From theories on middle managers’ entrepreneurship in private organizations, it is known that the structural network position of middle managers influences their innovative work behavior. Our study investigates if in a governmental setting, the intra-organizational networking behavior of public managers has a similar positive influence on innovative work behavior. As networking mechanisms may depend on the particular context and organizational norms, we also investigate the influence of networking motivations. According to social network research in private enterprises, social network links can be used to advance individual careers. According to public management and Public Service Motivation theories, public managers have a collective orientation aimed at producing public goods. Therefore, we investigate if, next to intra-organizational networking, an individual career motive or a collective motivation for networking explains innovative work behavior. In a case study on public managers of a municipality in Mexico City, we find a strong influence of networking on innovative work behavior. We also find support for additional influences of individual career motives, but no evidence for collective motivations. Points for practitioners Intra-organizational networking of public managers leads to increased innovative behavior in a governmental setting. In addition, when aiming at increasing innovative behavior, individual career motives seem to have stronger positive effects than collective motivations (such as teamwork-related motivations).

Providing aid in times of increasing humanitarian need, limited budgets, and mounting security risks is challenging. This paper explores in what organisational circumstances evaluators judge, positively and negatively, the performance of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) in response to disasters triggered by natural hazards. It assesses whether and how, as perceived by expert evaluators, CARE and Oxfam successfully met multiple institutional requirements concerning beneficiary needs and organisational demands. It utilises the Competing Values Framework to analyse evaluator statements about project performance and organisational control and flexibility issues, using seven CARE and four Oxfam evaluation reports from 2005-11. The reports are compared using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The resulting configurations show that positive evaluations of an INGO's internal and external flexibility relate to satisfying beneficiary needs and organisational demands, whereas negative evaluations of external flexibility pertain to not meeting beneficiary needs and negative statements about internal control concerning not fulfilling organisational demands.

SUMMARY Building enforcement capacity, that is, attaining and sustaining control in order to implement changes, is crucial for the success of public management reforms. However, this aspect of public management reform does not receive much theoretical or empirical attention. This paper analyzes the process of building enforcement capacity for the case of the Mexican Professional Civil Service reform. Although this reform experienced several complications (e.g., limited support, resources, and credibility), important goals were attained and some control was achieved. We study how officials attained control over implementation through the adaptive management of combinations of different types of control strategies (regulatory, normative, and procedural). The case study, focused on the analysis of in‐depth interviews with the highest officials involved in the implementation of this reform, finds evidence for three combinations of strategies next to a general pattern characterized by a trade‐off between compliance and coordination. This trade‐off shows that the process of building enforcement capacity may affect the goals of the reform, deviating from lawmakers' original intentions Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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A technocratic pathway to public management reform stresses the need for committing sizeable resources to reform implementation. Building on an institutional framework, we argue that there are alternative pathways to compliant implementation for government agencies with limited resources. Our comparative study of 55 Mexican government agencies that were the object of the 2003 Civil Service Reform Act reveals the co‐occurrence of both technocratic and institutional pathways to compliant implementation. The common denominator across pathways in organizations with limited resources was the absence of strong oppositional norms (patronage) and the presence of robust interpersonal trust. We conclude that the role played by available resources in compliant reform implementation is far from straightforward, and depends on different combinations of public organizations' endogenous characteristics.