Structural reform histories and perceptions of organizational autonomy: Do senior managers perceive less strategic policy autonomy when faced with frequent and intense restructuring?

Abstract

Through recurrent structural reform programmes governments are on a quest to design public organizations that will stand the test of their environment. One of the approaches to uncertain or sensitive issues has been to create various forms of (semi‐)autonomous organizations with substantial strategic discretion. However, while governments repeatedly experiment with designs, one might simultaneously expect that such interference through repeated structural change may limit the degree of strategic policy autonomy perceived by senior managers. More specifically, we propose that intense structural reforms may inadvertently reduce strategic policy autonomy perceptions through two mechanisms. First, intense sequences of structural reforms may lead to perceptions of relatively controlling political principals. Second, they may reduce an organization's ability to accrue resources beneficial to autonomy, such as a strong internal culture, network embeddedness and expertise. Results indicate that strategic policy autonomy perceptions will indeed be detrimentally affected for organizations that experience intense sequences of structural reform.

Keeping a watchful eye in times of turmoil? How repeated structural reform leads to more attention to political signals

“…Severe disruption (e.g., in the form of repeated structural reform) within an agency may make both its senior management and subordinate civil servants increasingly risk averse (’t Hart and Wille 2006). While scholars interested in de facto autonomy have found that such disruption may thus reduce perceptions of autonomy (Kleizen et al ), we posit that it is also likely that they may increase the attention devoted to signals, as the organization's management attempts to safeguard the organization's stability.…”

“…However, previous work already indicates that political actors have a strong urge to steer their implementing organizations, even when these organizations are placed at some distance from the government (’t Hart and Wille 2006; Kleizen et al ). As many formal control mechanisms that allow for ad hoc steering, such as the competence to provide direct and binding instructions, are not available towards formally autonomous agencies, political actors may resort to intervening through structural reforms altering the tasks, legal statute and organizational framework underpinning the agency (Carpenter ; Hood and Lodge , p. 184; Terman ; Zito ).…”

“…We argue that such employees are likely to place increased emphasis on signals from the government, the competent minister or state secretary and his/her ministry or political advisers—which we will refer to as political signals, for purposes of succinctness—to anticipate and prevent additional turmoil (’t Hart and Wille 2006; Terman ). Thus, we argue that when an agency is reformed too frequently, a situation may arise in which the effort to insulate an organization from political life is (partially) undone by the psychological processes produced by the reform fever confronting said organization (Kleizen et al ).…”

“…Moreover, while one might argue that changing the organization's overarching course to match the preferences of its political principals might be the goal of some structural reforms (e.g., Carpenter ; Zito ), it is likely that altering the individual‐level attentiveness to political signals of civil servants is an unexpected side‐effect (Kleizen et al ). In particular when a history comprising frequent structural reform increases this effect, it is likely that at least some of these structural reforms were not intended to alter the degree to which individuals within the organization devote attention to political signals.…”

Explaining the survival of public organizations: Applying density dependence theory to a population of US federal agencies

“…One approach has been to test whether an organization can be designed or 'hardwired' to survive. Prominent design factors are legislative design and formal autonomy (Lewis 2003;Carpenter and Lewis 2004;Boin et al 2010;Park 2013;Greasley and Hanretty 2016;James et al 2016;Kleizen et al 2018). While these factors matter (Lewis 2003), they do not tell the whole story.…”