When we ignore design flaws in government organisations, we misattribute bad government to incompetent and corrupt workers instead of the bad design that fails to support their efforts.
Be it the Republican party’s post-election attempts to overhaul the US bureaucracy, the newly appointed Lebanese government tending to a country reeling from years of political paralysis and socioeconomic collapse, Syria hoisting itself out of a 14-year war, saving lives in a pandemic, or Burkina Faso’s push for economic self-determination, public sector institutions feature as the sites of the hour, and their workers the talk of the hour.
Without them, policy — whether tied to peacetime state building, reconstruction after socioeconomic collapse and war, disaster management, or reclamation of a sovereign political economy — cannot be translated into action and impact.
Yet essential as they are, public sector establishments and their workers cannot escape citizens’ and policymakers’ discontent, disproportionately shouldering responsibility for government failure. They cannot escape the tainted and tired storyline that they fail to deliver public value because of incompetence, corruption, sometimes both. For many, the size of the public sector alone — it makes up 38 per cent of formal employment globally — signals an undiscerning employer.
Careful research on public services provision and state-led R&D initiatives shows that ideology, faulty social science, and expedient policymaking have propped up this storyline long enough to shrink and gut the public sector, and to impose the wrong kind of performance and value creation standards.
Selective attention to failures in public services provision and state-led innovation initiatives has resulted in oversampling instances of bad government and in writing off instances of good government as idiosyncratic exceptions that are not worth learning from — especially in low- and middle-income countries.
Thus unfortunately, and often, public sector reform follows a familiar playbook: cull, shuffle, and replace. On rare occasion, hire more.
We hear much less about reform that attempts to understand why existing public sector workers are failing to deliver and what could be done to change that. Maybe because hiring and firing is faster and more obvious than system (re) design.
Engineering failures happen when quality parts come together in bad design.
Consider then that bad government is not about bad people but bad design choices too.
The problem is not public sector workers
No doubt, state institutions need qualified workers to thrive.
In 1883, the US federal bureaucracy adopted the Pendleton Act to mandate hiring based on qualifications and competitive examinations. Merit-based hiring in the US Post Office reduced delivery errors and increased demand for postal services. It retained high-quality bureaucrats and reduced politically motivated worker turnover that harms the quality of public services. This more performant US Post Office bridged the geographic gap between inventors and businesses, enhancing innovation and economic development.
The issue then is not about whether a state teacher, health worker, or police officer is a “civil servant at heart.” It is about enabling their work of serving — a matter of organisational design.
Today, cutting across country income levels, the majority of government bureaucracies worldwide recruit bureaucrats and frontline workers selectively and competitively. Compared to the private sector, government agencies hire more educated workers, pay them better, and give them better benefits. They hire competent workers, matching qualifications and skills to job descriptions, and their public servants agree that merit is the main criterion for hiring.
So what’s the problem?
One theory is that, although competent, many government workers lack intrinsic motivation to serve the public. Researchers and policy makers consider public service motivation to be a second dimension of worker quality because government agencies are mission-oriented. They say government organisations should focus on public-spirited hires because their prosociality and commitment to service will spur better public services delivery.
We should, however, be wary of selecting on motivational profile for two reasons.
First, what motivates people changes over their life course. Even more so than with personality profiles, it would be misguided to treat motivational profiles using trait-based logic. The Perry scale, as with Big Five scores, might characterise applicants at a specific point in time, but their informational value is unreliable over the long run.
Second, as with “personality fit,” relying on “motivational fit” lets managers off the hook, making them unaccountable to their workers. They lock workers into roles, jobs, and restricted mandates. They assume workers can’t learn and don’t develop them. Recent hires based on motivational fit might boost the work of government units initially. But soon enough, the effort and civic-mindedness premium of public-spiritedness is crowded out by under-investing in and undervaluing these workers, and by misdirecting their efforts.
The issue then is not about whether a state teacher, health worker, or police officer is a “civil servant at heart.” It is about enabling their work of serving — a matter of organisational design.
The military is not choosy about its hires. Yet it manages to socialise young men and women into internalising the ideal of “service before self”, into soldiers who stake their lives for unit and country. The military invests in organisational practices that align the soldier with its goals. It builds a culture, a structure, and processes that reinforce its ideals and mission.
The point is simple: If workers can be shaped into alignment with organisational goals, they can also be shaped out of alignment with them.
Government organisations should motivate through design, not just selection.
Organisational design can either empower or stand in the way of its workers: some examples
Government workers are hired for jobs they don’t do. Outsourcing government work to the private sector is a design decision about the allocation of work. It thwarts the use and development of local competencies in the public sector corps and reduces ownership over policy implementation and outcomes. It prevents the organisational learning needed to innovate and scale policy, to build dynamic and context-relevant problem-solving capabilities.
Government workers do too much rather than too little. Indian and Moroccan nurses perform clinical tasks formally the mandate of physicians. But this labour shortage induced task shifting occurs without commensurate adjustment in pay, which offends their sense of fairness. This experience of inequity in the workplace can lead to undesirable behaviour choices, like working in private practice during public sector work hours and taking bribes from patients.
Government workers’ career aspirations are frustrated by poor performance tracking and evaluation systems. When the Ministry of Health and Sanitation in Sierra Leone adopted a meritocratic promotion system, rather than continue to rely on the discretion of local health authorities, health workers increased their household visits by 22 percent without compromising quality of care.
Government workers suffer from bad job design. Nigerian bureaucrats tasked with greater autonomy and discretion in their work show higher project completion rates. Pakistani procurement officers empowered with greater decision-making authority achieved nine percent lower public procurement purchase prices, all while maintaining quality. The positive effects of autonomy are unsurprising because government work should be responsive to the needs of local communities and emergent policy demands.
Government workers don’t receive necessary on-the-job training to do better. Mexican police officers who received targeted training in procedural justice policed better. They shifted their mindset, communicated more openly and more respectfully with the public, and were less likely to engage in harmful behaviour like intimidation and bias with citizens.
Capable government organisations leverage their workers’ competencies and motivation through design
To motivate effectively through design, it’s critical to look locally for good and context-relevant design choices. It pays to attend to the significant variation in management practices, and worker performance and behaviour, across and within government establishments.
Within the same country, government schools with higher adoption rates of basic management practices, greater degrees of operational and strategic autonomy, and more accountable and strategic leadership by principals exhibit substantially higher educational outcomes. In Morocco, bribery rates during healthcare provision vary across and within public hospitals. Across the wards of the same hospital, they can be as low as zero per cent and as high as 56 per cent. And across different kinds of health workers in the same ward, they can be as low as eight per cent and as high as 47 per cent. This variation appears to be tied to how care work is organised.
Such variation means that neither the performance nor behaviour of government workers is overdetermined. Under the same set of constraints, a realm of design possibilities reveals itself.
Smart government invests in learning why some work units and organisations manage past the constraints, why others remain hemmed in by them, and why others still, remain fenced in despite favourable conditions for takeoff.
Rather than “hollow men” and “blobs”, the answer is almost always rooted in organisational design. And in particular, in the incongruence of component design choices, like work allocation decisions that don’t leverage and grow in-house talent; uncompensated task shifting that generates inequity; non-meritocratic promotions that frustrate career-oriented workers; job designs that don’t allow workers to adapt to local needs; management that doesn’t invest in necessary on-the-job training. Incongruence in design creates inertia, underperformance, and corruption in public sector organisations.
Capable government organisations piece together the work, the people who do the work, the structures and processes that fashion, allocate, and streamline the work and that reward effort and output, and the workplace culture, in a fit-for-purpose way. Therefore, before rushing to shake up a civil service corps, consider that the “innovators and disrupters and original thinkers” are to be found in currently employed bureaucrats and frontline workers, and that they pine for the organisational design that allows them to realise their added value.
The Dutch cycling team Team Visma | Lease a Bike (formerly Jumbo-Visma) dominates the sport because it combines resources with good management, the kind that carefully marries team strategy and team design.
Governing may not be a competitive sport, but it is a high stakes matter. Matching strategy to organisational design creates capable government that can deliver thriving and resilient societies in the long game.
