Impact of Conflicting Accountability Demands on Bureaucratic Responsiveness

• In Event: Experimental Research and Behavioral Public Administration

Abstract

This study is to examine the impact of conflicting multiple accountabilities on the behaviors of public employees. Accountability is the hallmark in political science and public administration. In particular, public organizations and public employees frequently face the conflicts among different accountability requirements from institutional superiors including the legislature, citizen, and professional organizations. Concerning the conflicts, a classical case is the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion event that was discovered to result from problematic conflicts among bureaucratic, political, professional, and legal accountability sources (Romzek and Dubnick 1987). However, there is a gap in the existing literature focusing on case studies or conceptual papers: a quantitative study for a theory development and causality on how conflicting accountability systems affect the behaviors and attitudes of public employees. This study is, by using experimental vignette methodology, to examine the impact of conflicting multiple accountabilities on the responsiveness of public employees to their bureaucratic supervisors in terms of time and intention to be responsive. This study is meaningful because extents of conflicts (or, accordance) among different institutional superiors are expected to differently affect public employees: for example, significant conflicts can frustrate public employees in a way to increase uncertainty/confusion and difficulty of decision while consistent supportive environments from all institutional superiors can encourage public employees with a certainty of what to do. Accordingly, the different levels of conflicting accountability expectations can bring out the different behaviors of public employees. This phenomenon is frequent in the public sector: for example, in educational area, assistant professors face expectations from the general public, their mentors/professional organizations, the school’s Dean as well as their immediate superiors. This study focuses on the education area in various public contexts (additional study plans to examine the police and health area).

This study develops four hypotheses to develop the accountability theory for the public sector as follows.
1)Public employees are less responsive to supervisory demand if they face more conflicts with their institutional superiors
2)Public employees are less responsive to supervisory demand when they face a conflict with their legal superiors than political superiors.
3)Public employees are less responsive to supervisory demand when they face a conflict with their legal superiors than professional superiors.
4)Public employees are less responsive to supervisory demand when they face a conflict with their professional superiors than political superiors.


The experimental designs and data collection are as follows.
1) Three independent variables (Professional, Legal, and Political Accountability)
2) Two levels of each variable (Conflict vs. No Conflict with Bureaucratic Accountability Expectations)
3) Factorial design: 2x2x2 = Eight experimental cells
4) Numbers of vignettes: Total 9 vignettes: Eight Test Conditions plus one baseline vignette of bureaucratic accountability
5)30 subjects per vignette considering effect size: total 270~300 subjects
6) MTurk/TurkPrime is used.

Variables are as follows.
1)Dependent variables: willing to be responsive to the bureaucratic requirement and time to be taken to respond
2)Mediating variable: personal accountability (individual subjective experience of being accountable about the conflicting macro accountability requirements)
3)Control variables: demographic factors that may influence the hypothesized relationship, including organizational rank and tenure.

Initial results and implications:
The results of a pre-test show that the more conflicting accountabilities negatively affected responsiveness of public employees to bureaucratic accountability system in terms of time and intention to be responsive. Also, the more conflicting accountabilities negatively affected the personal accountability of public employees. We expect that more conflicts among political, legal, professional, and bureaucratic accountability expectations are not helpful to induce public employees’ attitudes and behaviors. As a future study, it would be meaningful to examine the responsiveness of public employees to citizens whom they work for when they face conflicting multiple accountabilities from their institutional superiors including supervisors, legislature, and professional organizations.

Author

• Yousueng Han, University of Southern California