Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: The Role of Research in Making Public Management (and Public Managers) More Effective

(Public and Non-Profit Management and Finance)

Making government more effective requires effective of public agencies, which, in turn, require the effective management of these agencies—both individually and collectively. Unfortunately, the effective public management is qualitatively different—in multiple dimensions—from effective private-sector management. Certainly, it is more complex. Thus, although many of the managerial strategies that make business organizations effective can be adapted by creative public executives to improve their organizations’ effectiveness, research focused on public management can contribute significantly to improving government’s effectiveness. One research approach emphasizes the rational design of management systems that could drive effectiveness. Unfortunately, effective management is excruciatingly challenging. Any management strategy that improves effectiveness—that produces more and/or better results—requires more than the straightforward implementation of policy. It requires that executives specify what effectiveness means in particular circumstances, to communicate that vision clearly to individuals, teams, and collaborators, to collect data that reveal both progress and barriers, and thus to focus attention on the actions that need to be taken next, and then to motivate subordinates and collaborators to implement that strategy creatively and passionately. The scholars on this panel have dedicated their careers to research designed to help public managers become more effective. Thus the themes of this panel reflect their scholarly history as well as their current research focus. These include: the challenges of implementing real data-driven management that involves the active, strategic use of metrics in decision making, the challenges of orchestrating collaboration in a hybrid arrangement of multiple organizations from different sectors; and the challenges of doing so while relying not on explicit knowledge that can be easily communicated but by exploiting the tacit knowledge that multiple members of the leadership team(s) possess. For public sector organizations to be more effective they obviously have to be able to use data in a way that is more than mere window dressing. Yet there is a big difference between the explicit knowledge of mathematics and the tacit knowledge required to use data effectively. Similarly the prerequisites for the subunits of a hybrid organization to work together effectively include a tacit understanding of the objectives, norms, standard operating procedures, and strategies of their colleagues. Finally, public executives need to understand, appreciate, and employ not just the explicit knowledge that emerges from traditional research. They also need to understand, appreciate, and then learn how to adapt the tacit knowledge that they and their colleagues have acquired to their current task of improving effectiveness. And accepting that much of their knowledge is indeed tacit—that it cannot be converted into yet another set of standard operating procedures for everyone to mindlessly follow—is one of the important lessons that public-management research can help to convey. Public management research—as the scholarship presented by this panel will exemplify—is explicitly designed to improve the effectiveness of government.