This paper explores impacts of trust-reforms on organizational outcomes in professional services in public sector organizations. Governments and public sector organizations in the Nordic countries have been active but pragmatic public management reformers for a long time (Brunsson & Olson, 1993; Greve et al., 2020). The Nordic countries are commonly regarded as well-functioning societies on many dimensions, including having effective public sectors (Fukuyama, 2014). The many public management reforms involving organizational-oriented as well as user-oriented management tools may have contributed to the well-functioning societies and the effective public sector organizations. Norway, for example, has been above average active in implementing organizational-oriented as well as user-oriented management tools, for example management by objectives and user surveys (George et al, 2019). Research show that top executive public managers in many European countries regard many public management tools as having positive impacts (Hammerschmid et al., 2019). At the same time, the many public management reforms over many decades may have resulted in a fragmented public sector and in many public sector organizations with layers of management tools and practices that are not well coordinated. Moreover, some political sentiments are tilted in favor of some types of management models and in disfavor of other types of management models in public management reforms. Neo-liberal and conservative regimes often favor privatization, contracting out, user choice, and performance appraisals and social democratic regimes often favor strategic planning, management by objectives, and total quality management. Changes in political regimes may therefore results in public management policies to adjust and sometimes reverse earlier reforms. Hence, much previous public management reform activity may be a driver for still more reforms.
A current trend of public management reforms in the Scandinavian countries revolves around de-bureaucratization, trust, and collaborative governance (Torfing & Bentzen, 2020; Bentzen, 2022a). There are now several studies that indicate promising results from trust-reforms in the Scandinavian countries (Bentzen, 2019, 2022b; Elmersjö & Sundin, 2021; Klemsdal & Kjekshus, 2021; Vallentin & Thygesen, 2017). Most of these studies are, however, case studies of processes and there a few large-N studies and studies of organizational outcomes.
In this paper we conduct a large-N study with survey data on how employees in home care and primary and secondary education services perceived changes from a municipal trust-reform and how these changes relate to leadership practices and organizational outcomes. Specifically, we studied the City of Oslo, which implemented a trust-reform in 2017, and we conducted our survey in 2021. We developed a path model with changes from the trust-reform as exogenous variable, transformational leadership (Jensen et al., 2019) as mediating variable, and organizational citizenship behavior (Lee & Allen, 2002) and organizational performance (Van de Ven & Ferry, 1980) as dependent variables. The model is estimated with structural equation modelling (CB-SEM or PLS-PM).
Preliminary analyses indicate positive and significant relationships between all the latent variables, indicating that introducing more trust-based management may impact transformational leadership, organizational citizenship behavior, and organizational unit performance positively. The paper contributes to the performance management literature and the literature on the management of professional services as well as to public management reform theory.
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