Cultural Theory and Managerial Values: Examining Trust as a Motivation for Collaboration

Abstract

Public administration theorists have long argued that values of administrative actors fundamentally shape the quality and nature of the public services they provide. While there has been some work in recent years to measure values in the public sector like Public Service Motivation, we know relatively little about the role that other (more basic) values play in shaping managerial behaviour. To fill this gap, we argue that Cultural Theory (CT), a prominent theory within research on risk and public opinion, provides a general framework for operationalizing and measuring the values of public managers, which (if pursued) allows scholars to directly test important yet untested hypotheses about the relationship between values and managerial decision‐making. To explore this proposition, we use data from a recent survey of American Indian education directors in public school districts to examine the relationship between cultural worldviews and managerial motivation to engage actors in collaborative arrangements.

Introduction to the Symposium

“…Conner et al () use the Cultural Theory variant to develop and test hypotheses about the conditions under which Native American education directors in public school districts in three US states coordinate with each other. However, rather than examining the influence of institutions, they test an ideational operationalization of the theory rooted in individual values and perceptions taken as fixed, finding that worldviews explain the particular motivations for coordination reported in their survey data.…”

“…Both studies powerfully undermine claims of generalized 'network governance' and 'soft coordination mechanisms' which have been so fashionable in public administration literatures on both sides of the Atlantic, but they also place heavy qualifications on arguments that hierarchical ordering remains central. Conner et al (2016) use the Cultural Theory variant to develop and test hypotheses about the conditions under which Native American education directors in public school districts in three US states coordinate with each other. However, rather than examining the influence of institutions, they test an ideational operationalization of the theory rooted in individual values and perceptions taken as fixed, finding that worldviews explain the particular motivations for coordination reported in their survey data.…”

“…For their survey-based examination of institutional pressure, Entwistle et al (2016) use statements of perceived organizational effort, constraint and opportunity. For their ideational worldview variant, Conner et al (2016) use batteries of statements of normative beliefs.…”

How participant values influence reasons for pursuing voluntary programme membership

“…To conceptualize participants’ values, we adapt dimensions proposed by grid‐group cultural theory, developed in the field of anthropology (Douglas , ) and later introduced to political science (Wildavsky ). The theory has seen a surge of attention among public policy and administration scholars examining a range of phenomena, from policy images (Robinson ) to managerial values in public sector organizations (Conner et al ). From cultural theory, we adopt the perspective that distinctive worldviews, characterized by the degree to which individuals are amenable to externally imposed prescriptions (referred to as grid) and the extent to which they value social collectives (group), influence motivations and behaviour.…”

The Current State of Interorganizational Collaboration: Lessons for Human Service Research and Management

“…For example, Goldman and Kahnweiler (2000) use popular personality tests to determine if, in addition to describing personality types, they can also be used to identify "collaborative" profiles. And a recent article by Conner et al (2015) uses "cultural theory" to test public managers' motivations to collaborate, an approach that suggests that attitudes about cultural norms such as egalitarianism and authoritarianism also create collaborative predispositions. Overall, more than one third of the entire scholarship on nonprofit intersectoral and cross-sectoral collaboration involved theories that do not include institutional dynamics and thus are less familiar to the management, economics, and policy disciplines.…”