Teaching, Tasks, and Trust: Functions of the Public Executive

4. Task Allocation in Public Bureaucracies

63 Chapter 4 Task Allocation in Public Bureaucracies A S SHOULD be becoming evident after reading this far, organization theorists are consistent in their argument that the coercive aspects of supervision in public bureaucracies alone cannot account for high levels of performance. Indeed, this point may have been ascertained by the reference to Barnard (1938/1968) in the subtitle of this book. Like those of the private sector executive, the functions of the public executive are many. Although coercion, in the form of the application of rewards and sanctions for performance, deters shirking and encourages working, it is a pale and limp tool for the supervisor seeking to generate significant amounts of effort and production. Instead, self-selection into bureaucracies, policy goals, and peer reinforcement dominate coercion. If the supervisor in a public bureaucracy does not succeed by coercion, then what do supervisors do? Here we provide deductive evidence that supervisors in public bureaucracies achieve high degrees of compliance by selective assignment of tasks to subordinates, in which the primary advantage of a task to the subordinate stems from the perquisites related to that task. In short, supervisors wield perks, the ancillary aspects of task performance, as a primary tool in obtaining subordinate compliance. Our premise is that bureaucratic subordinates must choose among a variety of discrete activities, tasks, and allocate effort accordingly. The idea of the task as the fundamental unit of bureaucratic organization is an old one, explicitly part of the formulation of division of labor (for example, Smith 1776/1994; Babbage 1832), or of the design of bureaucracy itself (for example, Weber 1947). Smith’s pin factory, after all, is populated with people who specialize in drawing the wire, others who specialize in fastening the head of the pin, and still others who specialize in sharpening the pin. Weber’s ideal bureaucracy has people who specialize in their domain of expertise. Wilson puts it well: “People matter, but organization matters also, and tasks matter most of all” (1989, 173). The variety of tasks to allocate within a bureaucracy can be diverse. In one of our many analyses of the performance of police officers, we considered how police officers divide their time among eleven tasks (see Brehm, Gates, and Gomez 2003; Brehm and Gates, chapter 5, this volume ). The vast majority of officers devoted the vast majority of their time toward only two of these tasks, mobile patrol and runs (dispatches to investigate or handle a citizen complaint). Nonetheless, all had to devote some portion of their time toward the completion of paperwork, traffic duty, and other policing tasks, and some (relatively small) fraction on personal tasks. Another example of task diversity can be found in Herbert Kaufman’s account of The Forest Ranger (1960). Forest rangers prevent fires, seek fair prices for timber, manage old and new growth forests, provide recreational opportunities for citizens, regulate the extraction of resources from National Forest lands, maintain relations with communities, and, of course, complete paperwork. The diversity of these tasks creates the central problem of Kaufman’s book, namely, given these pressures to decentralize, how is it that the Forest Service obtains a high level of competent performance from the rangers? How are their actions coordinated? Who is responsible for allocating tasks? Some tasks are legislated. The level of discretion that an employee of the Social Security Administration has in issuing Social Security checks is next to nonexistent: Congress stipulates the formula by which all Social Security recipients are paid. Similar constraints on bureaucratic task allocation can be found in the Internal Revenue Service or the U.S. Postal Service, bureaucracies that take the form of production organizations (Wilson 1989). Production organizations are those that most closely resemble manufacturing firms, in that both outputs (work performed) and outcomes (results of outputs) are readily observable. These bureaucrats have less discretion over their allocation of time across tasks. In other organizations, where either outputs or outcomes are not observable, the allocation of tasks is influenced by the norms of the employees, experiences, the attitudes and beliefs of the subordinates, and the decisions of bureaucratic supervisors (Brehm and Gates 1997). In this chapter, we explicitly model how a supervisor allocates tasks, holding norms, experiences and attitudes of subordinates in control. Of course, the assignment of tasks to subordinates is not unique to bureaucracies. Supervisors in private sector organizations also face the problem of optimal assignment of subordinates to varied tasks of the organization. Supervisors in public bureaucracies, however...