Understanding the Impact of Accountability Reform on Public Employee Attitudes: the Case of No Child Left Behind

Understanding the Impact of Accountability Reform on Public Employee Attitudes: The Case of No Child Left Behind Jason A. Grissom Harry S Truman School of Public Affairs University of Missouri Sean Nicholson‐Crotty Department of Political Science and Harry S Truman School of Public Affairs University of Missouri James R. Harrington Harry S Truman School of Public Affairs University of Missouri Over the past three decades, reforms targeted at improving government performance, accountability, transparency, and customer orientation—sometimes grouped under the moniker of New Public Management (NPM)—have been implemented in public organizations delivering all type of services across all levels of government. There is at times disagreement about the exact reforms that make up NPM or about its continued relevance. Some suggest that ―performance management‖ may have survived as the dominant element in this basket of reforms and taken its place as the central tenet of modern governance (Kettl and Kelman 2007). Whatever the name, however, it is widely accepted that performance or results-oriented management practices that stress employee accountability and borrow tools from the private sector to incentivize production have come to dominate administrative reform (see Moynihan 2008). The performance payoffs of these reforms have received considerable scholarly attention and the findings have been, not unexpectedly, mixed (see for example, Thompson and Rainey 2003; Moynihan and Pandey 2005; Dubnick 2005; Fredrickson 2006). As these reforms have taken hold in more organizations, and affected more employees, scholars have begun to expand this exploration to the impact on the attitudes of public workers. While early proponents of NPM style reforms suggested that they would increase satisfaction, empowerment, and commitment among public employees (Barzelay 1992; Osborne and Gaebler 1992), the empirical evidence has been a decidedly mixed bag. Some reforms have been shown to negatively impact public employee attitudes (e.g., Korunga et al. 2003), while others have been found to be positively related to satisfaction (e.g., Lee et al. 2006). In some cases, authors have found positive and negative effects in the same study (Yang and Kassekert 2006). Given that the debate over the utility and appropriateness of many of these reforms is ongoing, understanding their impact on 1 employee satisfaction and commitment is of significant import to scholars, managers, and policymakers. We hope to contribute to this enterprise in this project. We endeavor to show that a prominent model of job stress from the private sector can be used, following some adaptations to the unique values of public workers, to predict the impact that performance based reforms will have on satisfaction among those employees. Specifically, we adapt the Demand, Control, Support (DCS) model (Krasek and Theorell 1990), which has recently been applied to attitudes in the public sector (Noblett and Rodwell 2009), to include job security, which has been shown to be an important predictor of public employee attitudes (Lim 1996). We propose that the impact of reform on more generalized attitudes like satisfaction should be a function of the sum of its impacts on an important set of antecedents; an impact that we expect will be moderated by the effectiveness of the public employee’s manager. We test the utility of that framework in an examination of the impact of No Child Left Behind—arguably one of the most ambitious performance based accountability reform ever implemented in this country—on teacher attitudes. The results suggest that the adapted DCS model may offers a powerful tool for explaining, and disentangling the components of, the often disparate impact of performance reforms on public employee attitudes. Literature on the Impact of Performance Reforms on Employee Attitudes With the widespread adoption of private sector management practices in public organizations, often grouped loosely under the names ―New Public Management‖ or ―Performance Based Accountability,‖ scholars have become increasingly interested in the impact that these reforms have on public employees. This growing literature has investigated the impact of managing for results, accountability standards, pay-banding, at-will employment and other 2 common NPM reforms on the stress and satisfaction of those working in the public sector. Interestingly, however, this research has arrived at divergent conclusions regarding that impact. One body of scholarship has suggested a negative relationship. Authors have found a link between these reforms and levels of public employee stress (Korunka et al. 2003; Exworthy and Halford 1999). Work has also suggested that emphases on efficiency and accountability decrease employee satisfaction (Mikkelsen, Osgard, and Lovrich 2000) and that reforms which emphasize extrinsic rather than intrinsic rewards may result in reduced levels of organizational commitment (Young, Worchel, and Woehr 1998; Foster and Wilding 2000). Finally, New Public Management reforms have been shown to erode professional values among public servants (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2000; Powell, Brock, and Hinings 1999) and workplace trust (Battaglio and Condrey 2009). Alternatively, another body of work suggests a positive, or at least more complicated, relationship between NPM style reforms and employee attitudes in the public service. Yang and Kaessekert (2006) find that contracting out and the erosion of civil service protections reduce satisfaction, but that performance-based accountability, pay-for-performance, and ―innovativeness culture‖ can actually produce improvements in public employee satisfaction (Yang and Kassekert 2006). Lee et al. (2006) find that pay-for-performance schemes are regularly associated with increased satisfaction in the federal civil service in more than three decades worth of surveys. Finally, Bertelli (2007) finds that performance-based incentives can reduce stated turnover intention among some federal employees. Specifically, he finds that supervisory-level employees who are subject to pay-banding respond positively (i.e., have lower stated turnover intention) to timely performance incentives, though perceived accountability does not influence turnover intention. Alternatively, among nonsupervisory personnel, being held 3 accountable for results significantly increases the likelihood that they will state an intention to leave. Understanding and Managing the Impact of Performance Reforms The literature reviewed thus far suggests that performance or accountability focused reforms, though often bundled together by both scholars and policymakers, can have differential effects on public employees’ psychological health, job satisfaction, and turnover intention. This section draws on and expands a theoretical model from the private sector management literature that has recently been applied to public organizations in order to construct a framework that will generate predictions about the direction of a reform’s impact on public employees. In recent years, scholars have applied a number of models from the private management and occupational health literatures in order to better understand the mechanisms by which organizational reforms impact the attitudes of public employees (see for example Noblett and Rowdell 2009). Among the most commonly applied of these has been the Demand-Control- Support, or Job-Strain, model (Krasek 1979; Krasek and Theorell 1990). The model hypothesizes an interactive relationship between the demands placed on an individual by her job, the level of decision making authority that she feels she has, and the support that she receives from supervisors and coworkers (see van der Doef & Maes 1999 for a review). It predicts high strain, and the negative psychological consequences that accompany it (e.g. stress, low satisfaction), when the demands of a job exceed the control and support necessary to meet those demands. The model has received widespread support in research on private organizations and is among the most commonly used theoretical approaches in occupational stress research (Fox et al. 1993). 4 The justification for applying this model in the public sector is typically the organizational change wrought by New Public Management. Scholars suggest that the imposition of external accountability standards and the new performance-oriented culture, along with the dwindling or static resources that often accompany NPM reforms, have placed much greater demands on, and intensified the work of, public employees (Korunga et al. 2003; Schafer and Toy 1999). They also assume that, despite the rhetoric of decentralization, NPM reforms often do little to increase the actual decision making authority of line employees and may actually decrease control by giving more power to external stakeholders (Dixon, Kouzmin, and Korac- Kakabadse 1998; Hood 1991). While these are reasonable assertions and provide an intuitive justification for the application of the DCS to public organizations, there has been little empirical evidence generated regarding the actual impact of NPM style reforms on demand, control, or support. Nonetheless, scholars have found some evidence for elements the DCS model in public organizations that have undergone NPM-style reforms. Noblett et al. (2005) find that job control and supervisor support have a significant impact on psychological health, satisfaction, and organizational commitment in what they describe as a ―commercially-oriented‖ public organization. Similarly,

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