David W. Pitts

Workforce Diversity in the New Millennium: Prospects for Research

Public organizations in the new millennium are tasked with a myriad of human resource management challenges that stem from workforce diversity, but the field of public administration has not produced a body of research that adequately assists them with these struggles. In 2000, Wise and Tschirhart called for “greater contribution from public administration scholars to the body of research focusing on how human diversity can best be managed to produce positive results.” They found that existing research contributed little usable knowledge for diversity management policies and programs. The authors examine whether their call for more rigorous and more practice-oriented research has been heeded by identifying articles on workforce diversity published in a core set of public administration journals since 2000. A broad overview of the literature on diversity is provided, followed by a more focused discussion of empirical research on employment diversity, diversity management, and organizational outputs and outcomes. It is found that although diversity issues remain salient to public administration scholarship, usable knowledge is in short supply. A substantial share of this research can be categorized as focusing on representative bureaucracy issues. Few empirical studies test diversity effects or hypotheses. Some empirical work explains factors beyond the control of human resource policies or practicing managers, which makes findings less useful to practitioners. The research suffers from inadequate data, little innovation in methodology, and insufficient attention to empirical connections between diversity and organizational results.

Modeling the Impact of Diversity Management

Public management research on diversity suffers from a lack of coherence and little theory building. There have been few attempts to establish a comprehensive theoretical framework through which streams of research can unite and better inform public managers—rather, issues of recruitment, management, and cultural values are pursued as wholly separate areas of inquiry. This article critically evaluates the current ways in which public management research addresses the diversity issue and proposes a new comprehensive model for research. The model is based on three functions of diversity management: recruiting and outreach, building cultural awareness, and promoting pragmatic management policy. These functions are linked to organizational performance through a series of intermediate steps, and the resulting model for quantitative analysis is specified.

Representative Bureaucracy, Ethnicity, and Public Schools Examining the Link Between Representation and Performance

Demographic changes in the United States have led to challenges for public organizations that are tasked to serve shifting target populations. Many arguments exist for including greater numbers of ethnic minorities among an organizations personnel, under the guise that greater ethnic representation will result in greater competitiveness in the market or effectiveness in governance. This article tests this proposition empirically, using data from the public education policy setting. Results show that representativeness along ethnic lines leads to gains for the organization as a whole, but some segments of the target population appear to respond more positively to representativeness than others.

Leadership, Empowerment, and Public Organizations

Empowerment has emerged as a component of recent public management reforms and a trend in both public and private organizations. This study builds on research on empowerment by creating a model that explains why some managers empower their employees and others do not. Hypotheses about the role of both individual and organizational variables are tested, and the results provide evidence for connections among race, education, organizational resources, task difficulty, and empowerment. Findings reject hypotheses related to empowerment as a trend, leading to the conclusion that empowerment may be nothing more than a recycled version of Theory Y and people-oriented leadership.

Ethnic Diversity and Organizational Performance: Assessing Diversity Effects at the Managerial and Street Levels

ABSTRACT As the public sector workforce becomes more ethnically diverse and as government agencies make attempts to manage that diversity, the importance of understanding how diversity affects workplace interactions and work-related outcomes increases. Little public-sector research has examined the impact of diversity on performance outcomes. This article seeks to fill this gap by studying the effects of the ethnic diversity of managers and street level public officials on work-related outcomes. We use basic in-group/out-group theories from psychology to formulate research questions relating diversity and performance, along with empirical research on the effects of diversity on work-related outcomes. We then use data from schools to test the relationship between ethnic diversity and organizational performance, identifying different impacts for managerial diversity and diversity among teachers. Results are consistent across three different models: manager diversity is routinely non-significant in predicting organizational performance, while teacher diversity has a consistently significant, and negative, impact on performance. These findings suggest that process-oriented problems are causing diverse organizations to experience drawbacks instead of gains, and that any benefit that could be drawn from a diversity of viewpoints is overshadowed by communication and collaboration problems.

Under what Conditions do Public Managers Favor and Pursue Organizational Change

Managerial leaders play a prominent role in organizational change--as champions for change and as key players in its implementation. This study seeks to understand why public managers choose to support change and initiate it within their organizations. A model of change-related attitude and behavior is developed and tested in the study. The results indicate that a complex pattern of internal and external factors influence a public managers attitude and behavior relating to change. The results also suggest that top-down and bottom-up drivers of change work simultaneously to influence a public managers decision to assume the role of a change agent.

Differing Effects of Representative Bureaucracy in Charter Schools and Traditional Public Schools

The authors examine the influence of teacher and administrator representation by race and ethnicity on disciplinary tools and standardized test scores within traditional public elementary schools and charter schools. The authors argue that school officials within charter schools will be less likely to consider race and ethnicity when making schooling decisions because of their attention to the culture and norms within charter schools. As a result, the authors expect that the translation from passive to active representation will be more difficult in charter schools than in traditional elementary schools. Using data from Georgia, the authors analyze this question empirically and find a statistically significant influence of representation among teachers on disciplinary tools and test scores and a more limited influence of administrative representation on standardized tests. Findings also support the central research question of this study, that is, whether the effects of racial and ethnic representation appear more limited among charter schools than traditional public schools.

The State of Public Management Research: An Analysis of Scope and Methodology

ABSTRACT In this article we examine the state of public management research, specifically focusing on the scope of research and variety of methodologies pursued in the field. We use a sample of manuscripts from three successive meetings of the Public Management Research Association to explore these issues. Our analysis is organized along four themes that have been central to public managements identity as a field of research: (1) the link between theory and practice; (2) focus on prescription and performance; (3) debate over empirical and nonempirical approaches; and (4) preferences for quantitative or qualitative data. We find that public management research has not yet bridged the gap between theory and practice, although substantive areas of research appear to reflect current trends in the public sector. There is moderate but slightly declining interest in performance. Empirical methods appear to be the norm, with an even mix of qualitative and quantitative data.

Implementation of Diversity Management Programs in Public Organizations: Lessons from Policy Implementation Research

Abstract The U.S. workforce is becoming more diverse, particularly in the public sector. As a result, a number of public-sector employers have initiated diversity management programs aimed to assist different types of employees in their needs at work. While much of the public administration literature has focused on these programs and what makes them work, it has largely ignored a cognate area of study that has much to say about the success of such programs: the policy implementation literature. This article uses policy implementation research to develop five guidelines for public managers who wish to develop a successful diversity management initiative.

Diversity in Professional Schools: A Case Study of Public Affairs and Law

Abstract Although the issue of diversity continues to grow in salience in the field of public affairs education, evidence about the way academic programs respond to diversity is still sparse. Studies of public organizations suggest that, despite support for egalitarian policies, many may fail to make the critical link between diversity and other organizational policies and practices.This article compares organizational responses to diversity in two professional schools: a school of public affairs and a school of law. Using the school of law as a benchmark, we find that neither case can be characterized as exemplary in integrating diversity into organizational policies and practices, but public affairs clearly lags law on many important diversity indicators.