The Impact of Relational Factors on Contracting Management in Public Organizations

Abstract

This study examines how public managers perceive the value of contractors who hire former agency employees. We find that contractors strategically hire former agency employees to ensure the accomplishment of contract work, potential renewal, and extension of the current project. although it is unclear whether agency managers prefer contractors who are the agency's former employees to contractors who have no prior connection with the agency, it is clear that they tend to hire contractors who are more familiar with the agency rules, policies, and inside practices rather than those who are not. However, frequency of interaction with current contractors and contract management experience in the private sector do not have any significant effect on the favorable perception of the agency managers toward increasing contracting out. The findings have important implications for human resource managers, particularly when agencies expand and diversify sources of human resources to increase the overall capacity of agencies.

Intra-Organizational Communication in Public Agencies: The Effects of Contracting Out Core Services

“…Both institutional complexity and fragmentation might undermine intra-organizational communication (Graber, 1992). First, contractors are new nodes added to an organization's network (Galbraith, 1973;Klijn, 2002;Pandey & Bretschneider, 1997), making it necessary to develop new outward communication pathways to manage them (Amirkhanyan, 2011;Lee & Kingsley, 2009). With attention shifted to managing outward communication, we expect the principal organizations' employees to become less responsive to internal requests for information and invest less energy, attention, and time to disseminate information internally (Zhang et al, 2021).…”

“…Second, an increased number of contractors lead to fragmented authority and responsibilities as service provision is split across two or more organizations (Garicano & Wu, 2012; Meyers et al, 2001). This means that the principal organization needs to integrate multiple and diverse information systems to gather information (Lee & Kingsley, 2009; Meyers et al, 2001). Integration of information systems is often underfunded and ineffective in government (Kim & Lee, 2006; Thompson & Riccucci, 1998).…”

“…In the past decades, contracting out of public organizations’ core services has greatly increased across all policy areas (Government Business Council, 2015). This trend has spurred a vast scholarship on whether contracting enhances or hinders organizational performance and how public organizations can reduce moral hazard and opportunism across their contractors (Brown et al, 2018; Carnochan et al, 2019; Lee & Kingsley, 2009; Lindholst & Bogetoft, 2011). More recently, contracting scholars have taken an organizational approach by examining how contractual arrangements affect the principal organization's activities and workforce and, ultimately, its effectiveness and efficiency (Lee & Lee, 2020; Lee et al, 2021; Lindholst et al, 2018).…”

Are We There Yet? The State of Public Human Resource Management Research

“…Initially, decentralization (Coggburn, 2000, 2005; Hou, Ingraham, Bretschneider, & Selden, 2000; Witesman & Wise, 2009) was a focus of research as many of the reforms were often couched under this broader focus. As PHRM reforms expanded, declassification (Whalen & Guy, 2008) and privatization of human resource activities (Coggburn, 2007; Lee & Kingsley, 2009; Siegel, 2000; Snavely & Desai, 2010) have only recently come under greater scrutiny. Llorens and Battaglio (2010) suggest that these five distinct reform themes have emerged over the last three decades as a challenge to traditional PHRM.…”

Outsourcing Expert Services by State Transportation Departments

“…However, most of the studies have been case studies of one or a few highway agencies (DeHart-Davis & Kingsley, 2005;Gen & Kingsley, 2007;Lee & Kingsley, 2009;Ponomariov & Kingsley, 2008). Our study employs the results of a survey sent to all state DOTs in the United States to explore the effects of outsourcing on the cost and quality of services.…”