Strategic management and the performance of public organizations: testing venerable ideas against recent theories

Meier, Kenneth John ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6378-0855, O'Toole, Laurence J., Boyne, George Alexander and Walker, Richard Mark 2007. Strategic management and the performance of public organizations: testing venerable ideas against recent theories. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 17 (3) , pp. 357-377. 10.1093/jopart/mul017

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

Miles and Snow, among others, argue that strategy content is an important influence on organizational performance. Their typology, applied recently to public organizations in the United Kingdom, divides strategic actors into four general types: prospectors, defenders, analyzers, and reactors. This article begins by integrating work on strategy content or strategic management into the O'Toole-Meier formal theory of public management. This study shows that strategy content is a subset of generally accepted management functions in public organizations. The article then proceeds to test the strategic management concepts in a large, multiyear sample of public organizations. The results show that strategy can be separated out from other elements of management for a distinguishable assessment of its impact on organizational performance. Unlike the predictions of Miles and Snow and the empirical findings of Boyne and Walker, however, we find that the defender strategy is the most effective for the primary mission of the organization and that the prospector and reactor strategies work best in regard to the goals of the more politically powerful elements of the organization's environment.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Business (Including Economics) Geography and Planning (GEOPL)
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	1053-1858
Last Modified:	17 Oct 2022 09:17
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/2641

Citation Data

Cited 149 times in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item