Political and Cultural Environment of Public Policy and Its Administration Decision-Making
The Cherry County Human Services Department (CCHS) is a state agency of social intervention services providers involved in children’s protection, foster care, and delinquency. The CCHS employees experience continuous overload with highly stressful cases, strict court presentation requirements, and administrative paperwork; thus, staff turnover is a serious issue in the organization. Furthermore, cuts in finances, conflicts between colleagues, burnout, and the director’s disrespect for the difficult job of social service damage productivity and decrease the effectiveness of real help to the children in need. These factors influence decision-making processes in CCHS, enabling the executives to act based on adequate information about the situation or current conditions rather than attempting to research and develop an optimal solution. Shafritz et al. (2017) state that “in the real world, we are forced to reject the “rational comprehensive” approach and “satisfice” rather than “maximize” (p. 56). Resolutions offered by CCHS are necessary for the workplace environment improvement, caseload, and overwhelming paperwork issues addressing require reconsideration from the “satisfactory” perspective.
Discussion
The CCHS administration filled the senior role with a person from a different county rather than promoting one of the current supervisors. The agency could afford to be “satisfice” with the information they already obtained from interviewing a manager and assessing the current work environment. The rationality of offering a job to a third-party candidate is that the confrontations, load with cases, and bureaucratic paperwork seem impracticable to resolve by current supervisors and employees. Public organizations’ operations must consider their impact on society, and inviting a new manager addresses the employment rates and demonstrates the agency’s operations activity (Schwarz et al., 2022). The CCHS afforded to “satisfice” because the hiring decision might not involve additional research or employees’ opinions consideration to be fulfilled; the urgent need for closing the position is the priority.
The CCHS work is comprehensive as it includes participants in stressful instances such as child abuse, neglect, and abandonment, paperwork strictly regulated by the administration, and communication with colleagues with similar overload. Consequently, assessing if the staff operates efficiently and investigating if any issues force them to misconduct and get involved in conflicts must consider the specific conditions of their job (Schwarz et al., 2022). The disciplinary measures of executives to enable the employees to respond to new stringent reporting requirements is a decision made on a “satisfice” basis, yet absolutely should not have been completed without comprehensive research. Indeed, the director and managers relied on visible factors, such as service workers skipping their deadlines, completing only the minimum of tasks, and leaving earlier rather than attempting to indicate the causes of misbehavior. The additional paperwork for reporting increased the work overload and decreased employee productivity.
Decisions that affect the workload of service providers must have a conceiving basis that contains surveying employees, identifying the problematic aspects, and considering external factors. Affording to “satisfice” is unethical in the given case because the disciplinary measures must include specific evidence for implementation, and CCHS executives did not gather any information about the reasons for misconduct (Soltwisch et al., 2020). The agency did not complete sufficient research and communication with the employees to assist; rather, they made their responsibilities more laborious. If the maximizing strategy to develop arguments for decisions was applied, supervisors could address their subordinates’ complaints and improve the workplace environment and efficiency without disciplinary measures.
Organizational Behavior: Bureaucracy Section
Public administration organizations such as CCHS are highly bureaucratic in their daily operations, decision-making, and paperwork completion. Indeed, CCHS works collaboratively with courts and other social services where a similar approach is performed, making their communication and data exchange less comprehensive. The structure of administrative institutions determines the range of authority among its employees and assists in addressing specific issues directly to an individual responsible for the related processes and decision-making. However, Shafritz et al. (2017) claim that “the structures of a large bureaucracy are inherently conservative in that they are slow to change” (p. 289). Such conditions are disruptive for CCHS as the new child protection precedents might occur and require novel decisions for which the old regulations are unfeasible. Bureaucracy influences organizational behavior and its efforts to work efficiently as several aspects are helpful while others hinder the agency’s operations.
Hierarchy is a beneficial aspect of bureaucracy for the agency’s efforts because it allocates the responsibilities in the team and enables the employees to address the executives’ orders. In CCHS, supervisors and senior managers have the authority to make internal decisions, such as work hours revision or recourses distribution, based on the executives’ demands and the subordinates’ needs. The structure allows the social service providers to exclude the workplace load from their responsibilities and gather more time for fieldwork and collaboration with courts. The CCHS case demonstrates how lack of managerial intercommunication and addressing the issues employees experience disrupts the operations’ effectiveness in a bureaucratic organization. However, hierarchy also enables the social and civil service systems to maintain their commitment to their duties, such as children’s protection, and vertical power distribution is the most reliable for internal regulation (Suzuki & Hur, 2020). Although CCHS experiences issues with organizational behavior, the solid structure helps in the agency’s attempts to resolve them by identifying who is responsible for integrating the change and addressing the conflicts.
Extensive paperwork is an aspect of bureaucracy that demonstrates the conservativeness of such systems and hinders the agency’s attempts to work efficiently and improve organizational behavior. Indeed, public administration is a large structure, and without reports, inquiries, and cover letters, the considerable scope of information or evidence might be lost or deliberately concealed (Monteiro & Adler, 2022). The CCHS case demonstrates that paperwork is severely time-consuming for social service providers who must comply with the regulations to operate in courts and collaborate with other services such as foster homes. The employees complain about the large volume of reports with strict format requirements that must be written and timely delivered to their addressees. The courts demand official papers developed following legislation, enabling individuals who have already dedicated a significant amount of time and effort to create a strategy for helping a child in need. Consequently, service providers experience burnout, and with the lack of internal support by the managers, they start misbehaving and refusing to complete other responsibilities.
Paperwork automation or delegation are the changes CCHS should implement to address employee turnover because this aspect of bureaucracy disrupts their work daily, making them unable to complete the tasks on time. Public administration agencies, especially social service departments, are crucial for the citizens’ welfare, and how they operate demonstrates the municipal structures’ efficiency (Suzuki & Hur, 2020). Although bureaucratic institutions, such as courts, would not update their paperwork requirements urgently, organizations such as CCHS might make a deliberate attempt to help their employees balance their responsibilities.
Organizational Behavior: Theory Section
At CCHS, relations between service providers, their managers, executives, and external participants, such as the courtroom and other administrative institutions, require revision and improvement. Lack of proper feedback addressing and clarity of communication among colleagues and their supervisors disrupts the agency’s efficiency and adds stress to the already highly-loaded work (Shafritz et al., 2017). Specifically, staff relations demonstrate that they refuse to work collaboratively, engage in frequent conflicts, and have their needs ignored by the managers. Furthermore, the CCHS executives do not understand how the social service for children is performed and what interactions, activities, paperwork, and collaboration with courtrooms require. Thus, they cannot properly evaluate the team’s productivity and analyze if their employees complete sufficient hours and perform without risk of burnout. These conditions are the root causes of severe organizational behavior in the agency, and the new manager should develop a strategy to address them.
Multiple theories of organizational behavior can be applied in the CCHS case to help managers and supervisors improve the social service providers’ conditions and build a sustainable positive workplace environment. The employees who leave the office early and refuse timely to complete all reports and paperwork demonstrate a lack of motivation; therefore, the approach to influence their decision-making should address their willingness to improve. The Herzberg, Mausner, and Snyderman motivation-hygiene theory is suitable for CCHS organizational behavior issues because it assists in determining the dissatisfying factors and directly influences them or replaces them with motivators (Mitsakis & Galanakis, 2022). The two-factor methodology provides managers with sufficient data to take action in integrating the change into a workplace.
According to the selected theory, the prior action necessary to improve the workplace environment and relations between CCHS employees is to determine what hygiene factors make daily activities dissatisfying. Conducting a meeting with an agenda where all possible aspects, such as salary, supervision, conditions, and interpersonal relationships, will be discussed, and everyone could share their considerations is a proper activity (Mitsakis & Galanakis, 2022). Although conflicts and arguments might occur during such an event, the action will be successful because it will demonstrate managers’ willingness to improve and remind the staff that they work in a team. Then, every employee will be offered to mention satisfactory aspects of their job and expectations to help managers understand how motivation might be impacted.
Another activity to perform for improving staff relations in CCHS is related to increasing the range of satisfying factors that impact employees’ inspiration and the overall workplace environment. Indeed, according to Herzberg, Mausner, and Snyderman’s motivation-hygiene theory, enforcing the positive aspects, especially during high-loaded work, helps people reach their goals (Mitsakis & Galanakis, 2022). For instance, allowing the team to perform more inspiring tasks, such as communication and fieldwork, and offering assistance with paperwork will reduce the stress and make them kinder toward each other. Staff relations will benefit because the actions’ successful completion will make the providers recognize how flexible their work might be, even in the bureaucratic environment, if they are ready to collaborate.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Jones, the new staff manager at CCHS, has a complicated task to return the team’s discipline, willingness to fulfill their job obligations, and effectiveness as social service providers for children. The specific problem is a lack of communication and feedback between employees and their supervisors (Shafritz et al., 2017). Consequently, the actions to improve organizational behavior should demonstrate the importance of teamwork, interactions, and, for managers, the cruciality of their responsibility toward actively engaging in daily operations.
References
Mitsakis, M., & Galanakis, M. (2022). An empirical examination of Herzberg’s theory in the 21st-century workplace. Psychology, 13(2), 264-272. Web.
Monteiro, P., & Adler, P. S. (2022). Bureaucracy for the 21st century: Clarifying and expanding our view of bureaucratic organization. Academy of Management Annals, 16(2), 427-475. Web.
Schwarz, G., Christensen, T., & Zhu, X. (2022). Bounded rationality, satisficing, artificial intelligence, and decision-making in public organizations: The contributions of Herbert Simon. Public Administration Review, 82(5), 902-904.
Shafritz, J. M., Russell, E. W., Borick, C. P., & Hyde, A. C. (2017). Introducing public administration (9th ed.). Taylor & Francis.
Soltwisch, B. W., Brannon, D. C., & Iyer, V. (2020). The ethics of maximizing or satisficing: How decision-making style and ethical ideology impact moral judgement. Business and Professional Ethics Journal, 39(1), 77-96.
Suzuki, K., & Hur, H. (2020). Bureaucratic structures and organizational commitment: Findings from a comparative study of 20 European countries. Public Management Review, 22(6), 877-907. Web.