Influence of the National Performance Review on Supervisors in Government Organizations
Publication: Leadership and Management in Engineering
Volume 6, Issue 4
Abstract
Government organizations hold a reputation of performing inefficiently. Multiple levels of management in addition to complex policies and procedures emphasize the importance of having competent supervisors leading workers. In order for government organizations to work productively through the systems’ complex structures, supervisors need to motivate their employees and make ethical decisions. Government officials established the National Performance Review (NPR), now known as the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR), to help improve the efficiency of government workers by increasing the responsibilities of supervisors within organizations. With this increased responsibility, supervisors are exposed to corruption, influenced by having more power and control over their workers. Supervisors need to remain moral and ethical in order to preserve the integrity of government organizations. The NPR stresses the importance of having competent supervisors who act responsibly and ethically so government organizations can improve productivity.
The nature of business in the private sector requires companies to work in an efficient and productive manner in order to achieve maximum profitability, as clients are usually attracted to efficient companies. By adhering to this philosophy of productivity, private companies grow economically and technologically even to the point where government agencies contract work out to the private sector. This inefficient way of conducting government business caught the attention of high government officials and they began to take a look at the public sector using the private sector as a comparison (NPR 1993).
Society holds the stereotype of government agencies as expensive and inefficient. With multiple levels of management, authority, and numerous policies, government employees may find themselves assigned simple tasks that end up hitting all of the barriers within the procedural structure of the government organization, resulting in unnecessary time and effort required to accomplish the tasks. Years and years of policies and procedures have compounded into a complex government organization filled with “red tape” and barriers to efficiency. Since clients to government agencies are the tax-paying general public, no regulation exists for government agencies to be productive and efficient.
In recent years, legislators and other powerful politicians decided to attack the colluded structure of federal government agencies by forcing them to derive plans to make their organizations more efficient and productive. When upper management officials in government organizations investigated their situations, they noticed that civil servants lack the appropriate motivation required for productive output:
The bottom line was that supervisors were not effectively influencing their employees to be productive. Supervisors were blaming the process for their unproductiveness, rather than taking the initiative to change the attitudes of workers within the system to be productive.The regulations and statutes that bind federal employees from exercising discretion available in the private sector all come about as a response to the humiliations, mistakes, [and] embarrassments of the past … even though … [these] problems are fifteen, twenty, [and] thirty years old … and … the regulations and the statutes don’t change. The need to enforce the regulations and statutes, in turn, creates needless layers of bureaucracy … . We must first shift from systems that hold people accountable for process to systems that hold them accountable for results (NPR 1993).
Supervisors are present in every level of a government organization, including production, work floor, and management positions. In order to improve productivity in government agencies, supervisors need to play a larger role in directly influencing their employees. Supervisors need (1) the appropriate training and experience to attain knowledge in their field, (2) accountability for their actions and those of their employees within their responsibility as supervisor, and (3) personal morals so as not to be persuaded and influenced by political pressures.
Background
After years and years of observing how the public sector operated, political pressures within the legislature and other government branches forced former president Clinton to devise a plan for improving the efficiency of government agencies. Upon review of how inefficiently government agencies operated, former vice president Al Gore embarked on a ten-year program called the National Performance Review (NPR) in 1993 that aimed to improve the management of government organizations and reduce the size of the work force. Ban (1999) states that in order to accomplish these goals, Gore focused on deregulation, decentralization, and delegation within the civil service system. The last implemented change would be the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA), which developed government performance by holding managers accountable.
According to Ban (1999), deregulation would occur with the elimination of the Federal Personnel Manual (FPM), the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), and any other agency directives that would bind personnel to rules and regulations. The FPM is a ten-thousand-page guide on how personnel should implement Title 5, the law governing the civil service system; the CFR is the official regulation implementing Title 5. However, due to the security and public safety risks, it might be necessary to create new regulations to preserve the integrity of the government organization.
The NPR hoped to attain decentralization by eliminating the role of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) as the source of employment into civil service jobs. Each agency would be responsible for handling the resumes of their own applicants, therefore subjecting potential employees to their own processes and procedures. By allowing each agency to handle their own applicants, people who wanted to apply for civil service jobs would then need only to apply at each organization they were interested in working for instead of to the entire pot of organizations, hoping to get picked by one.
More human resources responsibilities would be delegated to first-line managers, allowing them to gain more control over hiring, classifying, and assessing the performance of their employees. This goal of the NPR eliminated several barriers that existed in the traditional public sector. With this NPR goal implemented, first-line managers could control the outcome of their employees’ career. However, a negative aspect of this goal lies in the susceptibility of managers becoming corrupt because of this new power, using it to their own advantage and hurting the organization. Ban (1999) states that in some agencies, managers do not want to assume the additional human resources responsibility. Also, the NPR decreased the number of managers and put additional pressures on managers who reluctantly inherited additional human resource responsibilities.
In 1997, GPRA mandated that all agencies would develop a five-year strategic plan stating annual performance plans with objective, quantifiable outcome measures. Government agencies needed to develop a way to measure the performance of their organization while still holding managers accountable for personnel performance. This posed a problem since managers did not have a standard comparison to measure their personnel performance in relation to the organizational goals (Ban 1999).
Currently, government agencies have been reengineering and reforming their organizations in order to meet the criteria set forth by the NPR and GPRA. Each agency received recommendations from the NPR committee that were reviewed by the General Accounting Office (GAO) for the impact and applicability of these reforms on the agency.
After each agency implemented their recommendations, they experienced a difficult internal struggle with employees “buying-in” to the reforms required by their organization to achieve the goal of efficiency as called out in the NPR recommendations. Due to these struggles, costs have actually increased due to the attitude of employees (Halachmi 1997). During a time of change, employees fear for the survival of their job and become less motivated to work. Employees may even sacrifice their current job to look for something else. Management needs to regain their employees’ trust and corporate loyalty in order to keep the organization running during times of change.
Seven years into the reform, agencies have slowly configured their organizations to implement the NPR recommendations. For example, the Department of Defense will be implementing performance-based pay as an incentive to work productively, though it is not clear that such incentives are necessarily effective. This productivity incentive was set in place at the beginning of 2006. Currently, Department of Defense employees have a pay schedule that allows for raises based on the amount of time someone works for the agency, independent of their contributions and performance. Although a new president from the one who started this initiative now resides in Washington D.C., improving the efficiency of government organizations still remains a high priority for government officials.
Organizational Change Under NPR
Many organizational reforms center on changing the people to fit the “new look” of the organization. Before the NPR reforms were started, management needed to convince the workers to “buy-in” to the changes. Successful organizational reforms were implemented very carefully and took a lot of patience, time, energy, and cooperation between the management and staff. However, government agencies face a major hurdle in that they are large organizations typically employing people who do not possess the motivation to change or improve.
Typically during a reform, upper management usually decides how the change will be implemented. Many times, these upper managers involve themselves too much with the actual implementation of these changes when they should be observing the dynamics of the changes on the entire organization instead of just on one group (Gabris et al. 1999). Upper management will usually try and make their ideas come into being by directing employees on how to implement the changes. When this happens, the reform tends to go badly because upper management has lost focus of the ends by concentrating on the means. This can become more complex with government agencies due to the multiple levels of management. People and focus get lost, leaving everything in confusion.
In the case of government agencies, instead of trying to have the “foot fit the shoe,” government officials should try to make the “shoe fit the foot.” The shoe represents the organization and the foot represents the people in the organization. As Argyris (1964) stated in those nascent years of the advancement of management science, the individual is of paramount importance to the organization and cannot be sacrificed; thus, the company must not think itself “bigger” than the individual, and the organization should not restrict the growth of its personnel. Instead of reforming the people within the organization, the organization should reform around its people. This means that reform tactics should center on motivating people to improve themselves, which in turn will increase the productivity of the organization.
With government agencies forced to improve their productivity according to the recommendations and time constraints made by the NPR committee, organizations need the cooperation of all employees in order to fully achieve this mandate. As stated previously, the key step in accomplishing the reform is getting the employees to “buy-in” to the changes. Once employees hear that their organization will change, most people will put up their barrier of resistance. Someone needs to assure these employees that things will be different, that they will still have their job because the organization still needs them.
Supervisors are key people for motivating their employees. A supervisor can be defined as anyone who has subordinates and has the authority to make decisions. Some supervisors have more subordinates than others, but as long as they act in the capacity of being responsible for a subordinate’s actions, they are a supervisor. If supervisors can motivate their employees to improve productivity, the summation of all employees becoming more productive will undoubtedly benefit the overall productivity of the organization. This bottom-up approach places more responsibility on the supervisor, but also attacks the problem at its source—the questionable productivity of government workers. The rest of this paper will describe three key points that supervisors should pay attention to if they want to motivate their employees to be productive: (1) knowledge is power for leaders; (2) the importance of accountability; and (3) avoiding the seeds of corruption.
Supervisors need adequate training and knowledge
At one point in their careers, all supervisors served their respective times as subordinates to other supervisors. During this time, they learned the “tricks of their trade” and experienced the application of this learning when working a job. Some individuals may have learned more than others or may have become “experts” in certain fields as subordinates. After learning their trade, the subordinates receive an offer to become a supervisor of others, mostly because of their trade knowledge. In order to be promoted, a subordinate should have confidence in his or her experience, so when approached by others, he or she can knowledgably and adequately answer questions.
It goes without saying that a supervisor must have necessary supervisory skills. For example, in a white- and blue-collar government agency, workers who attend trade school learn firsthand how a job should be conducted. Also, they gain knowledge of their responsibilities and work procedures because of on the job experience. A white-collar engineer may not learn these things unless he or she observes the blue-collar worker actually performing their job. Instead of having the supervisor refer their staff member to the engineer for problems, they need to be the first to attempt to answer their staff member’s question. Often, supervisors know the answers to their staffer’s question because they experienced the same or similar situation before, but decide to conform to the government worker mentality of relying on technically qualified white-collar workers to answer simple shop practice questions. By asking white-collar workers questions, it increases the time spent on one specific job. All too commonly in government agencies, the worker assumes the lazy mentality of their supervisor because the example of accepted laziness is demonstrated by the supervisor, thus hindering productivity.
On the other hand, if supervisors do not have the appropriate knowledge and are inadequately prepared to take on the tasks of managing others, the organization and their subordinates suffer. Hays (1996) believes:
Due to this growing trend, organizations should require their supervisors to be adequately prepared to train and teach subordinates the knowledge necessary for performing their jobs. With unqualified supervisors, the entire organization will suffer because no one will be able to perform their duties efficiently.With the expansion of the service economy, jobs are becoming increasingly professional and technical in nature. Knowledge workers will certainly have the upper hand in this environment, yet many of the employees entering the labor force will probably lack the requisite skills to compete. Not only will many new entrants to the labor force be relatively unprepared technically and educationally, but a large portion will also lack necessary language and behavioral skills.”
Promoting unqualified workers to be supervisors goes against the intent of becoming productive. If a leader shows uncertainty, their staff will not believe in them. As Coggburn and Hays (2004) describe it:
Since the workers are mostly in contact with their supervisor, the supervisor figure needs to be strong and motivational enough to support the needs of the worker. In essence, the organization must take care of the worker’s financial and personal needs regarding salary and benefits. Thus, the supervisor needs to tend to the emotional needs of workers because of the close personal contact.The first [enduring lesson] is that most workers don’t leave agencies, they leave supervisors…departing workers leave for reasons that are not directly work-related (lack of management support, failure to provide back-up during call arguments, etc.). Supervisors who report the lowest levels of turnover tend to be much more actively involved in promoting the intrinsic rewards of the job. In the words of one manager, those who “celebrate the staff” are most successful in retaining workers (emphasis added).
Based on this assessment of supervisor qualifications, credentialing of supervisors becomes ever so important. Current policies and procedures regarding the promotion of a worker to supervisor need to surpass those of the past, which only required years of service as a determining factor. Jones (1985) agrees:
Thus, it seems reasonable to believe that credentialing a worker to become a supervisor should entail a checklist of skills and knowledge required for promotion related solely to the section he or she applies to as a supervisor. This will ensure that only a qualified person becomes a supervisor.[T]he personnel function of government becomes critically important in any credentialing program of public managers. Personnelists will be called upon to match the new kind of public managers with the strategic managerial needs of government agencies. They can accomplish this difficult task only if there exists in law (a) a set of principles specifying the content of the skills and knowledge of a professional public manager, and (b) an official body with the purpose of translating these principles into practice.
However, some occasions arise where no one possesses the necessary qualifications required of a supervisor, yet the position needs to be filled by someone. In this situation, an evaluation of applicants can either promote the most qualified person or pose an invitation for corruption. Since the position needs to be filled right away, upper management may recommend people based on criteria not relevant to skill or knowledge. Jones (1985) points out that “this situation has created a sort of administrative vacuum where strongly organized, special interest groups have preempted important managerial positions with merit not being a significantcriterion for appointment.” Unfortunately, organizations encounter situations like these more often than desired. People who receive promotions based on corruption end up hurting the organization emotionally and financially.
Reduction in Force (RIF)
Current trends of government agencies subjected to the NPR recommendations resulted in the reduction in force (RIF) where downsizing of employees occurs. The morale of employees turns to a low level as they feel uncertain about the security of their job. However, management still has expectations for supervisors to perform at the same level or better with fewer resources. In order to successfully accomplish necessary tasks, supervisors need to knowledgably allocate their resources and lead their employees by motivating them to remain productive. Cayer (1986) discusses this dilemma by stating:
Reduction in force gives management an additional burden of dealing with employee insecurity and uncertainty … [and] department morale may suffer along with productivity. The challenge of management is to keep people motivated to do the work of the organization while worrying about their jobs and futures. Employees often start spending their time looking for other jobs as a protection against unemployment. Thus, management is faced with employees whose efforts are directed more to new job searches than to working for the organization.
The workflow of the organization is also often disrupted by RIFs because of the interorganizational conflicts that develop and because of changes of people in work groups. Because RIFs frequently involve demotions and bumping, work groups are disrupted and it takes time to integrate new members into the work situation. Reassignments result in the need for training, thus leading to lower productivity for a period of time.
Situations like RIFs test a supervisor’s ability to lead a group through a difficult time of change. With the departure of productive and capable workers, supervisors need to find ways to motivate the remaining workers who might not be as independent. This may require supervisors to spend more time teaching and assisting workers with their tasks. In order to continue running the organization, supervisors need to overcome their losses and train the remaining workers on how to effectively perform their jobs through efficient training and constant motivation.Additionally, managers have difficulty accomplishing RIFs while maintaining a productive organization because the insecurity of employees leads to loss of many of the best. The most productive and capable are usually the ones who are able to find other positions. Thus, those who have the potential for being the most productive leave the manager with fewer capable employees.
Evolution of supervisors to managers
The perception of supervisors began evolving in the mid 1980s, from a knowledgeable person to a knowledgeable leader. An increasing demand for supervisors to take on more of a managerial role within the organization initiated a wave of training supervisors on how to become leaders. Possessing trade knowledge was not enough to be a supervisor. Adams et al. (1986) concurs:
Managers can no longer be selected solely on experience and knowledge. Contemporary managers are more likely to be selected because of their ability to understand how to get people involved and committed to the expectations of an organization.
More contemporary organizations, finding themselves in a position requiring flexibility of employees, have moved toward selecting people for management positions because of their demonstrated leadership abilities as opposed to their management experience. These individuals are the ones who recognize that project management and organization development are part of their…role as managers, not simply managerial toys.
Not all leadership skills can be taught, but can be acquired by trial and error experience. A few people possess these unlearned skills naturally because of their personality. Various forms of leadership are required when managing people, and some supervisors possess more experience and skills than others. The supervisors who can absorb the most leadership skills will successfully manage their employees.
Some people perceive managers as leaders automatically because of the authoritative role of a manager. However, slight differences in attitude and goals exist between managers and leaders. Yessian (1988) notes:
[M]anagers tend to adopt impersonal attitudes toward goals. Their goals tend to emerge from necessities and to be deeply ingrained in the history and culture of the organization. Leaders, in contrast, are inclined to take a more personal and active attitude toward goals. They aim to change the way the organization thinks about what is desirable, possible, and necessary.
As described above, leaders think of the organization first and their personal goals second. Effective leaders can equally balance the goals and priorities of the organization with the needs and wants of their employees, which is becoming increasingly difficult in the competitive world today. A majority of leaders are managers, but managers are not always leaders.Similarly, while managers prefer to work with people in terms of a part they play in a sequence of events or in a decision-making process, leaders are inclined to relate to people in more innovative and sympathetic ways. Whereas a manager’s attention is focused on how things are done, leaders focus on what the event and decisions mean.
In essence, a supervisor needs leadership skills along with adequate trade knowledge in order to be successful. Knowledge of one’s trade and the ability to lead are two of the most important things required of a supervisor. Having trade knowledge entitles supervisors to exert power over their subordinates, which in turn will develop into respect. Supervisors have legitimate power over their subordinates because of their position in the organization hierarchy, but do not necessarily gain respect. However, if a supervisor does not gain the respect of his or her subordinates, conflicts will arise and deter workers from being productive. When supervisors lead others, they gain referent power over subordinates because of their ability to motivate others. Supervisors need to harness their power resources in order to increase productivity.
The importance of accountability
One of the main things lacking in most government agencies is personal accountability. Many civil servants work because of necessity rather than because they take pride in their jobs; further, they find the procedural complexities cumbersome. If given the option to delay working, workers will likely end up playing the game of relying on procedural compliance to prevent them from continuing their tasks. In order for government agencies to become more productive, supervisors need to motivate their workers to do their jobs effectively. This includes assuring that things subject to delay because of procedural compliance are accomplished in the most efficient manner as possible, as well as being accountable for the quality of the work individuals perform.
With government agencies implementing productivity improvements in accordance with the recommendations of the NPR, accountability plays a large factor in accomplishing these tasks. Prior to the efficiency measures of the NPR, workers had no accountability and wanted to place blame on anyone other than themselves when things went wrong with a job. Halachmi (2002) believes the implementation of performance measurements will prevent this from happening:
[P]erformance measurement in the public sector is meant for both internal accountability and external accountability. Internal accountability has to do first of all with the relationships between superiors and subordinates, appointed or elected heads of agencies and the respective career civil servants that are assigned to such agencies. Here accountability means the individual’s responsibility before superiors, subordinates, and peers. Internal accountability has also to do with the responsibility for creating (or preventing) certain conditions that are deemed necessary for successful functioning of other units within the same agency or at another agency. Accountability in this sense is at the unit or aggregate level. External accountability, on the other hand, has to do with meeting standards that pertain to legal, ethical, political, professional, [and] economic aspects of institutional or individual behavior. Such standards are used by outsiders, such as the legislature, different publics, the media, the courts, and auditors to ascertain the extent to which important societal norms and expectations are, or are not, violated.
Typically, civil servants have avoided taking internal accountability of their work because of their lack of motivation and fearless attitude toward work-related consequences. If their motivation increased, workers would show more pride in their work, and a fear of disappointment (unfulfilled expectation) would be instilled in them. Pride in one’s work causes personal embarrassment if something is found to be unsatisfactory, and many people want to avoid this feeling.
Commitment
Lack of coercive power by supervisors also prevents workers from being accountable for their actions and work. Without fear of consequences, workers will go about doing their jobs however they please, whether correct or not. For example, organizational commitment is an example of how accountable an employee feels to the organization. Studies have shown that employee absenteeism demonstrates the level of organizational commitment. Bennett (2002) defines commitment as:
[T]he strength of an individual’s identification with and involvement in a particular organization…a partisan affective attachment to the goals and values of an organization, to one’s roles in relation to the goals and values, and to the organization for its own sake, apart from its purely instrumental worth.
If an employee is absent for personal reasons other than illness, this can demonstrate a lack of organizational commitment. Along with costing the organization additional money to pay employees using leave, absenteeism affects the overall productivity of the organization. If a person does not show up for work, either someone else needs to take over the job or the job remains idle until the worker returns. In order to prevent this, supervisors need to instill some level of fear for consequences in their employees as motivation to perform their jobs properly and responsibly.
External Accountability
Almost everyone exerts external accountability in fear of personal consequences. External accountability holds a great scale of repercussions due to such legal aspects as negligence and other ethical issues. Unlike internal accountability, supervisors do not need to exert coercive power to make workers accountable for their actions outside of work. As a matter of survival, people will remain accountable for their personal actions outside of work. They understand that decisions made outside of work are solely their responsibility. Supervisors do not need to motivate workers on external accountability because human nature causes workers to fear personal consequences; but if internal accountability is not instilled in the workers, productivity will decrease.
Most people live their personal lives by a combination of the “survival of the fittest” mentality and personal pride. If workers can apply this same attitude at work, productivity will improve due to the increase in workmanship pride. People should try to achieve equal internal and external accountability in order to maintain productivity both at and outside of work. Unfortunately, when workers take advantage of their roles at work and lack internal accountability for their actions, productivity decreases due to the finger pointing that occurs when trying to pinpoint blame.
Credit for Productivity and Blame for Failure
Workers and supervisors need to remain accountable for their work regardless of how it affects productivity. Everyone wants to be held accountable for increases in productivity, but no one takes the blame for decreases. Many times supervisors take all the praise for the increases in productivity and never recognize the job well done by their workers.
Superordinates may be more positive about the outcomes of productivity increases than their subordinates. It may be that this dichotomy is one that needs to be investigated because the people who have a great influence on the level of productivity of the enterprise, namely the shopfloor workers, may be the most alienated. Therefore, if any productivity gains mean people are made redundant or suffer reduced working conditions it may be that the gains will not occur (Savery 1998).
When productivity decreases, management first looks at the supervisor for an explanation for the decrease in productivity, and the majority of the time, supervisors blame this decrease on the inefficiencies of their workers. If supervisors hold workers accountable only for the decreases in productivity and fail to acknowledge staffers’ contributions for increases, the staffers will not be motivated to be productive. Supervisors need to acknowledge staffers for their contributions to the productivity of the organization, and not solely blame them for the inefficiencies.
Appreciation
In order to keep motivating workers to be productive, management needs to constantly show appreciation for the workers by either rewarding them individually or as a group. Many times when organizations increase their productivity management financially rewards workers, but working conditions either remain the same or decrease. Workers do not feel appreciated for meeting the organization’s goals, and fear for their safety if the work environment does not receive improvements or proper maintenance. Savery (1998) agrees:
People in higher management ranks significantly feel that productivity enhancement deals will lead to improved quality while shopfloor workers appear to believe that such growth will lead to poorer occupational health and safety (OHS) and bear most of the costs of productivity increases. People in superordinate roles believe significantly more often than subordinates that to obtain productivity improvement workers will have to work more efficiently and this will lead to higher wages for workers.
Thus it looks as though superordinates have an impression of workplace bargaining which sees the advantages obtained in productivity being disturbed in higher wages to the shopfloor and the workers will not have to work harder but become more efficient and smarter. The shopfloor workers believe that any growth in productivity will lead to poorer occupational health and safety, and since they see no other benefits coming to them in the form or more money … they see workers bearing most of the costs of productivity gains.
Although workers appreciate increased wages, working conditions also need maintenance. Management now falls into a catch-22 dilemma. When productivity increases, management rewards the workers with increased wages. However, if the working conditions do not receive maintenance or improvement, workers will use this excuse for being unproductive. If management uses profits from increased productivity to maintain or improve the working conditions, workers will feel unappreciated if their wages do not increase. Management needs to balance rewards between individuals and groups by alternating increases in salaries or bonuses and maintenance or improvements in working conditions. If management can fulfill the needs of their workers, the workers will perform their jobs productively and with accountability.
Federal issues
Federal organizations tend to have accountability issues because of the organizational structure and mentality of workers. With complex policies, procedures, and a lot of red tape, workers end up claiming ignorance or confusion for job-related accountability. Finger pointing and blaming others for inefficiencies of federal organizations remain two of the most popular reasons why workers will not take accountability for their work. These defense mechanisms have been practiced for many years and have become part of the much-colluded organizational structure.
However, this leads to another catch-22: people who write technical specifications within the organization may incorporate more red tape procedures to prevent themselves for being blamed for technical or procedural errors. Currently, government organizations appear to be in a downward cycle that prevents them from improving work efficiency because of the lack of accountability within every department of the organization, as evidenced by the very need of the NPR. As a leader within the organization, supervisors can take accountability for their actions and work practices. Hopefully this will encourage their workers to follow suit so that productivity of the organization will improve.
Avoiding the seeds of corruption
In every organizational setting, employees face ethical questions that may compromise the integrity of the individual and the organization itself. Once corruption sets into an organization, workers will either take advantage of it or feel intimidated by it. People of power within the organization can use corruption to get what they want. Ultimately, corruption can make or break an organization, whether influenced by NPR or not. Workers who benefit from corruption will work more productively while those who do not benefit will either become whistle-blowers or let the intimidation negatively influence their work habits. Supervisors need to avert the influences of corruption from affecting the performance of the organization.
Different forms of corruption exist and the supervisor needs to use his or her ethical judgment to determine the appropriateness of their actions. Corruption can be defined as anything that causes an unfair advantage for one party over others. The degree of the advantage is left up to the ethical determination of the industry and the individual. For example, something as simple as buying someone lunch so that they work on your job first can be seen as a slight form of corruption. No definite line exists between corrupt actions and acceptable ones. NPR, too, hits the wall of corruption, which is a major barrier to effective change.
Very few pieces of literature exist on how corruption affects productivity. This could be attributed to the politics of the subject and to the uncertainty of the theory. The way one defines corruption may influence how one sees it affecting productivity. If one feels that unfairly rewarding workers for their job performance is acceptable, then that person may believe that corruption improves productivity. On the other hand, if an individual feels that rewarding workers for their job performance intimidates others to perform in the same manner, he or she may believe that corruption decreases productivity. This issue seems to be something that will never have a definite answer. Too many “gray areas” exist based on definitions and industry culture.
Rewards can sometimes be seen as corruption depending on the type of reward, the reason for the reward, and the person who receives the reward. When a supervisor rewards their workers for performing a job, he or she needs to consciously decide if the job warranted a reward and what type of reward the worker should be given. If a supervisor gives a monetary reward to a worker for performing a mediocre job and gives a plaque to a worker who ended up saving the organization thousands of dollars, it might look like favoritism by the supervisor. Supervisors are expected to think about their actions before they do something that will get them into trouble.
Corruption negatively influences organizations when supervisors need to evaluate the performance of their workers. When an organization needs to reduce the size of their workforce, management calls upon its supervisors to determine whom the organization can release. Unfortunately, if a supervisor lacks ethical integrity, people who may benefit the organization will be sacrificed instead of unproductive workers because of their relationship with or influence over the evaluating supervisor. Hays (1996) mentions a scenario where Margaret Thatcher’s attempt to decentralize an organization ran into trouble:
[H]er real goal was to encourage the departure of a “generation of top civil servants” through a process of “demoralization and deprivileging.” To the extent that line managers internalize the values of a merit system, the risks may not be very great. However, to the extent that their new-found freedoms over the public personnel system permit managers to engage their biases, to trade political favors or to reward their friends, then the professional public service suffers grievous harm.
Too much power given to the wrong people will hurt the reputation of and morale within the organization. Supervisors appear to be the best candidate for evaluating their workers, so they need to remain ethical in order to have their decisions benefit the organization.
Positive Corruption
Corruption can also positively influence an organization, though this may sound strange. When management or legislators propose cutting programs or budgets, supervisors can use their power to aggressively negotiate the proposals. Cayer (1986) describes similar situations:
Layoffs can also be manipulated by managers as ways of getting rid of unpopular employees. Even with specific criteria for layoffs, managers are often able to develop strategies to insure retention of their favorites while terminating others. It is also possible for managers to use the system to generate political support for their operations and thus restore some or all of their budgets…. Other agencies use similar approaches, picking the most viable or popular programs to cut or eliminate with the intent of generating political heat to have it restored.
The proposed elimination of a popular program will force management or politicians to reevaluate the proposition of reducing the size of an organization. This use of force by organizations in retaliation to downsizing proposals shifts the power from upper management or politicians to the work force. On the positive side, the supervisors will use their power to try and change the decisions of management or legislators. On the negative side, this act can be looked upon as a form of unethical blackmail. Although the intentions of supervisors may be good in this situation because they are trying to preserve their workers’ jobs, the act is still unethical. Unethical acts by supervisors, regardless of whether they have good or bad intentions, only lead to the false belief that this behavior can be acceptable.
Complex Procedures and Barriers in Government Agencies
Complex procedures and barriers to efficient work habits may encourage corruption, but also may be necessary because of the high level of security and public safety required in certain government organizations. This catch-22 may explain why corruption exists in government organizations. Legislators and high government officials want government organizations to work more efficiently. However, when the entire public sector was constructed, certain checks and balances systems were designed and created in order to prevent one organization from being more powerful than others.
By the very nature of their public orientation, government organizations are responsible for holding security and public safety in higher regard than productivity. If government organizations sacrifice security and public safety for productivity by contracting certain services to the private sector, it defeats the whole purpose of government control of these organizational functions. If the government wanted to sacrifice security and public safety for productivity, they would privatize all government organizations. Slowly, government officials are evaluating which government organizations can be controlled and run by private industry companies, but the only agencies that the private sector can manage will not involve security or public safety. The risk of a private sector company managing national security and public safety is too great for the government to take in order to achieve productivity, as recent alarms on the Dubai Port maintenance issue yielded.
The complexity of bureaucratic policies encourages corruption by people using bribery to speed up the process. Mauro (1995) points out an interesting concept regarding corruption in government organizations:
Corruption is expected to be more widespread in countries where red tape slows down bureaucratic procedures … corruption may even lead to more bureaucratic delay. In fact, when individuals offer speed money to officials, they contribute to establishing a custom, so that the granting of, say, a license will be artificially delayed until a bribe is received. Corrupt practices such as speed money (which may actually avoid delay for an individual) may therefore increase red tape for the economy as a whole.
Once established, corruption is hard to eliminate. With the world today thinking in a very capitalistic manner, anytime something involving money and power is established, that policy will stand until all practices are brought down and eliminated. As part of professionalism, supervisors are expected to remain ethically strong and not give in to corruption in order to preserve the integrity of their organization. If supervisors resist the temptation of giving into corrupt acts, this may set an example for their workers to perform their jobs with integrity.
Weakness of Professional Workers
Professional workers are most likely to fall victim to ethical questions and corruption in their respective industries. Currently, college curriculums lack courses in ethics for professional workers. If professional workers do not learn what is ethically expected of them prior to entering the industry, they will only learn from experience. This may encourage unethical behavior because of what the industry has accepted as ethical and unethical. For example, Singh (2004) states:
Perhaps we can argue that if people learn how ethics applies to their career, corruption can be minimized. Perhaps it is plausible to conclude that corruption can only be eliminated if people understand their ethical role and believe in it, and prevent giving in to the temptation of corruption.We probably understand the problem of campaign spending violations as being rooted in a submissive culture, in our efforts to make a fast buck, in being able to get away with a problem as long as possible without detection, in believing the practice as acceptable because the entire community is practicing it (corollary of error 2), in being coerced, and in being weak and unable to resist the pressures imposed by politicians and the politically powerful. No doubt, some politicians may also be caught for improperly influencing campaign spending violations. Abuses and violations are often a two-way street.
Conclusion
Supervisors serve as the main link to motivating their employees to work productively. The high level of interaction between supervisor and employee allows for a referent relationship to form. Supervisors may not realize how much their actions and beliefs affect the decisions and performance of their workers. This fact places heavy emphasis on how important a decision the management has for selecting a supervisor.
Management needs to adequately evaluate candidates for supervisory promotions. If management promotes someone who does not have proper qualifications and experience, demonstrates no accountability for their work and actions, and makes unethical decisions, the employees will lack the motivation to work for this supervisor. Management needs to select someone whom employees will look up to and respect as a person and a leader. Government organizations sometimes select supervisors based on the wrong criteria, and society can see this through the inefficiencies of unmotivated civil servants.
Since government organizations have some inadequate people leading others, corruption starts to form because this may be the only motivation workers find appealing. However, complex procedures and barriers to efficient work habits may be necessary because of the high level of security and public safety required in certain government organizations. These complex procedures and barriers lead to corruption in order to speed up the process. People are faced with making ethical decisions that may lead to corruption if the immoral choice is chosen.
While corruption can be rooted out, the effectiveness of organizational changes is reduced and implementation of innovative policies is stymied. New systems such as NPR cannot be fully successful unless accountability is increased, corruption decreased, supervisors are consciously trained to be leaders, and buy-in is obtained from the work force. Until these factors are adequately addressed, NPR and other organizational improvement movements will remain as a “grand plan” that will gather dust and eventually be forgotten.
Government organizations can improve their productivity internally by selecting adequate supervisors who motivate their employees to work efficiently. With the high pressure from government officials and legislators to improve the productivity and efficiency of government organizations, conflicts within these organizations will require a leader to help staff members survive once reengineering methods are implemented. Only then will the supervisor truly be looked upon as the key to productivity of government organizations.
References
Adams, J. R., Bilbro, C. R., and Stockert, T. C. (1986). An organization development approach to project management, Project Management Institute, Drexel Hill, Pa.
Argyris, C. (1964). Integrating the individual and the organization, Wiley, New York.
Ban, C. (1999). “Reinventing the Federal Civil Service: Drivers of change.” Public Admin. Rev., 22(1), 21–34.
Bennett, H. (2002). “Employee commitment: The key to absence management in local government?” J. Urban Econ., 23(8), 430–441.
Cayer, N. J. (1986). “Management implications of reduction in force.” Public Admin. Rev., 10(1), 36–49.
Coggburn, J. D., and Hays, S. W. (2004). “Innovations in local government human resource systems: Observations from several best practice locations.” Public Admin. Rev., 27(4), 433–455.
Gabris, G. T., Grenell, K., and Kaatz, J. (1999). “Managerial innovation as administrative leadership and policy boards.” Public Admin. Rev., 23(3), 223–249.
Halachmi, A. (1997). “Government reforms and public productivity: Do we have all the answers?” Work Study, 48(7), 233–245.
Halachmi, A. (2002). “Performance measurement and government productivity.” Work Study, 51(2), 63–73.
Hays, S. W. (1996). “The “state of the discipline” in public personnel administration.” Public Admin. Rev., 20(3), 285–304.
Jones, G. N. (1985). “Credentialing public managers: Cost of amateurs too high.” Public Admin. Rev., 7(2), 183–198.
Mauro, P. (1995). “Corruption and growth.” Quart. J. Econom., 110(3), 681–712.
National Performance Review (NPR). (1993). “From red tape to results: Creating a new government that works better and costs less.” Vice President Gore’s National Partnership for Reinventing Government, ⟨http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/nprrpt/annrpt/redtpe93/index.html⟩ (Nov. 21, 2005).
Savery, L. K. (1998). “Management and productivity increases.” Journal of Management Development, 17(1), 68–74.
Singh, A. (2004). “Philosophy of conscience in law.” J. Profl. Issues Eng. Educ. Pract., 130(2), 124–127.
Yessian, M. R. (1988). “Toward effective human services management.” Public Admin. Rev., 12(1), 115–132.
Biographies
Sharilyn Shiramizu is a naval architect at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Amarjit Singh is an associate professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Leadership and Management in Engineering
Volume 6 • Issue 4 • October 2006
Pages: 150 - 159
Copyright
© 2006 ASCE.
History
Published online: Oct 1, 2006
Published in print: Oct 2006
ASCE Technical Topics:
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.