CULTURAL THEORY AND MANAGERIAL VALUES: EXAMINING TRUST AS A MOTIVATION FOR COLLABORATION
| Date | 01 December 2016 |
| Published date | 01 December 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12200 |
doi: 10.1111/padm.12200
CULTURAL THEORY AND MANAGERIAL VALUES:
EXAMINING TRUST AS A MOTIVATION FOR
COLLABORATION
THADDIEUS W. CONNER, MATTHEW C. NOWLIN, THOMAS RABOVSKY
AND JOSEPH T. RIPBERGER
Public administration theorists have long argued that values of administrative actors fundamentally
shape the quality and nature of the public services they provide. While there has been some work
in recent years to measure values in the public sector like Public Service Motivation, we know rela-
tively little about the role that other (more basic) values play in shaping managerial behaviour.To ll
this gap, we argue that Cultural Theory (CT), a prominenttheory within research on risk and public
opinion, provides a general framework for operationalizing and measuring the values of public man-
agers, which (if pursued) allows scholars to directly test important yet untested hypotheses about
the relationship between values and managerial decision-making. To explore this proposition, we
use data from a recent survey of American Indian education directors in public school districts to
examine the relationship between cultural worldviews and managerialmotivation to engage actors
in collaborative arrangements.
INTRODUCTION
Public managers play a vital role in the connection between policy and outcomes, with
policy-making authority typically diffused across multiple institutions and actors. The
importance of public managers arises, at least in part, from the authority and autonomy
(discretion) granted to them by other policy actors (Mayhew 2004). Public managers are
often able to leverage this discretion to improve policy and/or agency outcomes. For
instance, public managers who are looking to solve a complex problem that cannot be
solved by their organization alone may decide to collaborate with actors outside of their
organization who share a common interest and/or goal. This decision to collaborate can
signicantly impact policy outcomes and organizational performance (Meier and O’Toole
2003; Meier and Krause 2003).1In the US, for example, school principals and other admin-
istrators are responsible for student achievement. However,student achievement is a com-
plex phenomenon that is driven by a number of factors within and beyond the walls of the
school. Thus, if school administrators want to meaningfully improve student achievement,
they may have to engage a variety of external stakeholders, such as parent-teacher associ-
ations, local business leaders and non-prot organizations that provide social services to
student-aged populations (Meier and O’Toole 2006). Given the proliferationof third party
actors in policy implementation throughout the public sector (Frederickson and Freder-
ickson 2006), managers in many countries are increasingly faced with complex problems
such as these that require networking and collaboration.
Because of this, scholars have examined some factors that may lead to more (less)
collaboration. Several theories of collaboration, including public choice, resource depen-
dency theory and transaction cost theory,suggest that public managers are rational actors
Thaddieus W. Conner is in the Department of Government, New Mexico State University, USA. Matthew C. Nowlin
is in the Department of Political Science, College of Charleston, USA. Thomas Rabovsky is in the School of Public and
EnvironmentalAffairs, Indiana University, USA. Joseph T.Ripberger is in the Department of Political Science, University
of Oklahoma, USA.
Public Administration Vol.94, No. 4, 2016 (915–932)
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
916 THADDIEUS W. CONNER ET AL.
who will collaborate in an effort to gain resources or reduce the transaction costs associ-
ated with performing the duties of the agency (Williamson 1975; Alter and Hage 1993;
Bardach 1998; Bryson et al. 2006; Thomson and Perry 2006). Sociological explanations
of multi-organizational partnerships argue that such perspectives overlook key factors
including the importance of social context, trust, group dynamics and institutional norms
and values that shape interactions among interconnected players (Granovetter 1985; Berry
et al. 2004). In recent years, scholars have pushed beyond organizational factors to explore
the individual-level predictors of collaboration and other kinds of managerial activity.
Public administration theorists have long argued that the values of administrative actors
fundamentally shape the quality and nature of the public services they provide. While
there has been considerable work in recent years to measure values in the public sector like
Public Service Motivation (e.g. Perry 1996; Anderfuhren-Biget et al. 2014; Jacobsen et al.
2014; Vandenabeele et al. 2014), we know relatively little about the role that other values
play in shaping managerial behaviour in areas such as networking and collaboration.
In this manuscript we attempt to ll this lacuna by developing a theoretical framework
of managerial values, with a particular focus on the link between cultural values and col-
laboration. Specically, we use Cultural Theory (CT) – a prominent theory of values in
multiple disciplines – to examine how public managers’ motivations to collaborate are
inuenced by their deeply held values. Before doing so, we take a closer look at the role
of values in the study of public administration. Then we briey outline CT as a theoreti-
cal framework to explore and measure the value systems of individuals. Next, we discuss
the literature on collaborative public management and outline a framework that uses CT
to develop theoretical propositions regarding intrinsic motivations behind collaboration.
Using data collected from surveys of American Indian education directors in New Mex-
ico, Oklahoma and Montana, we conduct exploratory empirical work on the relationship
between cultural worldviews and the motivations to collaborate. Finally,we conclude with
a discussion of the implications of our preliminary ndings and areas for future research.
MANAGERIAL VALUES AND THE STUDY OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
Managerial discretion is ubiquitous in the policy-making process. For a variety of reasons,
politicians (particularly in the US, but also in other advanced nations) often expend con-
siderable energy on making public speeches and appearances to debate the importance
of a given policy, but ultimately craft relatively vague legislation with several impor-
tant aspects of implementation left undened (Lindblom 1959; Epstein and O’Halloran
1999; Mayhew 2004). Additionally, the complexity and uncertainty surrounding the
task environment in many policy areas (such as education, crime and anti-terrorism,
social welfare, natural disasters, etc.) necessitates that managers have the capacity to be
exible and adaptable so they can respond to conditions ‘on the ground’. As a result,
public managers often have considerable capacity to alter the effectiveness of public
policy (for both good and bad), depending on the decisions they make on a daily basis
(Meier 2009).
This dynamic creates a number of important questions that public administration theo-
rists have struggled with for decades – when, how and why do managers choose to lever-
age their discretion and, more importantly, what factors inuence the decisions they make?
As shown in previous research, some of the factors that inuence the decisions made by
managers may include a manager’s knowledge, expertise, experience and/or the mission
of a manager’s organization (see Rainey 2009 for a more extensive discussion). While these
Public Administration Vol.94, No. 4, 2016 (915–932)
© 2015 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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