ArticleGoalsTrustParticipationandFeedbackLinkingInternalManagementwithPerformanceOutcomes.pdf

© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Inc.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].

327

Journal of Public Administration Research And Theory, 2016, 327–343
doi:10.1093/jopart/muu044

Article
Advance Access publication October 17, 2014

Article

Goals, Trust, Participation, and Feedback:
Linking Internal Management With Performance
Outcomes
Nathan Favero,* Kenneth J. Meier,*,†, Laurence J. O’Toole Jr.‡,§

*Texas A&M University; †Cardiff University; ‡University of Georgia; §University of Twente

Address correspondence to the author at [email protected].

Abstract

Much recent work in the study of public administration has emphasized new challenges and
relatively unusual aspects of management. However, it is likely that the core features of tra-
ditional public administration play a crucial role, particularly regarding the delivery of perfor-
mance. The most venerable of these aspects of public management have to do with “internal”
management. We focus here on a cluster of key, intertwined management practices: setting
challenging but feasible goals, building trust through credible commitments, encouraging
employee participation, and providing feedback. We examine the relationship between such
internal management at the mid-level, as perceived by subordinates rather than the manag-
ers themselves, and educational performance for more than 1,100 schools in the New York
City school system over a 3-year period. The results indicate that internal management mat-
ters, often sizably, for delivering educational outcomes. The findings are robust to autoregres-
sive specifications and the purging of halo effects, and they hold across multiple performance
measures. Managers’ setting challenging goals appears to be especially important in generat-
ing educational results.

Public management matters for program perfor-
mance. This basic proposition has been demonstrated
in contexts as different as English local governments
(Boyne and Walker 2006), Texas school districts
(Meier and O’Toole 2003), US state governments
(Jacobson, Palus, and Bowling 2010), Colombian
local governments (Avellañeda 2009), and local law
enforcement agencies (Nicholson-Crotty and O’Toole
2004). Much of the work, however, has focused on
how managers deal with the external environment
of the organizations (for instance, Agranoff 2007;
Provan and Milward 1995). Substantially less work
has focused how managers act within an organization

to shape overall program performance. This gap is
especially noteworthy given that public managers
are frequently restricted in their use of monetary
incentives and must rely on normative and solidary
inducements to shape employee actions. This study
examines how the actions of managers within the
organization can generate greater levels of perfor-
mance. The empirical evidence is drawn from an
elaborate database from New York City schools. The
study brings two methodological innovations to the
scholarship on management. First, we rely on subor-
dinates’ views of what management does rather than
managers’ self-reports on their own behavior. Second,
we deal with the halo effect of surveys, a measure-
ment problem that results because individuals may
respond to surveys in a biased manner that is related
to their own views of the organization. After a brief

An earlier version of this study was presented at the annual meeting of the
American Political Science Association, August 29–September 2, 2012,
New Orleans, LA. Copyright American Political Science Association.

mailto:[email protected]?subject=

328 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2016, Vol. 26, No. 2

summary of the existing literature, we craft a model
of internal management that relies on four concepts—
goals, trust, participation, and feedback. This model
is then evaluated in the context of public education,
and the implications of our findings for the study of
public management are discussed.

The Public Management–Performance Nexus

Although the notion that what public managers do
can shape the performance of public agencies has long
been assumed, large-N empirical research on the man-
agement-and-performance question has been largely
a product of the past dozen years or so. Early con-
tributions were primarily theoretical (Lynn, Heinrich,
and Hill 2001; O’Toole and Meier 1999), but empiri-
cal analyses followed quickly (see O’Toole and Meier
2011; Rainey 2014 for summaries). Some of these have
been based on limited performance measures, such
as perceptual assessments by managers themselves1
or federal government–generated PART (Program
Assessment Rating Tool) scores, but interesting anal-
yses have also been conducted using archival meas-
ures of performance, particularly those recorded on
a recurring basis and tapping outcomes of salience in
the empirical setting. It has been shown that multiple
aspects of public management contribute in a variety
of ways to public services performance (Boyne et  al.
2006; O’Toole and Meier 2011; Rainey 2014).

For all the welcome attention to management’s
influence on performance, nonetheless, a great deal of
the theoretical and empirical work has dealt with only
a portion of public management. Substantial work,
for instance, has focused on networks and managerial
networking, interorganizational and intergovernmen-
tal collaboration, and various other aspects of exter-
nally oriented management efforts (Agranoff 2007;
Andrews et  al. 2010; Jacobson, Palus, and Bowling
2010; Provan and Milward 1995). There has also been
much promotion and critique of the so-called New
Public Management (Barzelay 1992; Hood 1991; Kettl
2005; O’Toole and Meier 2009). Similarly, additional
attention has been devoted to such management topics
as the management of information technology, manag-
ing for results, or performance management (Ingraham,
Joyce, and Donahue 2003; Moynihan 2008).

Relatively neglected in this upsurge of interest in
estimating the effects of management on performance
have been the tried-and-true functions of internal
organizational management, what we might think
of as traditional public administration. Of course,
the POSDCORB-style elements of traditional public

administration have not been completely ignored.2
However, the effects of many internal management
activities—particularly the relationships that manag-
ers develop with workers and how such relationships
can shape performance—have yet to be explored with
systematic data.

Attempting to analyze the performance-related
effects of all such aspects of internal management
would be a Herculean task. Our approach is to focus
on a more limited set of managerial tasks—ones for
which there is good reason to believe that there should
be performance impacts—and estimate relationships.
We focus on four core elements of public management
that are interrelated but have received little rigorous
empirical attention: managers’ setting and communi-
cating goals, their effort to build trust with employees,
their enticing worker participation in decision-making
processes, and their providing feedback to subordi-
nates. These core elements of management envision a
people-centered approach to management that relies
more on intrinsic motivation than on monetary incen-
tives. The aim of this article is to assess what effect—
if any—these interconnected aspects of management
have on organizational performance. We hypothesize
that they positively contribute to that performance.
We explore whether this is so in an innovative way
by examining the behavior of mid-level managers in
organizations devoted to public education, as reported
by the managers’ professional subordinates—in this
case school teachers.

Goal-Oriented Core Elements of Internal
Management

Observers have often commented upon the relatively
limited ability possessed by public managers to influ-
ence what goes on in and through their organizations
(for instance, Wilson 1990). Certainly such manag-
ers’ opportunities to control material incentives are
much more limited than in the private sector; and in

1 For analyses of the methodological problems associated with a reliance
on managers’ perceptions of their own organizations’ performance as
a dependent variable, see Meier and O’Toole (2013a, 2013b).

2 POSDCORB stood for Planning, Organizing, Staffing, Directing,
Coordinating, Reporting, and Budgeting. The term was popularized by
Luther Gulick (1937). Some of these functions have been incorporated
into the work conducted under the aegis of the Government
Performance Project (Ingraham 2007; Ingraham, Joyce, and Donahue
2003), but that Project did not actually seek to demonstrate a link
between management and true organizational performance. Internal
public management makes an appearance in the reduced form
model of governance proposed by Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill (2001),
but managerial effects on performance are not estimated. “Internal
management” is also one of the key terms in O’Toole and Meier’s (1999)
model of management and performance, although much of their early
empirical work focused on the external functions of public managers.
Later empirical work made progress on some internal management
activities, such as personnel stability, the general management of
human capital, and buffering organizations from external perturbations
(O’Toole and Meier 2011, 131–81).

329Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2016, Vol. 26, No. 2

the short to medium term, their control over structural
features of their organizations is often constrained by
law, regulation, and the influence of political princi-
pals. Public managers, as a result, need to rely more
on normative inducements and on creating a work
environment that encourages street-level bureaucrats
(see Lipsky 1980; May and Winter 2009; Maynard-
Moody and Musheno 2003; Riccucci 2005; Tummers
and Bekkers 2014) to adopt the goals of the organiza-
tion and enthusiastically pursue these goals. Although
a theoretical argument can be made that public man-
agers’ influence over their organization’s performance
is different in predictable ways from that possessed by
private sector managers, we can expect that the influ-
ence is nevertheless real (Meier and O’Toole 2011).

Some long-recognized features of internal manage-
ment, in particular, would seem to offer possibilities in
this regard. At the risk of oversimplifying some of the
theoretical details, we specify four elements of man-
agement that are common to much of the extant theo-
retical work—goals, trust, worker participation, and
feedback. We see these four aspects of management as
closely interrelated and operating together to enhance
organizational performance. Figure  1 summarizes the
microfoundations of our theoretical argument linking
these four elements of management to organizational
performance. Each managerial action seeks to elicit a
specific employee behavior. In addition to the primary
effect each managerial action exerts on its correspond-
ing employee behavior, each managerial element is also
expected to exhibit a secondary effect on the other
employee behaviors we have identified. This reflects
the complementary, interconnected nature of the four
sets of managerial actions, which we discuss in greater
detail below. Our figure clearly suggests a set of inter-
connected relationships too complex to examine in a
single study. As such, our empirical test estimates only
the effects of the four managerial elements on organi-
zational outcomes. Although we do not empirically
model the intermediate employee behavior variables,
we include them in our figure in to help clarify
the microtheory underlying our hypothesized rela-
tionship between internal management actions and
performance.

How can managers encourage effective perfor-
mance? That is, how does a given managerial action
induce employees to engage in behaviors that improve
productivity? First, setting clear, feasible yet challeng-
ing goals allows employees to understand what man-
agement expects of employees and permits employees
to focus on efforts that can enhance organizational
performance (Latham, Borgogni, and Petitta 2008).
Challenging goals are those that require organization
members to exert considerable effort to achieve; such
goals clearly tap into employees’ intrinsic motivation

to perform well on the job and engage in interest-
ing work. Clearly communicated goals should pro-
vide direction to employees wishing to improve their
knowledge of topics relevant to performing their jobs,
and employees can better contribute to policy deci-
sions if they have clear goals that help indicate what
input might be valued by managers. At the same time,
public organizations sometimes have rather ambiguous
goals, and ambiguity has been shown to impede per-
formance (Chun and Rainey 2006). Even with ambigu-
ous goals, managers frequently have the opportunity
to communicate with their staff about operational ver-
sions of organizational goals, particular objectives to
emphasize, and the importance of specific goals for the
organization and its stakeholders. Such regularly used
communication channels allow for some reduction in
ambiguity and initiate a process to establish challeng-
ing goals in practice. Goal-setting theory, developed by
Locke and coauthors, argues that challenging and spe-
cific goals generate better performance than easy and
vague ones (for instance, Locke and Latham 1990),
and evidence, mostly from the private sector, validates
the argument (for instance, Latham 2007; Miner 2005;
Pinder 2008).

Second, managers need to engage in actions that
build trust among employees. One way to frame this
action and the resultant employee behavior is the idea
of credible commitment or managerial credibility (see
Dull 2009): Managers as principals need to elicit sup-
port and cooperation from employees (Barnard 1938),
and trust in a manager’s word—belief in her ability
and willingness to communicate clearly and follow
through on what she says she will do—is central here.
This credible commitment can be viewed as establish-
ing the legitimacy of the manager and the manager’s
actions (Tyler 2006), which is designed to establish
trust between management and employees; indeed,
trust has been shown to be a crucial element of many
institutional settings (Dirks and Ferrin 2002; Ostrom
2005). The need for such commitments is especially the
case in terms of managerial reforms because manag-
ers are asking for changes in behavior, and employees
may be hesitant to change unless they find the promises
of the manager credible (Dull 2009, 261). The need
for managers to deal with this issue has even been for-
mally demonstrated in Gary Miller’s (1993) influential
rational choice study of the matter. If trust is estab-
lished, employees are clearly more likely to believe
what managers say, more likely to pay attention to the
priorities that managers articulate and devote time and
energy to them, and more likely to both contribute to
decision making and be open to receiving feedback
from above.

Third, all managers face the problem of information
asymmetry. Employees have a great deal of knowledge

330 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2016, Vol. 26, No. 2

and experience that is valuable in organizational activ-
ities. Managers, as a result, need to take actions that
elicit participation by workers in decision making in
an organization. The potential importance of partici-
pation by public employees in organizational deci-
sion making has been another venerable theme in the
public administration literature (for instance, Mosher
1967) and in some of the most influential studies in
the human relations tradition (Argyris 1957). It has
also been examined productively in the context of
self-determination theory (Gagné and Deci 2005).
Participation by employees in highly professionalized
organizational settings is likely to be particularly rel-
evant, given the likely value of the ideas and creativ-
ity of such workers in improving practices and finding
ways to enhance outcomes (Huselid 1995; Miller and
Monge 1986; Rodgers and Hunter 1991). Such partici-
pation can also improve the trust relationship between
managers and employees (see Driscoll 1978; Lawler
and Hackman 1969). When employees feel that they
have a meaningful voice in their organization, they are
more likely to be motivated in their work and to
into organizational goals and learning initiatives.

Fourth, managers need to provide feedback to
employees so that employees can receive information
about how, and how well, they are contributing to key
organizational goals. They can thereby learn to per-
form their jobs better and also to focus more on goals
that are important to the organization. As Rainey indi-
cates, “Difficult goals enhance performance by direct-
ing attention and action, mobilizing effort, increasing
persistence, and motivating the search for effective
performance strategies. Commitment to the goals and

feedback about progress toward achieving them are
also necessary for higher performance” (2014, 287,
emphasis added; Hrabluik, Latham, and McCarthy
2012; Podsakoff and Farh 1989). These points, which
touch upon goals and trust, also clearly indicate the
importance of feedback between managers and workers
(see also Graber 2003), and so we include this related
aspect of management in the present study. Feedback
that is both constructive and encouraging can serve not
only to inform employees but also to motivate them by
providing external validation of their successes and a
social incentive to avoid shirking. Delivering helpful
and effective feedback may also complement manage-
rial efforts to build rapport with employees, increasing
employees’ willingness to approach management with
their own ideas about how organizational policy or
practices might be improved.

In short, a closely related cluster of internally
focused managerial actions seek to change the behav-
ior of employees so that employee efforts are focused
on the goals of the organization, employees trust man-
agers and are motivated to work hard, employees are
willing to participate in organizational decisions, and
employees can learn to perform their jobs better via
feedback from management. These core aspects of
internal management vary widely across managers
and organizations and can be hypothesized to be posi-
tively related to organizational performance. Clear
goals that are challenging but feasible generate more
precise expectations for employees. Building trust
among employees via managers’ establishing cred-
ibility facilitates a climate encouraging cooperation
and the exchange of ideas. The combination of clear

Figure 1. The links between managerial actions, employee behaviors, and organizational performance.

331Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2016, Vol. 26, No. 2

goals and trust encourages worker participation and
enhances employees’ willingness to receive construc-
tive feedback. All these actions should contribute to
more focused employees and a more productive work
environment. This interrelationship of the various
managerial actions and employee behaviors is fore-
shadowed in the work of Barnard (1938, 86)  who
notes that cooperation by employees and the accept-
ance of a goal are essentially a simultaneous activity;
the same can be said for trust, participation, and feed-
back. In the field of public education, the setting we
examine empirically in this investigation, the role of
mid-level managers—school principals—is likely to be
especially crucial.

The Research Setting

This study examines the performance of New York
City schools between 2007 and 2009. New York
City has the largest school system in the country with
1.1 million students, 80,000 teachers, and a $21 bil-
lion budget. During this time period, the New York
City schools were undergoing a major reform led by
Superintendent Joel Klein, who was being advised by
management scholar William Ouchi (2009) among
others. The reforms greatly expanded the author-
ity of principals and significantly increased schools’
accountability for performance. In addition to the
generic reforms of high standards and accountability,
the New York City reforms stressed parental involve-
ment (including the establishment of annual citywide
parent and student surveys) and the engagement of
teachers. The latter is directly relevant to this study
given our use of teachers’ assessments of manage-
ment. Although aspects of this reform are unique to
New York City, virtually all urban school districts
are undergoing major reform efforts, often repeatedly
(Hess 1999).

Performance indicators and several measures
of basic school traits are publicly available from
city and state records (New York City Department
of Education 2011b; New York State Education
Department 2011; New York State Testing and
Accountability Reporting Tool 2011). These records
were merged with school-level results from an annual
survey of teachers conducted each spring by the New
York City Department of Education (2011b). All
teachers in the school system were given the oppor-
tunity to respond to the survey, and the average
response rate for the schools we examine was 63%.
For the questions we analyze, the city aggregated
the responses by calculating the average response in
each school (strongly agree  =  10, agree  =  6.6, disa-
gree  =  3.3, and strongly disagree  =  0). We consider
data from 1,164 schools over these 3 years, yielding

a total of 3,267 observations after dropping observa-
tions with missing values.3

The primary dependent variable is student perfor-
mance on state standardized tests. For elementary and
middle schools, we created an index based on 3rd–8th
grade English and math scores. We first calculated the
average scores as well as the proportion of scores that
met proficiency goals for English and math. These four
variables were standardized and then summed to form
the elementary/middle school index. High schools do
not administer annual English and math exams, but
they require students to pass several exams, including
an English exam and at least one math exam, in
to receive a diploma (New York City Department of
Education 2011a). Using state records, we divided
the total number of English and math scores that met
Regents diploma standards by the schools’ total high
school enrollment. We then combined English and
math into a single category by adding standardized
versions of the two ratios we just produced. This gave
us our high school performance index. We combined
standardized versions of the elementary/middle school
and high school performance indexes into a single
variable.4

Several control variables aid us in isolating the
unique effect of internal management on school per-
formance. Student demographic characteristics indi-
cate task difficulty and are important predictors of
performance. City records provide data on the percent-
age of students who hold various racial/ethnic identi-
ties, are female, are recent immigrants, and are special
education students. The percentage of Limited English
Proficiency students can be found in state records. We
measure socioeconomic status with four indicators
that allow us to approximate different levels of eco-
nomic hardship; the city supplies the percentage of stu-
dents in temporary housing and below the poverty line,
whereas state records offer the percentage of students

3 Our data set did not include special education schools, alternative
schools, charter schools, early childhood schools, transfer schools, or
Young Adult Borough Centers. Additionally, we excluded observations
where fewer than three teachers or fewer than five parents responded
to the survey. We also omitted observations when the variables derived
from government records contained missing values or obvious data
errors, such as percentages greater than 100. New York City records
did not always distinguish between missing values and values of zero;
in such cases, we assumed a value of zero was appropriate. We faced a
choice between accepting any biases generated as a result of missing
data versus seeking to engage in multiple imputation of the data for
these cases. Because most of the omitted cases are so different from
the average school (and do not really belong in our population), we felt
that the distortion created by including them via imputation would be
more problematic than the bias generated by omitting them.

4 Because multiple math exams were offered in some years, we had to
sum the number of passing scores from each individual math exam to
find the total number of passing math scores.

332 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2016, Vol. 26, No. 2

eligible for free lunch and reduced-price lunch. We
also include dummy variables indicating whether or
not the school serves elementary, middle school, and
high school students (the categories are not mutually
exclusive).

Research has shown that class size (Nye, Hedges,
and Konstantopoulos 2000) and teacher turnover
(Meier and Hicklin 2008) are also important predic-
tors of student performance. A  single measurement
of class size was created that combines several state
records of average class size for different grade levels
and subject areas.5 We replicated a measure of teacher
turnover used by Favero and Meier (2013) for these
data. The teacher turnover variable is one of three
factor scores produced by a rotated factor analysis of
several school-level measures of teacher characteristics
(Supplementary Table A2). The turnover factor reflects
both the turnover rate of all teachers and the turnover
rate among teachers with fewer than 5  years experi-
ence. Finally, our models include fixed effects for years
and standard errors clustered by school to deal with
serial correlation and heteroscedasticity.

Measuring Management

As explained earlier, internal management of pub-
lic organizations focuses heavily, of necessity, on the
“human side” (McGregor 1960), simply because a
variety of structural and incentive-focused elements in
management are limited in the public sector (see Feeney
and Rainey 2010). One problem with measuring these
aspects of management via surveys of managers is that
managers might bias their responses. These individu-
als are trained managers and have taken courses in
the area; they are quite likely to know the literature
well. As a result, their responses might be subject to
social desirability bias as they seek to demonstrate to
the researcher that they are adopting the best current
practices in management. Even without social desir-
ability bias, what managers think they are doing and
what their subordinates think they are doing might be
two different things. The manager might not be effec-
tive in communicating his or her behavior or might not
be as consistent as the survey might indicate. For these
reasons, measuring management actions by using the

perceptions of the individuals who are being managed
has the potential of generating more unbiased meas-
ures of management. All measures of management, as a
result, rely on teachers’ perceptions of how the school
is managed. The use of teachers’ perceptions of man-
agement has another advantage in that it incorporates
the time lag that is likely to occur between managerial
action and employee response. These perceptions of
managerial action capture when an action has begun
to have an impact on frontline employees (e.g., the
level of trust increases) rather than when the manager
initially took the action.

All organizations have goals, and clearly communi-
cating goals is important if managers wish for employ-
ees to adopt these goals in a meaningful way. The
content of these goals also matters, as explained earlier.
In the substantive case being examined here, K-12 edu-
cation, an extensive literature finds that student per-
formance is enhanced by setting high expectations for
all students, providing clear measures of performance,
and focusing priorities on having students meet these
high expectations; high expectations, in fact, might
even be the overarching goal under which other goals
of education are subsumed (Costrell 1994; Darling-
Hammond and Ball 1998; Deci et al. 1991; McCombs
and Whisler 1997; Mirel and Angus 1994; Owens and
Valesky 2011). A  goals measure is created by factor
analyzing four items related to goals and high expecta-
tions; the survey items include adjectives like “high”
and “challenging,” thus linking well to the theoretical
argument about challenging goals. This measure has
an eigenvalue of 3.66, accounting for 91% of the total
variance in these items (table 1). This measure does not
explicitly tap goal feasibility, but it otherwise fits the …

Place your order
(550 words)

Approximate price: $22

Calculate the price of your order

550 words
We'll send you the first draft for approval by September 11, 2018 at 10:52 AM
Total price:
$26
The price is based on these factors:
Academic level
Number of pages
Urgency
Basic features
  • Free title page and bibliography
  • Unlimited revisions
  • Plagiarism-free guarantee
  • Money-back guarantee
  • 24/7 support
On-demand options
  • Writer’s samples
  • Part-by-part delivery
  • Overnight delivery
  • Copies of used sources
  • Expert Proofreading
Paper format
  • 275 words per page
  • 12 pt Arial/Times New Roman
  • Double line spacing
  • Any citation style (APA, MLA, Chicago/Turabian, Harvard)

Our guarantees

Delivering a high-quality product at a reasonable price is not enough anymore.
That’s why we have developed 5 beneficial guarantees that will make your experience with our service enjoyable, easy, and safe.

Money-back guarantee

You have to be 100% sure of the quality of your product to give a money-back guarantee. This describes us perfectly. Make sure that this guarantee is totally transparent.

Read more

Zero-plagiarism guarantee

Each paper is composed from scratch, according to your instructions. It is then checked by our plagiarism-detection software. There is no gap where plagiarism could squeeze in.

Read more

Free-revision policy

Thanks to our free revisions, there is no way for you to be unsatisfied. We will work on your paper until you are completely happy with the result.

Read more

Privacy policy

Your email is safe, as we store it according to international data protection rules. Your bank details are secure, as we use only reliable payment systems.

Read more

Fair-cooperation guarantee

By sending us your money, you buy the service we provide. Check out our terms and conditions if you prefer business talks to be laid out in official language.

Read more

Order your essay today and save 30% with the discount code HAPPY