Building on the work of Adam Herbert, this research examines how minority managers navigate the pressures of their organization versus the pressures of their community. Organizational socialization suggests that the socialization process will introduce employees to the goals and priorities of the organization and result in similar behaviors among managers. However, social identities (i.e., race, gender) also significantly influence the values, attitudes, and behaviors of a public servant. Navigating these two competing pressures, minority managers often experience role conflict in their work. We theoretically explore and empirically examine how race affects minority managers’ perceptions, networking behaviors, and hiring outcomes. We test our hypotheses using 6 years of school superintendent survey data. We find that racial minority managers behave in similar ways to their White peers as they have similar perceptions of their role in the organization and engage in professional networking behavior at similar rates. However, minority managers separately address the interests of their same-race minority community by hiring same-race street-level bureaucrats. As public organizations have grown increasingly diverse, this research revisits the experiences of minority public administrators and contributes to our understanding of how race and social identities contemporarily influence public managerial behaviors.

We explore the relationships between gender, career ambition, and the emergence of executive leadership. Growing research in public administration shows that career systems shape bureaucrats’ ambitions, political behavior, and management. Yet career systems are not neutral conduits of talent: Administrators are more likely to pursue advancement when career systems favor them. This study proposes that women and men respond to gendered public career systems. Using national- and state-level data on public school managers in the United States, we find gender disparities in the career paths that lead educators from the classroom to the superintendent’s suite. Specifically, we find that female and elementary school teachers advance more slowly than male and secondary school teachers. We also find gender disparities in certification and experience among principals. Accordingly, female and elementary principals report lower levels of ambition. Such gendered career systems may lead to biases in policy agendas and public management.

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Within the representative bureaucracy literature, there are a variety of individual or professional incentives that may discourage movement from passive to active representation. This study presents two of these incentives by explaining the potential effects of professional socialization and individual career ambition. Using 3 years of survey and performance data from public schools, this research explores how professional socialization and ambitions of career advancement may promote specific behaviors that potentially support or discourage effective representation. The results indicate that professional socialization actually promotes representation by African American and Latino bureaucrats. The impact of Latino representation across values of professional socialization is also significantly different from that of White managers. The results also demonstrate varying effects for bureaucratic career ambition, as the effect of Latino administrators on student performance is minimized for administrators with higher levels of ambition. For African American administrators, the opposite is true as Black administrators with high levels of ambition are related to increasingly positive student performance. These results add to our understanding of representative bureaucracy by exploring how different values will interact with a minority bureaucrat's decision to represent the interests of minority clients.