Nathan Favero

Taking Managerial Context Seriously: Public Management and Performance in U.S. and Denmark Schools

ABSTRACT While recent research has shown that management matters, we know very little about the role of national contexts in shaping management effects on performance. We address this issue by comparing the impact of management of similar organizations—schools—in very different national contexts, the unitary and corporatist Denmark and the fragmented, adversarial Texas. We hypothesize that external as well as internal management matter more in Texas than Denmark. This is because Texas principals can gain power by negotiating the adversarial system, while the corporatist influence of teachers reduces the decision authority of principals in Denmark through collective agreements and important shop stewards. Based on combinations of parallel surveys of school principals and archival data on student performance, we confirm that aspects of both external and internal management matter substantially in Texas while having virtually no effect in Denmark. We therefore suggest that public management research should pay more attention to the role of context.

Social Context, Management, and Organizational Performance: When human capital and social capital serve as substitutes

Abstract Do internal (administrative human capital) and external (social capital) resources work to reinforce the effects of each other? Work from multiple disciplines has approached this question, and we advance this literature with a theory of social and administrative resources as potential substitutes for each other in the production of public education outcomes. We argue that social capital benefits some groups more than others and that it interacts with management to improve performance. We therefore expect the benefits associated with social capital to be non-uniform across community groups. Using education as our area of study, we find that social capital offers the most direct and unconditional benefits to white students but that management can use human capital resources to compensate disadvantaged students who may lack support and resources outside of the classroom. We do not find support for the expectation that social capital and human administrative capital reinforce the benefits of each other, but we find evidence that the two resource types are substitutable. This implies that management may substitute human capital resources when social capital is low to benefit public program performance.

What's Really Happening Here? Effectively Using Surveys to Learn About Organizations

ABSTRACT Scholars and practitioners of public management need reliable data as they strive to understand public organizations. This article considers various sources of data and how they can be effectively leveraged to learn about organizations and their employees. Common problems associated with archival and survey data are identified, and several recommendations regarding survey design and administration are offered, including a consideration of who (clients, managers, or front-line employees) might provide the best information about various topics that may be of interest to researchers or practitioners conducting surveys. Finally, two examples of effective data-collection efforts are briefly discussed.

How Should We Estimate the Performance Effect of Management? Comparing Impacts of Public Managers’ and Frontline Employees’ Perceptions of Management

ABSTRACT Many areas of public management research are dominated by a top-focused perspective in which emphasis is placed on the notion that managers themselves are usually the best sources of information about managerial behavior. Outside of the leadership literature, managers are also the typical survey respondents in public management studies. An alternative perspective on management can be provided by subordinates’ perceptions of what management is doing. Surveys of subordinates and of managers each pose potential advantages and potential disadvantages when it comes to measuring management, and each approach is likely to prove more fruitful for measuring certain management functions. Using a unique data set of parallel surveys on management with managers and their subordinates as respondents, we examine the differences and relationships between Danish school managers’ and teachers’ perceptions of management functions and the implications of such relationships for organizational performance. We find a surprisingly low correlation between manager and teacher responses regarding the same management functions. Teacher responses are better predictors of student performance for management aspects that are visible to and mediated by teachers. However, manager responses better predict performance for manager expectations that are less visible to employees.

For Better or worse: Organizational turnaround in New York City schools

Abstract The performance of public organizations has become a more salient issue as the popularity of accountability policies has grown. Though organizations are often defined as underperforming, little is known about the effectiveness of various strategies commonly recommended for agency turnaround. This study provides a large-N test of three common categories of turnaround mechanisms – retrenchment, repositioning, and reorganization – in nearly 300 failing New York City schools between 2008 and 2011. Models show that none of the three turnaround strategies appear to be significantly associated with improvements in core organizational performance from an administrative perspective, although repositioning appears to improve client satisfaction.

Is Active Representation an Organizational-Level Process? The Indirect Effect of Bureaucrats on Clients They Don’t Directly Serve

A now well-established link exists between passive representation of racial and gender minorities in certain bureaucracies and substantive benefits for the represented groups. However, few quantitative studies have distinguished between the multiple possible mechanisms by which passive representation might produce such effects. We conduct a novel set of empirical analyses aimed at determining whether or not passive representation produces effects only for those clients who directly interact with bureaucrats who share their demographic characteristics or if passive representation produces broader organizational-level effects. We find strong evidence that minority clients’ outcomes are positively associated with representation in portions of the bureaucracy with which they do not directly interact. This suggests that either passive representation produces substantial bottom-up, organizational-level effects or that managers who recruit minority personnel also adopt policies that are favorable toward minority clients.

Public management on the ground: clustering managers based on their behavior

ABSTRACT Public management research has identified a dizzying array of management variables that affect organizational performance. While scholars have learned much by analyzing one or a few specific behavioral dimensions of public management at a time, we argue for the value of a more holistic and inductive approach that uses data on several aspects of public management for identifying manager types. Such an approach accounts for both the cognitive processes of people affected by management and the reality that managers’ individual behavioral decisions are interrelated. We examine the overlap of 21 aspects of public school management behavior using cluster analysis. We identify four different manager types (“firefighters,” “laissez-faire managers,” “administrators,” and “proactive floor managers”), each reflecting a distinct constellation of managerial behaviors. The manager types we call “administrators” and “proactive floor managers” are associated with relatively better outcomes, while “firefighters” are associated with relatively worse outcomes.

Public Management on the Ground: Clustering Managers Based on Their Behavior

Public management research has identified a dizzying array of management variables that affect organizational performance. While scholars have learned much by analyzing one or a few specific behavioral dimensions of public management at a time, we argue for the value of a more holistic and inductive approach that uses data on several aspects of public management for identifying manager types. Such an approach accounts for both the cognitive processes of people affected by management and the reality that managers’ individual behavioral decisions are interrelated. We examine the overlap of 21 aspects of public school management behavior using cluster analysis. We identify four different manager types (“firefighters,�? “laissez-faire managers,�? “administrators,�? and “proactive floor managers�?), each reflecting a distinct constellation of managerial behaviors. The manager types we call “administrators�? and “proactive floor managers�? are associated with relatively better outcomes, while “firefighters�? are associated with relatively worse outcomes.