This chapter discusses organizational goals and effectiveness in public organizations. It covers different models that have been used to assess effectiveness, including goal models, resource models, and stakeholder satisfaction models. The chapter notes that goals in public organizations tend to be more vague than in private firms. It also discusses challenges in measuring effectiveness, such as conflicting goals and the difficulty converting goals into measurable outcomes. Finally, it addresses issues with comparing public and private sector effectiveness.

1. Understanding and Managing
Public Organizations
Chapter 6
Organizational Goals and
Effectiveness

2. Chapter Overview
• Major issues about organizational goals and the goals of
public organizations
• Models of effectiveness and their implications for
organizations
• How expectations about goals and the effectiveness of
public organizations (especially in comparison to the
private sector) have played a major role in political and
governmental reforms

3. General Organizational Goals
• Organizations are goal-directed, purposive entities, and
their effectiveness in pursuing those goals influences the
quality of our lives and even our ability to survive.
• An organizational goal is a condition that organizations
seek to attain.

4. Types of Goals
• Official goals
• Mission statements and annual reports contain what
organization theorists refer to as official goals. These
• Specify official value statements
• Enhance organization legitimacy
• Guide and motivate employee behavior
• Operative goals are relatively specific intermediate ends.

5. General Organizational Goals
• Literature offers useful insight into nature of goals. For
example:
• Goals are expressions of an organization’s values; they orient
employees toward the organization’s mission.
• Clarification of goals can improve efficiency and productivity.

6. General Organizational Goals
• Literature also underscores problems (for theorists and
practitioners) with the concept of goals.
• Goals are multiple (a goal is one of a set).
• Goals often conflict.
• Short-term and long-term goals can conflict.
• Goals are arranged in hierarchies and chains.
• One goal leads to another or is operative for a higher or more
general goal.

7. Goals of Public Organizations
• The most often repeated observation about public
organizations is that goals are particularly vague and
intangible compared to those of business firms.
• What is the reason for this?
• What implications might this have to employee motivation,
commitment, satisfaction?

8. Goal Ambiguity:
Reasons and Implications
• One reason is because of vague mandates.
• Studies suggest that goal ambiguity may create
problems in motivating employees.
• Goal ambiguity presents problems for developing clear
performance indicators. In turn, this may raise questions
about accountability and lead to performance
evaluations on the basis of rules.

9. To What Extent Does an Organization
Reach Its Goals?
• This question assumes that organizations have goals, that the
goals can be discovered, that the goals are at least somewhat
stable, that abstract goals can be converted into specific,
objective measures, and that data relevant to those measures
can be collected, processed, and applied in a timely and
appropriate manner.
• Much of academic organizational theory has observed that
these are problematic assumptions. Organizational theorists
challenged this commonsense understanding of formal
organizations.

10. More Assumptions
• Organizations will perform better if goals are clarified and
progress is measurable.
• Public organizations need to do much better.
• Public organizations will do better if they adopt business
practices.
• The federal nature of the U.S. system does not matter
much to goal attainment.
– Multiple authorities at multiple levels agree on goals.

11. Models for Assessing Organizational
Effectiveness
• Scholars are not in agreement on one model.
• Goal approach
• Systems-resource approach
• Participant satisfaction models
• Human resource and internal process models
• Government performance project

12. Goal Approach
• It is the simplest approach, based on the link between stated goals and
effectiveness.
• Its shortcoming is that it does not consider complications. It is
concerned with the output side and whether the organization achieves
its goals in terms of the desired level of output.
– It implies a view of management as a rational and orderly process with a
single expression of goals.
• Its indicators include operative goals .
• It does not consider goal conflict, hierarchy, and goal types and sub-
types.

13. The Systems-Resource Approach
• This approach concentrates on whether an organization
can obtain valued resources from its environment.
• It places effectiveness criteria in a hierarchy with the
organization’s ability to exploit external resources
and opportunities as the ultimate criterion.
• This criterion is ultimately un-measurable; it has to be
inferred by measuring the next-highest or penultimate
criteria.

14. Systems-Resource Approach
• Observes the beginning of the process and evaluates
whether the organization effectively obtains resources
necessary for high performance
• Indicators:
• Bargaining position—the ability to exploit its environment
• The ability to interpret the real properties of the external
environment
• Maintaining of internal day-to-day activities
• The ability to respond to changes in the environment
• Usefulness: when other indicators are difficult to obtain
or are hard to measure

15. Participant Satisfaction Models
• The ecological model or the participant satisfaction
model defines organizational effectiveness according to
organizations’ abilities to satisfy key strategic
constituencies in their environment.

16. Internal Process Approach
• Looks at internal activities and assesses effectiveness by indicators
of internal health and efficiency
• Indicators:
– Strong corporate culture and positive work climate
– Team spirit, group loyalty, and teamwork
– Confidence, trust, and communications between workers and
management
– Decision making near information sources, regardless where those
sources are on the organizational charts
– Sharing of relevant facts and feelings (horizontal and vertical)
– Rewards to managers for performance, growth, and development of
subordinates and for creating an effective working group
– Interaction between the organization and its parts, with conflicts that
occur over projects—resolves in the interest of the organization

17. Human Resource and
Internal Process Models
• Refers to such factors as communications, leadership
style, motivation, interpersonal trust, and other internal
states assumed to be desirable
• University of Michigan (Likert and others, 1961):
Specified two leadership behaviors: job-centered and
employee-centered

18. The Government Performance Project
• The GPP is a source of information about state management.
• Its stated mission is to improve service to citizens by strengthening
government policy and performance.
• The GPP systematically evaluates how well states manage their
money, people, information, and infrastructure—four areas critical to
ensuring that states’ policy decisions and practices actually deliver
their intended outcomes.
• The GPP produces a report card.

19. Conceptual Framework of the Government Performance Project
Management Subsystems
Financial
Management
Human
Resources
Management
Capital
Management
Information
Technology
Management
Leadership as Driver
Information as Connector
Managing for Results
Management
Capacity Program
Delivery
Performance
Measurement

20. Organizational Effectiveness Dimensions and Measures
1. Overall effectiveness
2. Productivity
3. Efficiency
4. Profit
5. Quality
6. Accidents
7. Growth
8. Absenteeism
9. Turnover
10.Job satisfaction
11.Motivation
12.Morale
13.Control
14.Conflict / cohesion
15.Flexibility / adaptation
16. Planning and goal setting
17. Goal consensus
18. Internalization of organizational goals
19. Role and norm congruence
20. Managerial interpersonal skills
21. Managerial task skills
22. Information management and
communication
23. Readiness
24. Utilization of environment
25. Evaluations by external entities
26. Stability
27. Value of human resources
28. Participation and shared influence
29. Training and development emphasis
30. Achievement emphasis
Source: Campbell, 1977, pp. 36-39.

21. Effectiveness Dimensions for Educational Institutions
Perceptual Measures Objective Measures
1. Student educational satisfaction
Student dissatisfaction; student complaints Number of terminations; counseling center visits
2. Student academic development
Extra work and study; amount of academic development Percentage going on to graduate school
3. Student career development
Number employed in major field; Number receiving career counseling
number of career-oriented courses
4. Student personal development
Opportunities for personal development; Number of extracurricular activities;
emphasis on nonacademic development number in extramurals and intramurals
5. Faculty and administrator employment satisfaction
Faculty and administrators’ satisfaction with Number of faculty members and school
employment administrators leaving
6. Professional development and quality of the faculty
Faculty publications, awards, conference attendance; Percentage of faculty with doctorates;
teaching at the cutting edge number of new courses
7. System openness and community interaction
Employee community service; emphasis on community Number of continuing education courses
relations
8. Ability to acquire resources
National reputation of faculty; General funds raised;
drawing power for students; drawing power for faculty previously tenured faculty hired
9. Organizational health
Student-faculty relations; typical communication type;
levels of trust; cooperative environment; use of talents
and expertise
Source: Adapted from Cameron, 1978, p. 630. See original
table for numerous additional measures for each dimension.

22. The Competing Values Framework
Output
Quality
Human Relations
Model
Internal Process Model
Open-Systems Model
Rational Goal Model
Flexibility
Internal External
Control
Means:
Cohesion; morale
Ends:
Human resource development
Means:
Information management;
communication
Ends:
Stability; control
Means:
Flexibility; readiness
Ends:
Growth; resource acquisition
Means:
Planning; goal setting
Ends:
Productivity; efficiency
Source: Quinn and Rohrbaugh, 1983. Reprinted by permission of the authors. Copyright 1983. Institute of Management
Sciences.

23. The Balanced Scorecard
• Incorporates multiple dimensions and measures for
assessing organizational performance and effectiveness
• A performance measurement framework that added
strategic nonfinancial performance measures to
traditional financial metrics to give managers and
executives a more “balanced” view of organizational
performance

24. Effectiveness in Organizational Networks
• Networks are “structures of interdependence involving
multiple organizations or parts thereof, where one unit is
not merely the formal subordinate of the others in some
hierarchical arrangement” (O’Toole, 1997, p. 44).
• Networks are common to public management.

25. Networks and Effectiveness
• Brings up questions about measuring effectiveness
• Effectiveness should not be focused on one part, but the entirety
(Provan and Milward, 1995).
• These are most likely to be effective when core agency
integrates the network, the mechanisms for fiscal control are not
fragmented, resources are plentiful, and network is stable
(Milward and Provan, 1998, 2000).

26. Managing Goals and Effectiveness
• The information presented in this chapter raises
important issues concerning the goals of public
organizations that allegedly influence their operations
and characteristics.
• Later chapters will build on these issues.

27. Effectiveness in Public Organizations
• The information presented in this chapter raises
important issues about the distinctions between public
and private sectors and the problems using the private
sector as a benchmark for comparative assessments.
• Yet beliefs and perceptions have influenced reforms
while ignoring the complexities in assessing performance
that have been discussed in this chapter.