Søren C. Winter

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.

Street-Level Bureaucrats as Individual Policymakers: The Relationship between Attitudes and Coping Behavior toward Vulnerable Children and Youth

ABSTRACT Lipsky (1980) pointed out that street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) are important policymakers due to the discretion they exercise and argued from a structural perspective that these workers manifest relatively similar coping behaviors owing to their shared working conditions, characterized by chronically limited resources and non-voluntary clients. Using data from a national survey of municipal child welfare caseworkers in Denmark, we further develop Lipskys theory from an agency perspective by focusing on variation in coping among SLBs and examining the extent to which such variation is explained by SLBs’ attitudes towards the target group, the objectives and content of their jobs, and their perceptions of the capacity of their institutions. We find that SLBs’ aversion to and tolerance of the client group, their perceptions of institutional capacity in terms of municipal resources and local political inefficacy, and their conceptual modification of job contents are all related to their use of coping.

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.