In the wake of the global financial crisis, governments have introduced comprehensive public sector reforms to improve service provision to their citizens while cutting costs. According to Cepiku et al. (2016), local government can alleviate the negative impact of the crisis if cuts are implemented selectively. In the UK, councils have been transforming the ways in which they manage and deliver services (LGA, 2014). Partly in response to encouragement from central government, most have collaborated to deliver services. Some have gone further and created shared senior management teams (SMTs).
SMTs are a management innovation (MI) that occurs when a team of senior managers oversees two or more organizations. They often start with a shared chief executive before moving on to sharing the whole senior management team. The aim is to reduce management costs and gain economies of scale while maintaining each council’s own identity and political oversight.
The MI literature provides two perspectives to understand the motivations behind councils’ adoption/implementation of shared SMTs. From a rational perspective, councils sharing SMTs are responding to budgetary pressures by exploring management models that enable them to protect ‘frontline’ services whilst balancing their budgets. The decision to adopt a MI is based on a careful analysis of costs and benefits and the prospects of greater efficiency (Strang and Macy, 2001) - the so-called ‘logic of consequences’ (March and Olsen, 1996).
From a neo-institutional perspective, councils may choose to share a SMT because it is perceived to enhance their legitimacy and reputation in the eyes of key stakeholders such as regulators and competitor organizations (Walker et al., 2015) or in response to changes in prevailing notions of how best to organize (Paauwe and Boselie 2005; Ashworth et al., 2009). This perspective focuses mainly on the ‘logic of appropriateness’ (March and Olsen, 1996) where a MI can become established regardless of whether there is any evidence that it actually enhances efficiency (Nicolai et al., 2010).
This paper presents the results of an in-depth analysis of shared SMTs in English district councils. Drawing on a qualitative approach (documentary analysis, interviews and multiple case studies), it identifies the main motivations behind the decision to share a SMT and examines the impacts which have been produced to date, from both a rational and neo-institutional perspective.
The findings show that the main motivation behind the decision to share senior managers reflects a rational perspective. Councils introduce the innovation to save costs, although these savings appear to be relatively small. Councils also point to a range of non-financial benefits including increased organizational resilience and access to new expertise and learning. We also find examples that reflect a neo-institutional perspective (Nicolai et al., 2010). Councils decide to adopt a SMT following a governmental mandate or to imitate others that share similar political ideologies and service populations with socio-economic characteristics.
The paper contributes new knowledge in an emerging area of public sector management and has potential to help develop theory and improve the policy and practice of public service innovation more widely.
