to opt out of a state gambling expansion capable of generating a new source of local tax revenue.