Personnel constraints in public organizations: a study of intraorganizational variation and performance

Prior research has shown that personnel constraints are far more prevalent in the public sector than in the private sector. Anecdotal accounts suggest that public managers are hamstrung by these personnel constraints – particularly their inability to reward and punish employees to promote higher performance. As a result, more than three decades of public management reform has attempted to loosen these constraints on the assumption that more personnel system flexibility will lead to increased organizational performance. We mount an empirical study to test this assumption with data taken from a large-scale survey of English local authorities and other sources. We operationalize personnel constraints using Rainey’s (1979; Rainey et al. 1976) longstanding measures: "difficulty in removing poor managers" and "difficulty in rewarding good managers". We show that attitudes towards personnel constraint vary within organizations in statistically significant ways. The results from our lagged autoregressive multiple regression models also show that one of our personnel constraint measures – "difficulty in removing poor managers" – is harmful to performance but that the other "difficulty in rewarding good managers" has weak but positive short-term effects. The implications of these findings for public management research and practice are considered in the concluding section of the paper.postprintThe 10th Biennial Public Management Research Conference, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH., 1-3 October 2009

Administrative or survey data for measuring organizational performance: what's the difference?

Debate about the best way to measure performance in studies of management in public organizations is longstanding. We address this topic through a review of the evidence from 93 studies that use administrative and/or survey measures of organizational performance. We find that administrative data typically reflect the performance judgements of government (at the central, regional and local level) and regulators, while survey data is based on the perceptions of citizens, service users and public sector managers. We undertake a critical review of the twelve articles that use both administrative and survey measures of organizational performance. This reveals limited differences in the impact of management variables on the two types of performance measures. However, in those studies using survey measures, management variables are more likely to have a positive link with the performance judgements of service consumers than the judgements of managers themselves. This implies that public managers may underestimate their impact on citizens’ perceptions of organizational performance.postprintThe 14th International Research Society for Public Management (IRSPM) Conference, Berne, Switzerland, 7-9 April 2010

External control and red tape: the mediating effects of client and organizational feedback

Bozeman’s (1993, 2000) external control model of red tape posits that organizations with higher degrees of external control will have higher levels of red tape. According to the model, this is compounded by entropy affecting the communication of rules and their results, limited discretion over rules and procedures, and non-ownership of rules. However, the model predicts that red tape will be mediated by communication from clients and within the organization. Bozeman’s model is often cited in the literature, but it has not been subjected to empirical verification. This study tests the model using data from a multiple informant survey of 136 upper tier English local governments conducted in 2004 and several secondary sources. Statistical results show that external control does indeed lead to higher levels of red tape. We then test a number of organizational feedback mediators and find that client feedback does little to mediate the effects of red tape; the major factor is trust between politicians and officers. We discuss these findings and propose some changes to the model.postprin

Bureaucratic malaises and their remedies in Public and Nonprofit Organizations

Many experts have observed that bureaucratic malaises are endemic in public sector organizations. These so-called “diseases,” which include personnel constraints, red tape and risk avoidance, can discourage workers, damage organizational performance, and lower the quality of public services. The depth and impact of these malaises are tested across the public and nonprofit sectors using data from the third National Administrative Studies Project (NASP III). NASP III surveyed randomly selected managers in public and nonprofit organizations in Georgia and Illinois. Multiple informant data are aggregated to the organizational level resulting 47 public and 64 nonprofit organizations for further analysis. Multivariate statistical analysis suggests that most of the maladies have harmful effects on work quality in the public sector, but not on the nonprofit agencies studied in this sample. The results further show that task clarity does not mitigate the performance effects of these maladies in the public sector whereas in the nonprofit sector it is associated with higher levels of performance. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.postprin

Centralization, organizational strategy, and public service performance

We test the separate and joint effects of centralization and organizational strategy on the performance of 53 UK public service organizations. Centralization is measured as both the hierarchy of authority and the degree of participation in decision making, whereas strategy is measured as the extent to which service providers are prospectors, defenders, and reactors. We find that centralization has no independent effect on service performance, even when controlling for prior performance, service expenditure, and external constraints. However, the impact of centralization is contingent on the strategic orientation of organizations. Centralized decision making works best in conjunction with defending, and decentralized decision making works best in organizations that emphasize prospecting.postprin

Above all, do no harm: Towards more ethical ways of being and acting in psychological formulation

Recent evidence seems to suggest mental health service users can be at risk of persistent harm as a result of psychological interventions. This article analyses ways of addressing harm by using the ‘lenses’ of four ethical theories to view psychological formulation

Development and application of two novel monoclonal antibodies against overexpressed CD26 and integrin α3 in human pancreatic cancer.

Monoclonal antibody (mAb) technology is an excellent tool for the discovery of overexpressed cell surface tumour antigens and the development of targeting agents. Here, we report the development of two novel mAbs against CFPAC-1 human pancreatic cancer cells. Using ELISA, flow cytometry, immunoprecipitation, mass spectrometry, Western blot and immunohistochemistry, we found that the target antigens recognised by the two novel mAbs KU44.22B and KU44.13A, are integrin α3 and CD26 respectively, with high levels of expression in human pancreatic and other cancer cell lines and human pancreatic cancer tissue microarrays. Treatment with naked anti-CD26 mAb KU44.13A did not have any effect on the growth and migration of cancer cells nor did it induce receptor downregulation. In contrast, treatment with anti-integrin α3 mAb KU44.22B inhibited growth in vitro of Capan-2 cells, increased migration of BxPC-3 and CFPAC-1 cells and induced antibody internalisation. Both novel mAbs are capable of detecting their target antigens by immunohistochemistry but not by Western blot. These antibodies are excellent tools for studying the role of integrin α3 and CD26 in the complex biology of pancreatic cancer, their prognostic and predictive values and the therapeutic potential of their humanised and/or conjugated versions in patients whose tumours overexpress integrin α3 or CD26

Spinal involvement in mucopolysaccharidosis IVA (Morquio-Brailsford or Morquio A syndrome): presentation, diagnosis and management.

Mucopolysaccharidosis IVA (MPS IVA), also known as Morquio-Brailsford or Morquio A syndrome, is a lysosomal storage disorder caused by a deficiency of the enzyme N-acetyl-galactosamine-6-sulphate sulphatase (GALNS). MPS IVA is multisystemic but manifests primarily as a progressive skeletal dysplasia. Spinal involvement is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in MPS IVA. Early diagnosis and timely treatment of problems involving the spine are critical in preventing or arresting neurological deterioration and loss of function. This review details the spinal manifestations of MPS IVA and describes the tools used to diagnose and monitor spinal involvement. The relative utility of radiography, computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for the evaluation of cervical spine instability, stenosis, and cord compression is discussed. Surgical interventions, anaesthetic considerations, and the use of neurophysiological monitoring during procedures performed under general anaesthesia are reviewed. Recommendations for regular radiological imaging and neurologic assessments are presented, and the need for a more standardized approach for evaluating and managing spinal involvement in MPS IVA is addressed

Atomic excitation during recollision-free ultrafast multi-electron tunnel ionization

Modern intense ultrafast pulsed lasers generate an electric field of sufficient strength to permit tunnel ionization of the valence electrons in atoms. This process is usually treated as a rapid succession of isolated events, in which the states of the remaining electrons are neglected. Such electronic interactions are predicted to be weak, the exception being recollision excitation and ionization caused by linearly-polarized radiation. In contrast, it has recently been suggested that intense field ionization may be accompanied by a two-stage `shake-up' reaction. Here we report a unique combination of experimental techniques that enables us to accurately measure the tunnel ionization probability for argon exposed to 50 femtosecond laser pulses. Most significantly for the current study, this measurement is independent of the optical focal geometry, equivalent to a homogenous electric field. Furthermore, circularly-polarized radiation negates recollision. The present measurements indicate that tunnel ionization results in simultaneous excitation of one or more remaining electrons through shake-up. From an atomic physics standpoint, it may be possible to induce ionization from specific states, and will influence the development of coherent attosecond XUV radiation sources. Such pulses have vital scientific and economic potential in areas such as high-resolution imaging of in-vivo cells and nanoscale XUV lithography.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, original format as accepted by Nature Physic

Evidence for Pervasive Adaptive Protein Evolution in Wild Mice

The relative contributions of neutral and adaptive substitutions to molecular evolution has been one of the most controversial issues in evolutionary biology for more than 40 years. The analysis of within-species nucleotide polymorphism and between-species divergence data supports a widespread role for adaptive protein evolution in certain taxa. For example, estimates of the proportion of adaptive amino acid substitutions (alpha) are 50% or more in enteric bacteria and Drosophila. In contrast, recent estimates of alpha for hominids have been at most 13%. Here, we estimate alpha for protein sequences of murid rodents based on nucleotide polymorphism data from multiple genes in a population of the house mouse subspecies Mus musculus castaneus, which inhabits the ancestral range of the Mus species complex and nucleotide divergence between M. m. castaneus and M. famulus or the rat. We estimate that 57% of amino acid substitutions in murids have been driven by positive selection. Hominids, therefore, are exceptional in having low apparent levels of adaptive protein evolution. The high frequency of adaptive amino acid substitutions in wild mice is consistent with their large effective population size, leading to effective natural selection at the molecular level. Effective natural selection also manifests itself as a paucity of effectively neutral nonsynonymous mutations in M. m. castaneus compared to humans