Public-sector entrepreneurship is one of the hot debates over New Public Management (NPM) and its effectiveness (Borins,2000). . Proponents for NPM have extolled its new values such as innovation, quality, efficiency, and... [ view full abstract ]
Public-sector entrepreneurship is one of the hot debates over New Public Management (NPM) and its effectiveness (Borins,2000). . Proponents for NPM have extolled its new values such as innovation, quality, efficiency, and service, which are achieved by public agents as enterprising leaders or astute innovators. In contrast, opponents have cautioned that NPM’s entrepreneurship could collide with traditional values such as due process, fairness, honesty, and accountability. opponents of NPM are concerned about Terry’s and deLeon-Denhardt’s arguments that public agents who are given too much discretion to indulge in risk-taking behaviors for efficiency or performance can become out of control loose cannons, rule breakers, or self-promoters.. This article extends the study of bureaucratic/unbureaucratic behaviors or NPM’s effects with three contributions. First of all, following Bowen and Lawler (1992, 1995)’s conceptualization, employee empowerment which is a newly defined concept from a managerial perspective is used as an organizational factor affecting entreprenuerships or unbureacratic behaviors. Furthermore, according to Fernandez&Moldogaziev (2010), this overall perceived empowerment concept is measured into four practical dimensions -1) information on goal clarity and performance, 2) performance-based rewards, 3) access to knowledge and skills, and 4) discretion. These organizational factors measured into four managerial empowerment practices will provide alternative implications on NPM’s entrepreneurship and its effects. Second, this study’s dataset covers all federal agencies including cabinet-level departments from three different sources, which will increase or convince generalization or external validity: rule-breaking behaviors measured by termination rate for discipline/performance (DV) is from official counts on separation by Office of Personnel Management (OPM); overall or four empowerment practices (IVs) are from Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey(FEVS); other control variables for organizational or demographic characteristics such as political appointments, resources, gender, age, race, occupational positions, education, agency size are from FedScope’s official records or surveys. Finally, using the panel data from 2006, 2008 and 2010-2014 at agency level, more advanced methodologies controlling for both Heteroscedasticity and Auto Regressions are applied in estimating the effects of overall or four empowerment practices on rule-breaking behaviors. The results showed that overall perceived empowerment or empowerment of discretion can increase termination rate for discipline/performance implying possibly increasing a risk of rule-breaking misbehavior in agency level. This study provided an empirical evidence for the Terry-deLeon-Denhardt’s loose cannons and rule breakers.
