The administration of government business is one of the key fundamental issues in public administration theories and practices. The framework of administration determines the core performance objectives that enable the public service—as the engine room of the state—to coherently and efficiently complement democratic governance anywhere across the world. When bureaucracy emerged in the 19th century, it was founded on a notion of public administration that is coherent only to the extent that it sees the state in action and interaction. In this context, administration becomes synonymous with government, and it essentially concerns the entirety of the state’s activities in terms of the coordination and enforcement of policies, and the people and agencies that are involved in these activities. The concept of government represents the prototypical hierarchical and rule-bound institutions of the state based on formal and fixed laws and norms of operations. In this context, government refers to that very institution that exerts executive authority within a political system and over society. The government becomes the complex and organisational centre of administrative power separated, by that fact, from the rest of society.
This is the concept that gave birth to the management-by-directive tradition, which undergirds Max Weber’s articulation of the nature of the bureaucracy. This tradition centralises the decision-making process in a manner that gives the administrator or manager (in Nigeria and in a significant sense, the permanent secretary) complete discretionary control over the employees and the entire administrative context. This tradition stipulates a set of administrative goals and objectives, rules, procedures, and regulations, as well as well-defined roles and responsibilities, which serve as pathways to achieving these objectives. All these are codified as “general orders” that the employees are expected to strictly follow under the omniscient supervision of the manager or administrator. As a leadership paradigm, it follows what Martins G. Evans and Robert J. House call the path-goal trajectory of leadership effectiveness. This theory insists that the effectiveness of a leader is determined by the leader’s capability to assist the followers or employees in achieving organisational goals through motivation, clarifying the paths to the goals, and eliminating impediments.
This tradition owes its most influential theoretical basis to the groundbreaking work of Max Weber who erected public administration on the command-and-control structure of the Prussian army. The idea of bureaucracy, for him, is based on the notion of legal-rational authority; in other words, it is a structure with an authority that activates basic democratic principles and codes, which employees and society recognise as legitimate and for which career officials are custodians. Each position in the bureaucracy has its clearly defined rules, procedures, duties and rights, which are clearly defined to determine how the given authority is to be exercised. The bureaucracy, therefore, promises a stable organisation that is neutral, hierarchically organised, efficient and inevitable; and is characterised by precision, continuity, discipline, strictness and reliability.
However, Douglas McGregor’s analysis of what he calls Theory X and Theory Y in the administration of government business provides the philosophical foundation for management-by-directive. Theory X and Theory Y constitute a theoretical diagnostic of organisations and systems. McGregor’s theory evolved as a human relations theory that outlines certain underlying assumptions that managers have with regard to organisational functioning and performance.
The Weberian bureaucratic framework is founded on three basic propositions: first, management involves the deployment of people, materials and money as means towards the achievement of particular economic objectives; second, organisational objectives require the control and motivation of people; and, third, without a strict organisational regimen, humans are usually unproductive and resistant to organisational needs. This theory is backed by a very dim and gloomy perception of human nature, which conceives of an average employee as being (a) indolent by nature, (b) lacking in ambition and motivation, (c) naturally egoistic and, therefore, set to work contrary to organisational requirements, (d) naturally resistant to change, especially those that would contradict his selfish desires, (e) naturally deceivable. Given these assumptions, organisational goals can only be achieved if the discerning manager employs a very strong tactic in getting his indolent employees to achieve the set targets.
McGregor’s Theory X, therefore, demands the path-goal theory of leadership in its four iterations: achievement-oriented leadership, directive leadership, participative leadership and supportive leadership. Leadership is perceived in a hierarchical framework. These hierarchies are the basis for the assertion of administrative authority. The manager, for instance, stands at the zenith of that authority as the one person whose seniority enables her to monitor the administrative rules and procedures that those lower down the hierarchy must follow. This is the tradition that centralises the significance of the Weberian administrative model for many years. It is the traditional model that constitutes the core of the framework for administering government business until the emergence of the managerial revolution in public administration in the second half of the 20th century. Managerialism upends almost all the assumptions that define the bureaucracy in command-and-control terms.
The managerial revolution has as its most fundamental premise the argument that market-based business management principles and the entrepreneurial culture possess the most formidable capacity for ensuring public service efficiency in ensuring democratic service delivery to the citizens. The justification for this transition is simply that, for ‘managerialists’, the Weberian bureaucratic model is much too rigid, rule-bound, cumbersome, costly, inefficient and unresponsive to the needs of the citizens as the customers of public services.
In its place, managerialism expects a government that is FAST—flatter, agile, streamlined and technology-enabled. The traditional structure of the bureaucracy, being rigid, inward-looking and founded on outdated competencies, must, therefore, be modernised in ways that make it more collaborative, transparent, flexible and participatory. This translates into a public service that is expected to be (a) fast-moving, intelligent, professional, information-rich, flexible, adaptable and entrepreneurial; (b) less employee-focused and rule-driven, deliver quality service; (c) performance-focused and accountable; and (d) operated by a multidisciplinary team of new generation public managers and project teams.
In this managerial context, the real challenge is not what government does, but rather how it is done—the measurable means by which government business is effectively and efficiently administered to produce significant outputs and results.
To achieve these performance-based results, therefore, it becomes important to reflect on the public service and the functions of public managers. Contrary to the transactional model of leadership which takes public managers as mere administrators, who measure the temperature of the bureaucracy, managerialism insists that public managers must be freed from the bureaucratic operating mechanism and framework that limits their vision, creativity and capacity for managerial innovation. This, then, implies that administrators and front-line managers will not only be empowered to make critical decisions and achieve discretionary autonomy as a measure of the responsiveness of the system, but they will also be held accountable for performance and measurable outcomes which emphasises customer satisfaction and productivity.
McGregor conceptualises managerialism in terms of Theory Y, which not only provides a better understanding of human nature that undergirds the bureaucracy but also articulates a transformational understanding of administrative leadership. While Theory X has a gloomy perspective on personnel dynamics, and of employees in an organisation being motivated only by the bare need for food, shelter and survival, the Theory Y paradigm insists on the contrary that humans in any system or organisation are motivated by the need to satisfy the higher-order needs like social relationship, the search for esteem and dignity as well as the need to exercise their creative genius, especially with regards to organisational performance.
McGregor’s Theory Y does not constitute a wholesale rejection of the Weberian traditional understanding of public administration. This makes it a perfect theoretical framework for a neo-Weberian reconsideration of the required paradigm for rethinking the administration of government business. Given the failures of both the traditional Weberian tradition and the new public management and its managerial revolution, the neo-Weberian paradigm possesses the capabilities to incorporate useful insights from both frameworks. Its understanding of people, and human resources management and human relations, constitutes a tremendous plank in building an organisational framework that gives the nod to productivity and performance.
But more than this, the framework of a shared transformative capacity of a leader, required by Theory Y, turns public administration itself away from being a mere theory of government to a new understanding of it as a theory of governance. And within this new framework of governance, it provides the basis for a distributed paradigm of leadership that is the centrepiece of what has been called the change space model of leadership, rather than the path-goal theory. The change space model emphasised the idea of leadership rather than that of a leader anchored on a personality. Thus, even when there is one public manager around which the administrative dynamics are anchored, the leadership trajectory is distributed across many multilayered points, from the permanent secretary to the front-line manager.
How then can we begin to reimagine the transition from Theory X to Theory Y which the neo-Weberian institutional framework permits? I will outline two fundamental variables in terms of which we can assess any bureaucratic system. The first concerns the dynamics of the workforce and the workplace, and the second has to do with the implication of Theory Y for the structure performance management protocols of the public service. Theory X and Theory Y both have different frameworks that provide different perspectives of the workplace. Within Theory X, the assumption that employees are lazy and irresponsible leads to a management style that is autocratic and utilises the carrot-and-stick method of motivation. And a rigid bureaucratic environment that essentially stifles the employees’ creativity and entrepreneurial innovation.
But if we shift the assumption and rather see employees as self-motivated and ethical, and the management style becomes more participatory and empowering, then we arrive at more employee engagement at the workplace that boosts morale and motivation, enhances creativity and innovation, and enhances more efficient performance and productivity outcomes. The idea of decentralisation (let managers manage), for example, provides department and individual managers with more autonomy and discretionary capacities in decision-making, while also empowering employees to have more say in procedural and performance matters. This makes for more job satisfaction that enables the workforce to do more. However, this transition must also carry forward the understanding that some responsibilities might need the management-by-directive mechanism that demands direct supervision.
All this has direct implications for performance management. This is to the extent that the workforce and its responsibilities are crucial to how we shift focus from processes to results. Performance management is therefore a process of (a) communicating organisational aims and objectives to all stakeholders, (b) setting performance targets to measure the achievement of goals and objectives, and (c) ensuring that all these activities provide a basis for continuous learning, improvement and performance accountability. Within a bureaucratic environment that is participatory, the performance management system cannot be codified within the general orders. What is to be achieved, and how it is to be achieved will be a function of shared understanding. It will also involve a decentralised organisational process that, first, connects plans, strategies and blueprints to budgeting and funding; and second, cascades all this to the operational timelines of the ministries, departments and agencies.
This enables the ministries, departments and agencies to arrive at their own vision, mission and value statements, as well as the performance strategies that distil, at the individual levels, performance contracts and target outputs between the key policy actors. This is what it means for a performance management system to emphasise participatory planning of performance goals, service standard setting, and establishment of performance improvement plans and measures between superiors and subordinates. The system also ensures the setting up of a performance-based reward and sanction linkage that connects performance to individual and departmental accountability in ways that encourage continuous learning and incremental improvement. For example, it is based on performance reviews that supervisors decide whether their subordinates can be promoted, whether they need specific training to enhance their performance, or whether they deserve any performance-based rewards for the execution of their duties and responsibilities.
•Prof. Olaopa, Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission, writes from Abuja
