Goal Ambiguity and Organizational Performance in U.S. Federal Agencies

In spite of numerous observations that government organizations have high levels of organizational goal ambiguity that exert major influences on their other characteristics, few researchers have measured goal ambiguity and tested these frequent assertions. In previous research, we developed measures of four dimensions of goal ambiguity: mission comprehension ambiguity, directive goal ambiguity, evaluative goal ambiguity, and priority goal ambiguity. Confirming hypotheses developed from the literature on public organizations, the latter three variables showed relations to such organizational characteristics as organizational age, financial publicness (proportion of funding from government allocations), and regulatory status. This article reports a second analytical step of examining the relations between the goal ambiguity dimensions and indicators of organizational performance based on responses to the 2000 National Partnership for Reinventing Government Survey of federal employees. The performance variables included managerial effectiveness, customer service orientation, productivity, and work quality. Regression analyses with numerous control variables found that directive, evaluative, andpriority goal ambiguity relatednegatively tomanagerial effectiveness. All four performance indicators showed significant negative relationships with evaluative goal ambiguity and directive goal ambiguity. The results provide further evidence of the viability of the newmeasuresof goal ambiguity, support theory-basedbut previously untestedhypotheses, and further indicate the feasibility and value of analyzing goal ambiguity of government organizations. The literature on public organizations contains numerous assertions about the impacts of goal ambiguity on important characteristics of those organizations. Again and again, authors say that vague, hard-to-measure goals influence structural dimensions, attitudes, behaviors, and organizational outcomes in public organizations andmake them different from business firms on these characteristics (for a review, see Rainey 1993). The great frequency of such observations, however, has not generated a comparable amount of empirical research aimed at proving or disproving them. The small number of studies that have tried to provide We wish to thank Jungwook Lee for his valuable editorial assistance with this article. We also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for rigorous critiques and numerous colleagues who provided comments at the ‘‘Determinants of Performance in Public Organizations’’ seminar, Cardiff University, May 6–8, 2004. Address correspondence to Young Han Chun at doongsirigo@hanmail.net. doi:10.1093/jopart/mui030 Advance Access publication on February 25, 2005 a The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org. JPART 15:529–557 at R uers U nirsity on A uust 2, 2010 http://jpaordjournals.org D ow nladed fom empirical evidence, moreover, have usually relied on managers’ responses to survey questions about whether their organizations have vague or clear goals (e.g., Rainey, Pandey, and Bozeman 1995). These studies have found that public and private managers do not differ in their responses to questions about whether their organizations’ goals are vague and hard to measure. These findings thus run counter to the typical observation that public organizations have less goal clarity than business firms. They raise the question of whether one would get different empirical results using evidence relying less on managers’ survey responses. The situation calls for more research with better measures of goal ambiguity. This study relates new measures of the goal ambiguity of U.S. federal government agencies to measures of the agencies’ performance. This study is the second report of a larger study reported previously (Chun and Rainey 2005). That first article reported the development of the new measures of the four dimensions of goal ambiguity described below. As described below, it reported evidence that supported hypotheses about the relations between those measures of goal ambiguity and ‘‘antecedent’’ variables that should influence the degree of goal ambiguity. These antecedents included the agency’s financial publicness (the proportion of its funding from government allocations as opposed to sales or user charges), regulatory functions versus nonregulatory functions, complexity of the policy problems the agency confronts, and others. Researchers in the social sciences have paid very little attention to clarifying and measuring the concept of goal ambiguity. These confirmations of hypotheses about relations between the goal ambiguity measures and these antecedent variables justified optimism about measuring organizational goal ambiguity in a meaningful way and about using those measures in research on the many assertions about its antecedents and consequences. The larger study analyzed the relations between goal ambiguity and a variety of consequence variables, including such variables as employee work satisfaction and perceptions about organizational structure. This article reports our analysis of the relations between goal ambiguity and arguably the most important of these consequence variables, organizational performance. Examining these relationships has important implications for the theory of public organizations, since assertions about goal ambiguity figure so importantly inmany scholars’ assertions about the other characteristics of public agencies, including their performance. It also has important implications for public policy and managerial practice, for the assumption that goal clarification will improve organizational performance underlies recent administrative reforms, including the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) in the United States and initiatives based on the New Public Management in other nations. This assumption involves a leap of faith, since there is so little empirical evidence of such a relationship and since one can argue that for some government agencies goal clarification might not be feasible and might indeed be dysfunctional. Further development of measures of organizational goal ambiguity and research on their relations to other variables can contribute to better analysis of such matters. Then comes the formidable challenge of measuring the performance of government agencies in a way that provides common, comparable measures for all the different agencies. We use data from the very large 2000 National Partnership for Reinventing Government Survey conducted by the Office of Personnel Management to construct the performance measures from the responses of the employees in the agency. As we describe later, the survey’s very large sample size leads to very sensitive statistical tests that find many statistically significant results but with small effect sizes (small R statistics). Nevertheless, the finding of statistically significant support for the hypotheses offers 530 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory at R uers U nirsity on A uust 2, 2010 http://jpaordjournals.org D ow nladed fom further support for the usefulness of the measures of goal ambiguity and useful evidence about frequent assertions in the literature. DIMENSIONS OF GOAL AMBIGUITY IN ORGANIZATIONS For this study, organizational goal ambiguity refers to the extent to which an organizational goal or set of goals allows leeway for interpretation,when theorganizational goal represents the desired future state of the organization. An organizational goal loses clear meaning and becomes ambiguous when it invites a number of different interpretations. This definition of organizational goal ambiguity (or clarity) is consistent with some previous conceptions of the construct (DiMaggio 1987; Kelemen 2000; Locke et al. 1989; Zahariadis 1999). Goals can be ambiguous in various ways, however, and along different dimensions. We developed four dimensions of goal ambiguity that refer to communicating the reason for the existence of an organization, directing organizational activities, evaluating organizational performance, and making decisions about organizational priorities (Chun and Rainey 2005). Measuring Organizational Goal Ambiguity The measures for variables usually appear in the method section. Given the newness of the four concepts and measures of goal ambiguity, to aid the reader we describe the measures in this section aswe introduce the concepts. As described below, the data formost of the dimensions of organizational goal ambiguity were collected from the agencies’ strategic plans and performance reports. The Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 requires that virtually every federal agency describe the agency’s goals and performance indicators in the strategic plans and in annual performance plans and performance reports that must be submitted to Congress (U.S. Office of Management and Budget [OMB] 2001). This provides access to information about the formally stated goals of most federal agencies. The measures of the goal ambiguity dimensions we employ do not have a long history of use, so we provide evidence of criterion validity, especially convergent validity, in notes in the following sections. 1 There has been little clarification of the relations among such goal attributes as goal vagueness, specificity, complexity, multiplicity, conflict, tangibility, and measurability. The relationships among these ambiguity-like constructs remain ambiguous themselves. A focus on the level of interpretive leeway involves conceiving goal ambiguity as a general concept incorporating these seemingly interrelated goal attributes. 2 Using the GPRA plans and reports as data sources to measure goal ambiguity in federal agencies has several significant advantages in dealing with methodological complicat