Antecedents to managing publicness: a study of professional and cultural socialization

Abstract

Recent scholarship on managing publicness better positions scholars to consider antecedents to managing publicness, such as the role of a manager's professional and cultural socialization. In this chapter, we consider professional and cultural socialization with respect to management tenure, gender, and race, and explore how these factors associated with a manager's socialization influence the way in which a given manager seeks to achieve public outcomes in the context of their organization (for a related discussion, see Chapter 11 in this volume). Better understanding of the effects of socialization in this publicness-specific context of management, whether emanating from tenure, gender, or race can " lead to insights into factors that make certain styles of leadership more effective or relevant in some contexts as compared with others" (Hamidullah et al. 2015, p. 249). While this study theorizes on the independent effects of these socialization factors, it may lay additional groundwork for scholars to explore the interactive effects of management tenure, gender, and race on managing publicness, similar to Breslin et al.'s (2017) research on intersectionality in public leadership. In this chapter, we review existing theories on classifying public organizations, offer propositions on the role of professional and cultural socialization in managing for public outcomes, and provide implications of this research for public administration scholarship and practice. PUBLICNESS THEORY Public administration scholars often examine the internal and environmental factors associated with various organizational outcomes, such as behavior and performance (Merritt et al. 2018a). Research in this area has provided clarity on the effects of varying organizational types on organizational outcomes and employ one of four analytical frameworks: the generic approach, 4 the core approach, the dimensional publicness approach, or the "realized publicness" approach (for summaries on the theoretical development of publicness theory and various publicness

Toward amicro‐levelperspective of organizational publicness: Felt organizational publicness in the eyes of state government employees

“…Axial coding identifies potential relationships among the concepts and categories. The coding process was nonlinear and iterative: concepts and patterns were identified and revised through the repeated procedure of close reading of transcripts, open‐coding, and comparing codes within and across cases (Merritt et al, 2018). Following Gioia et al's (2013) guideline, we started by generating first‐order codes by focusing on key phrases and sentences about the employees' responses on how they perceive organizational publicness.…”