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

5. Task Allocation in Policing

77 Chapter 5 Task Allocation in Policing I N THIS chapter, we extend our analysis of the supervisor as coordinator within a public bureaucracy, a role consistent with both principalagency approaches and organization theory.1 In this role the supervisor must define and allocate tasks across subordinates (Wilson 1989). Tasks define what it is that bureaucrats, and hence bureaucracies, do. The challenge for the supervisor as coordinator is to match the right subordinates with the right tasks. This requires that subordinates be given tasks they prefer. In chapter 4, we formally demonstrated that an efficient solution to the task allocation matching game is possible. There exists an equilibrium solution whereby tasks are stably allocated across subordinates. Nonetheless, demonstrating the existence of an equilibrium does not necessarily prove that such an outcome is common in the real world; indeed, a perfect match is doubtful, because a subordinate is likely to receive a bundle of tasks, some of which he prefers and some he does not. Here we empirically examine this process of matching tasks to workers. More particularly , we examines the capacity of supervisors to coordinate subordinate work across a variety of tasks. By featuring tasks, we escape the simple working-shirking dichotomy that dominates the study of hierarchical organizations. By looking at speci fic tasks rather than cumulative time in working, we attain a much more nuanced understanding of what it is that public bureaucrats do. Our previous analysis of working and shirking by police officers (Brehm and Gates 1993, 1997) required that we collapse together all tasks that lead toward production, when there is obviously considerable variation in the form of those tasks. It is of considerable interest to the police supervisor to know whether her subordinate officers are devoting the majority of time to mobile dispatches at the expense of time spent on paperwork. Further, the notion of tasks as the unit of bureaucratic effort squares much more cleanly with organizational theory on routines (for example, Steinbruner 1974), and bureaucratic politics literature (for example, Wilson 1989). Finally, by switching to an analysis of time devoted to different forms of working, we reduce the sensitivity of our results to the potential for effects of the observer upon the performance of the subordinate. That is, though the amount of time spent working probably increases when the subordinate is being observed, the amount of time allocated to any particular form of work is probably less sensitive to observation. We expand on the working-shirking dichotomy by examining the compliance of public bureaucrats across multiple tasks, and we choose police officers as the bureaucrats to study. Data gathered in 1977 by Elinor Ostrom, Roger Parks, and Gordon Whittaker (1982) detail the specific allocation of time across different tasks by individual officers. By examining the amount of time a police officer allocates to specific tasks, we have an opportunity to evaluate both the supervisor’s role in maintaining subordinate compliance and coordinating work effort. Based on our previous models of supervision, we believe that subordinate work across tasks will be a function of supervisory coercion, subordinate preferences, and the solidary attachments of subordinates (Brehm and Gates 1993, 1994, 1997). Although the findings here relate specifically to police work, we believe that they are generalizable to the behavior of bureaucrats in other contexts . In Working, Shirking, and Sabotage, we found strong similarities across a wide variety of bureaucrats, from police officers, to social workers , to federal civil servants. Supervisors as Agency Coordinators We know little about the role tasks play in organizations and we know even less about how tasks are allocated in an organization. What role do supervisors play in this allocation? In what capacity do supervisors serve as coordinators and facilitators of subordinates’ work on different tasks? The traditional principal-agent model features agents’ decision to work or to shirk. In the enhanced principal-agent model (Brehm and Gates 1994, 1997), we expand the options available to subordinates to include sabotage, the act of producing negative output. In this chapter, we consider variation among the tasks available to subordinates, where the tasks vary in desirability to both the supervisor and to the subordinate . The key question is: what accounts for the amount of time that subordinates devote to each task?2 We study the role of supervisors as coordinators by looking through the lens of our task allocation game, presented in chapter 4. 78 Teaching, Tasks, and Trust [13.59...