In the last three decades, public tasks have been shifted from central government to a proliferated periphery of autonomous agencies. According to the New Public Management (NPM) doctrine, organizational autonomy would induce these agencies to develop a more private sector-like management, to be more customer-oriented, and to be more accountable for results. Although many governments of most OECD countries continue(d) to change the structure of their public sector fundamentally, following NPM and post-NPM recipes, little was known of the effect of increased autonomy. More precisely, there was a lack of theoretical modelling, appropriate methodologies and empirical evidence about the effects of organizational autonomy. This research addressed this gap by testing the effects of organizational autonomy on (1) the organizational capacity, (2) the managerial and policy processes, and (3) the accountabilities of public sector organizations. These have been identified as necessary preconditions for a better organizational performance. The study tested hypotheses from rational choice institutionalism, organization theory, historic institutionalism and sociological institutionalism, in order to study the main effects and to control for specific factors. The leading research questions were:
(A) Explanatory: To what extent does the autonomy of single agencies affect their organizational capacities, processes, and accountabilities?
(B) Explanatory: Which intervening features at country-level and agency-level strengthen or reduces these effects? Which theory helps to explain these effects?
These research questions have been addressed by exploiting a dataset containing survey data from 1408 agencies in 15 European countries with different politico-administrative regimes (combined with other data), by collaborating with partners within the COBRA-CRIPO network.
1) The organizational capacity of organizations: The research has described and examined the effect of personnel and financial management autonomy on the organizational culture of organizations. NPM claims that the ‘right’ culture is a trigger for efficiency and effectiveness (often objectives of reforms in the public sector), and that culture is a malleable component of organizations (Ongaro and Rodolfi 1998; Schedler and Proeller 2007). Following this logic, managerial autonomy and result control can be determinants of organizational culture. I have examined whether more managerial autonomy and result control makes organizational culture move away from traditional compliance-oriented, detail- oriented, bureaucratic cultures, towards organizational cultures which are more oriented towards external customers. Not only the effect of managerial autonomy on the strength of a customer-oriented culture within public sectors has been examined but also whether this culture becomes dominant over traditional public administration culture. Managerial autonomy and result control separately proved to have a positive effect on the development of cultures linked to NPM. Yet it does not make these dominant over other cultures. More importantly, combinations propagated by NPM thus lead to contra-intuitive results.
2) The managerial and policy processes: The effect of managerial autonomy on the use of a set of performance management tools in autonomous organizations has been examined in detail across a wide range of countries. Findings indicate that especially result control and not managerial autonomy is the driving forces for using performance management techniques. Result control is particularly important to start making organizations use performance management techniques. The impact is however less strong on the extent to which these are used. Although the effect of result control proved to exist for all examined performance management techniques, other factors such as primary task, size or formal-legal statute of the organization may intervene in this relationship and also affect the use of performance management techniques.
3) The accountabilities of the organizations: Accountability to political principals, stakeholders and citizens is a major issue in the literature on structurally disaggregated autonomous agencies. There are numerous accounts in the literature which claim that the need for independence of agencies reduces the ability of political principals to hold it and its leadership accountable for actions. However, next to traditional vertical accountability instruments (e.g. through monitoring and evaluation of the organization or senior management), there exist “alternative”, horizontal ways of holding agencies accountable.
Main innovative theoretical insights & quality of the research:
This research has been the first study to empirically examine the effect of NPM, and autonomy in general, across several countries allowing more generalizable statements. Two innovative theoretical insights can be identified:
1) Contrary to NPM doctrines, giving public sector organizations more managerial autonomy combined with result control does not automatically lead to more effective and efficient public sector organizations. A more nuanced view on agencification is thus necessary since straightforward NPM recipes do not work. The ideal NPM type agency encompassing an innovation-oriented culture, use of performance management techniques, and a strong degree of internal decentralization seems impossible to achieve. Consequently, governments should adjust their goals and try to improve the public sector on key aspects they believe necessary instead of just trying to improve everything with a one fits all ‘success’ recipe.
2) Moreover, this research has led to the insight that not only the last but also previous reforms have to be taken into account when examining organizational behavior. In other words, it appears that public sector organizations are strongly influenced by historical legacies. Within Public Administration (PA) - but also within organization studies - using organizational history to explain organizational behavior is gaining importance (e.g. the ‘historic turn in the study of organizations’; Wadwani & Bucheli, 2014). Regardless of these developments, literature which systematically takes historical legacies into account is lacking within Public Administration. Contrary to only examining the effect of one specific reform (NPM).