Value Diversity and Political Appointees

• In Event: Finding the Right Person: Political Appointees and Agency Effectiveness

Abstract

We explore how vacancies in presidentially appointed leadership positions might have an impact on two separate aspects of performance in public organizations: (1) the relative diversity of values represented in an agency’s strategic goal environment, as articulated by its leadership, and (2) an agency’s ability to meet those goals. First, “acting” leadership culled from the career or lower-level appointed ranks in a PAS’s stead may be risk adverse in attempting to clearly define an agency’s or program’s priorities (O'Connell, 2008), thereby relying on the legislatively delegated range of authority and failing to further refine the priorities of the organization among the diversity of values representative of that delegated discretionary scope—for fear of directing the value orientation of the organization afield from the preferences of any given principal (future or present). Second, extended vacancies should complicate the ability to quickly “hit the ground running” when an appointed leader is finally in place (Maranto, 2005; Pfiffner, 1996), thereby complicating an agency’s ability to meet its goals.
While little work on legislative delegation of authority looks at whether delegation actually leads to agency performance (Krause, 2010; Marvel & McGrath, 2016), research from private sector organizations indicates that a lack of continuity in leadership might disincentivize agency workers to strive for or define “effectiveness” on their own (Cannella & Hambrick, 1993; Finkelstein & Hambrick, 1990; Hambrick & Fukutomi, 1991). Thus, the intervention of politically appointed leadership (relative to its continuity) could work complementary to legislative delegation of authority to increase performance through the mechanism of leadership—i.e., defining the course of action that employees engage (Barnard, 1938, 1968). Put simply, appointees attempt to define and prioritize the value orientation of the organization in order to set a course of action toward the mutual preferences of the president and Senate (Bertelli & Grose, 2011). Conversely, some scholars of policy implementation argue that a “bottom-up” outlook of policy goal formulation and adjustment “celebrate the diversity and cacophony of ‘adaptive’ implementation arrangements” (O'Toole, 1989, p. 2) that may incorporate broader value perspectives than those proffered by the seemingly shorter-term, narrower policy interests of political appointees (Meier & Bohte, 2007, p. 131).
We present analysis of a research effort that leverages two novel data sources—(1) a detailed longitudinal roster of presidential appointment positions and the officials who occupy them from 1989 to 2011 (Resh et al., 2019) and (2) a qualitatively coded analysis of U.S. executive branch agency Performance & Accountability Reports (PARs). The latter data are based on an inductively derived typology of the predominant values underlying specific annual performance targets and whether the actual performance results meet/exceed those targets. We model the temporal impacts of appointed leadership vacancies, politicization (in terms of unilateral “appointee layering”), and the relative value diversity of an agency’s goal environment on organizational performance.
The present research note provides some indication that the value diversity across an organization’s entire goal environment is positively associated with individual goal achievement. Moreover, both PAS placement and politicization inhibit goal attainment indirectly by reducing value diversity. In other words, the more consistently appointed leaders are in place at an agency and the more a president politicizes that agency with unilateral, lower-level appointments, the more negatively both of these factors contribute to the value diversity of an agency’s goal environment at the point of setting an organization’s annual objectives. This, in turn, leads to diminished goal attainment presumably because there is a more narrow organizational value set (i.e., the legislatively delegated range of discretion) from which the organization can pick and choose, thereby limiting organizational flexibility.
Previous research indicates that careerist leadership is more effective than appointed leadership (e.g., Lewis, 2008) and that employee access to important organizational information is more open with the absence of political leadership (Resh, 2014, 2015). Yet, “the evidence linking appointee continuity and agency performance remains largely anecdotal” (Dull & Roberts, 2009, p. 445). The evidence provided here points to the importance of a diverse value set underlying the goals of the organization. We find that appointees set and prioritize more narrow value sets in their respective agendas, which in turn inhibits the agency to meet its broader expectations.

Author

• William G. Resh, University of Southern California