Does Private Sector Experience Matter for Public Managers?

• In Event: Performance Management and Performance Information

Abstract

Public administration reforms, and not at least NPM-inspired ones, have propagated the use of private sector management skills in the public sector. The private sector management model is seen as superior and therefore to be imported (Farnham and Horton, 1993: 46). This has not only resulted in the transfer of management tools and practices, but also in an increased openness to managers with a private sector background. Reform thinking centered on the idea of managerialism, or the idea that better management is the solution for making public organizations perform better and for solving social problems (Pollitt, 1990; Painter, 2011; Diefenbach, 2009). Under managerialism, “Private experience is, for the most part, depicted as the fount of most practical management wisdom” (Painter, 2011: 237). Hence, bringing in managers with private experience is seen as desirable because of the more advanced knowledge of management tools and skills they were supposed to possess.

Especially in executive agencies, private sector experience has become more common (Van Thiel et al., 2007). Sector switchers are said to have a ´sector imprinting´ (Boardman et al., 2010; Chen, 2012): they hold certain norms, attitudes, skills and behaviors that they take with them when moving to another sector. This may make them valuable in the new position. A similar literature exists in private sector management scholarship that has looked at whether a new CEO is an insider or an outsider to the organization (Petrovsky et al, 2015). Karaevli (2007) talks about outsiderness to describe the value of an outside CEO bringing in new skills, insights or leadership styles to a company.

Despite the attention in political rhetoric for the added value of private experience and abundant biographic story telling about the experiences of private top managers who have switched to public sector roles, broad empirical evidence remains limited and speculation is more prominent than evidence (Rainey and Bozeman, 2000; Bozeman and Ponomariov, 2009). Scholarship on sector switchers has tended to focus on their job satisfaction, motivation (Hansen, 2014), job involvement, (Boardman et al. 2010), experienced value differences (De Graaf and Van der Wal, 2008), careers and income changes (Bozeman and Ponomariov, 2009) or on perceptions of red tape and formalization (Chen 2012). A lot of this work has been based on in-depth interviews with smaller samples (De Graaf and van der Wal, 2008; Apfel, 2012), but increasingly, new data become available that allow larger studies (Boardman, Bozeman and Ponomariov, 2010). Some earlier studies have explicitly looked at the effect of prior private experience on public managers attitudes and behaviors (Fernández-Gutiérrez and Van de Walle, forthcoming; Chen, 2012).

Our proposed paper looks at whether having private sector experience makes public managers different in terms of management instrument use and entrepreneurial attitudes. This paper uses data from the COCOPS Top Public Executive Survey, a survey among central government top managers in 19 European countries (Hammerschmid et al, 2016). It is a large scale survey, based on a full census of public officials at central government and agencies in all policy fields.

Authors

• Kohei Suzuki, University of Gothenburg

• Steven Van de Walle, K.U.Leuven

• Victor Lapuente, Goteburg University