The persistent educational gap between African American and white students has been a troubling matter within public policy for decades. This gap is puzzling in light of political theories of educational equity. While African American school board representation has increased over the years, the...

Is public management different from private management? That has been a central concern of public administration since its founding (for reviews see Rainey and Bozeman 2000; Rainey 2003). Private sector arguments frequently claim that organizations are generic or more central to their concern (for...

Accountability pressures have generated complex performance measurement regimes to evaluate and improve public or publicly-funded services. Performance management, however, faces many challenges including the tradeoffs posed by numerous dimensions of performance and a lack of consensus on which...

This article investigates how institutional context shapes the relationship between citizens’ evaluations of performance and archival measures of performance contingent on administrative autonomy — standards, human resources, and financial autonomy. Using cross-national education data, we...

This study investigates linear and nonlinear effects of job tenure on organizational performance and explores how administrators’ job tenure can moderate the relationship between three key managerial strategies – innovative management, participatory management, and external management –...

Bureaucratic reforms worldwide seek to improve the quality of governance. In this article, we argue that the major governance failures are political, not bureaucratic, and the first step to better governance is to recognize the underlying political causes. Using illustrations from throughout the...

This study reports on the effectiveness of a year-long field experiment involving training in transformational and transactional leadership in the public and private sectors. Using before and after training assessments by employees of several hundred Danish leaders, the analysis shows that...

The interaction between leaders and employees plays a key role in determining organizational outcomes and performance. Although human resources management literature posits positive effects of leadership behaviors on employee job satisfaction, the causal path between the two is unclear due to...

This paper advances a theory of optimal turnover rates in public organizations. In doing so, we first illustrate how public labor market conditions would affect optimal turnover rates of public organizations. After that, we develop a decision-theoretic model of public managers to show when...

The measurement of public organizations' performance is a central issue in public administration both in the U.S. (Moynihan 2008) and numerous other countries (Pollitt and Bourckaert 2000). Missing in the rush to performance appraisal and performance management is any effort to tie empirical...