working, shirking, and sabotage

Working, Shirking, and SabotageWorking, Shirking, and Sabotage: Bureaucratic Response to a Democratic Public by JohnBrehm; Scott GatesReview by: James NordinPublic Administration Review, Vol. 60, No. 3 (May - Jun., 2000), pp. 281-285Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Society for Public AdministrationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/977470 .

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Working, Shirking, and Sabotage

James Nordin, University of California John Brehm and Scott Gates, Working, Shirking, and Sabotage: Bureau-

cratic Response to a Democratic Public. (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 245 pp., $39.50 cloth.

In just over 200 pages of text, Brehm and Gates present their enhanced principal-agent theory and data from several studies to support it. Before going into the content of their book, I want to make some introduc- tory comments. I read this book from my own point of view-that of a bureaucrat and a manager who is look- ing for solutions to problems or at least guidance as to what might work. Thus, I am impressed by well-developed arguments supported by solid data, but the arguments must make sense to me at the experiential level before I will really buy them. While I consider myself a student of public administration and public management (can one be in both camps?), I prefer plain writ- ing rather than the sometimes esoteric, convoluted prose emanating from many scholarly journals. Brehm and Gates satisfied me on both these counts. While they offer no easy answers and slip into technical statisti- cal jargon occasionally, on the whole their book is very readable and as hopeful as it is provocative.

Brehm and Gates study the age-old problem of how to get subordinates to work. What can a supervisor do to in- duce compliance? They begin by ask- ing how bureaucracies can be made accountable to the people through Congress. Their first answer is that

interorganizational control can only be achieved by understanding issues of intraorganizational control (Brehm and Gates 1997). The first chapter of their book is a literature review that begins with Woodrow Wilson and Luther Gulick and proceeds through Frederick Taylor, Mary Parker Follett, Chester Barnard, Herbert Simon, Hugh Heclo, Michael Lipsky, and James Q. Wilson. These are all authors in what they call the "public administration and theory of organizations" traditions. These authors cover every- thing from scientific management to the human relations school to bureaucratic discretion, focusing mostly on the interaction of the bureaucrat and the organization. They look for struc- tural and procedural solutions to bureaucratic compliance.

Brehm and Gates then look to the economists for a theory of the firm and rational choice. They review the work of Anthony Downs, Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz, Will- iam Niskanen, Oliver Williamson, Ronald Coase, Terry Moe, Gary Miller, Mathew McCubbins, Roger Noll, and Barry Weingast as well as several of their own contributions, to see how they explain control of subordinates. The key features of the literature of rational choice are the no- tions of principal-agent theory, moral

hazard, and adverse selection. Using principal-agent theory, the authors examine the efforts involved when a principal ("supervisor") wants an agent ("subordinate") to perform a task. The principal knows what is desired and (theoretically) controls the incentives and sanctions to reward or punish performance. The agent has the working knowledge of what the task entails and knows how hard she or he is working.

Moral hazard comes into play when insurance encourages people to take risks they ordinarily would not take, but the terms can apply to any action by an agent that is not in keeping with what the agent promised to do.

Adverse selection, another essen- tial concept in principal-agent theory, describes the dilemma of the principal in selecting the best agent for the task. Each agent will say s/he is the best for the job, and the agent alone knows if this is true. The principal al- ways risks choosing the "wrong" agent or making an adverse selection. In the literature reviewed, rational choice theory is applied primarily to relationships between organizations, especially between Congress and bureaucracies. Brehm and Gates see that all the solutions proposed in these studies rely on the coercive powers of supervisors over subordinates, so

James Nordin is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Sacramento Center. He recently retired after more than 30 years of federal service, over 20 of those years as a supervisor/manager. His research interests are supervision and public sector financial management. He was a founding member of the Western Region Partnership Council, Food and Nutrition Service, USDA. This Council won the 1999 John N. Sturdivant National Partnership Award and was awarded honorable mention in 1998.

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that relationships between organizations are actually based on relationships within an organization.

Brehm and Gates try to reconcile the literature discussing motivation as a positive force with the literature dealing with sanction. One focuses on professional ethics, the other on leisure time on the job. Writers in both of these literatures find that bureaucrats respond to their supervisors, to their own initiatives and purposes, to each other, and to their customers. Bureaucrats can respond in a number of ways; working to implement policy; shirking by relaxing on the job, or intentionally going slowly to subvert policy; or actively working against policy, that is, through sabotage. One final note before proceed- ing to Brehm and Gates' theory de- velopment. They classify what they are studying as "administrative supervision" as opposed to educational or supportive supervision. They are studying the coercive form of supervision classically associated with incentives, sanction, and control.

Brehm and Gates use chapters 2 and 3 to develop what they call their enhanced principal-agent theory. We will return to these chapters momen- tarily. The rest of the book analyzes studies of bureaucratic behavior to see if the theories developed stand up to empirical tests. Chapters 4 and 5 examine federal bureaucrats using data from three surveys conducted by the Unites States Office of Personnel Management. These surveys covered over 100,000 respondents from over 36 agencies. Chapter 6 examines data on county social workers gathered by the authors. About 138 respondents were involved and one county was studied. Chapters 7 and 8 look at police officers, the quintessential "street- level" bureaucrats. Police from seven cities were observed or interviewed in two different studies. Chapter 8 examines police brutality, so the numbers are generally very small (but nonetheless alarming).

Chapter 9 looks at state utility regulators and how they report what influences them. Chapter 10 is a summary chapter. The authors conducted only one empirical study themselves. In every other instance, they rely on data gathered by others. The data were gathered for other purposes as well; none of the studies focused exclusively on supervisory influence over subordinates. The empirical evidence is therefore more difficult to deal with, although it contains no research bias in favor of the theory put forth by Brehm and Gates.

What is their enhanced principal- agent theory? First, the agent is not a unilateral worker or shirker. Agents are allowed to selectively work or shirk depending on the task assigned. Sec- ond, agents can find utility in the work they do, not just from incentives of- fered by the supervisor. Third, the agent is constrained by time and effort in producing work. The enhanced principal-agent model focuses on the constraints, not just on the production of work. These factors together allow the agent to choose one of four options for each assignment, as noted above: work; leisure-shirk; dissent-shirk; or sabotage. Another aspect of this model is that the supervisor is acknowledged to have his or her own interests and therefore applies incentives or sanctions to different policies with differ- ing levels of vigor. The supervisor also has a finite set of resources with which to work, as do subordinates. Finally, the enhanced principal-agent model allows the agents to interact with one another.

In chapters 2 and 3 Brehm and Gates provide the results of a computer run of the enhanced principal-agent (EPA) game. In this game, the supervisor allocates tasks to subordinates (several tasks per subordinate): the subordinates) decide how to address each task. The supervisor decides how to allocate supervisory resources among subordinates. The subordinates respond (or not) to the supervisor. This

ends the first round of the game. In the second and future rounds, the supervisor allocates tasks to subordinates and uses the information gained from previous rounds in making the alloca- tions. In this restricted model, the supervisor has minimal impact on whether subordinates work or not. The greatest impact on working is whether the subordinate chooses to work or not. The first choice of the subordinate becomes dominant.

To understand bureaucratic management better, Brehm and Gates argue, we must be able to determine the optimal amount of time a supervisor should spend supervising a subordinate. To determine this, the authors assume that the marginal effect of supervision on subordinate work is a function of how amenable the subordinate is to supervision. They added a factor for "amenability" into their for- mula and ran the game again. The results make absolute sense to me as a practicing manager, but they are generally denied in almost all descriptions of supervision. When amenability to supervision is added to the mix, (and remembering that supervisors have constraints on their supervisory resources), five general options are available to the supervisor: 1. Bureaucrats who produce desirable

benefits without supervision are left alone.

2. Subordinates unresponsive to supervision are left alone.

3. Supervisors allocate little work to produce output that they do not value.

4. Bureaucrats who improve production under supervision and are re- sponsive to a shift in the amount of supervision time allocated re- ceive the most supervision.

5. If the marginal utility of eliminat- ing the production of negative output (sabotage) is greater than the marginal utility of the time spent supervising, a supervisor will take action against the saboteur (Brehm and Gates 1997, 39-40).

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Tom Peters uses the analogy of a football field (Peters and Waterman 1982). If a supervisor has one subordinate "stuck" on the organization's own 10-yard line and another "stuck" on the opponent's 10-yard line, where should the supervisor place his or her effort to assist? The unequivocal answer from most supervisory training given to federal managers is to work with the "problem" employee on your own 10-yard line. Peters says that is a waste of resources. For the effort needed to move a subordinate 10 yards, you can "score" with the person on the opponent's 10-yard line and still be less than halfway to midfield with the person on your own 10-yard line. Here is a computer simulation that not only comes up with these same scenarios, but also shows that what will happen is what Peters says should happen.

In chapter 3, the authors loosen the rules slightly and allow agents to interact with one another. They did this based on a common observation of people in most all organizations when faced with a new assignment. The heu- ristic devices applied time and again are to do what was done in the past or see what everyone else is doing. When the EPA game is run again in the "imitation" mode, the results are even more stark. The variables that matter are those associated with the subordinate, not with the supervisor. Brehm and Gates produce seven propositions from this simulation.

The more individual bureaucrats look to fellow bureaucrats for information about appropriate behavior, the more likely it is that the bureaucrats will be in a state of conformity (all doing the same thing).

The greater the sense of uncertainty a bureaucrat feels about appropriate behavior, the more likely that bureaucrat is to look toward others, which in turn leads to greater conformity.

The greater the frequency of contact among subordinates, the

greater the degree of conformity in their behavior.

Whether or not a bureaucracy, in general, tends to comply with political su- periors depends primarily on the policy predispositions of the bureaucrats.

Learning by imitation might lead to extremism, not to middle-of-the-road behavior.

Learning by imitation can lead to extreme levels of compliance as well as extreme levels of noncompliance.

If subordinates adopt standard op- erating procedures on the basis of learning by imitation, their supervisors are but feeble influences on the ultimate compliance level of their bureaucracies (Brehm and Gates 1997, 71-74).

As noted above, the balance of the book tests the theories developed in these chapters with empirical data. The data for chapters 4 and 5 come from a series of three surveys conducted by the U.S. Office of Person- nel Management. The first two, called Federal Employee Attitudes surveys, were conducted in 1979 and 1983. The first had nearly 14,000 responses, the second over 20,000. The third survey, called the Survey of Federal Government Employees, which was conducted in 1992, resulted in nearly 31,000 usable responses. When asked what would motivate them, employees reported that they were most in- terested in money, but stated that their pay was not commensurate with their performance, so actual pay was generally not a motivating factor. Em- ployees were also not particularly motivated by performance ratings, although they did place more importance on them in the later surveys which were conducted after civil service reform. The authors also looked at how hard employees worked. They used employee self-reporting, employee reporting on other employees, and supervisory reporting of work effort. Putting together the data on motivation and performance, Brehm and Gates reach five conclusions that sup-

port the propositions stated in Chap- ter 3.

Federal supervisors are constrained both in monitoring employee performance and in rewarding or sanction- ing it.

Subordinate preferences consistent with work are the most efficient means to encourage work. (In other words, assign staff to tasks they want to work on.)

Subordinates derive utility from fellow subordinates. (What fellow employees think of you matters.)

Working may be skewed to the extreme. (When employees operate in an imitative manner and the culture of the organization supports working, working becomes the overwhelmingly dominant activity.)

Federal bureaucrats are hard workers. (Of course as a federal bureaucrat and manager, I find this very reassuring, in that it substantiates what I ex- perience on a daily basis.)

Chapter 6 examines the activities of social workers in Durham County, North Carolina. The data come from original fieldwork done by the authors in 1994, which analyzed a total of 138 usable responses (60 percent of those sent out). This survey was the first designed to look at sabotage specifi- cally. The authors use three measures of sabotage: Do subordinates fudge paperwork to keep clients eligible: do they bend the rules to get things done; do they perceive co-workers as break- ing the rules? They also look at the same kind of preference motivation questions as in the federal studies, and their data analysis produces findings that are consistent with the federal surveys. Social workers have very strong functional preferences-that is, what they do at work is important to them. They also show strong (but less strong) solidarity preferences-that is, group affiliation and support and recognition from co-workers. Supervisory influence was greater among social workers than federal employees. The authors are at first mystified by this, but

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then realize that social work supervisors do not generally behave in an administrative supervisory manner. Rather, their culture and training leads them to act in an educative or supportive manner which social workers find more influential. However, the factor that influences social worker performance the most beyond the preferences of the employee was the client. Customers were a strong influence on whether social workers took work home to finish but not on any form of sabotage.

Chapters 7 and 8 look at police officers. Brehm and Gates, while sometimes technical and arcane in their language, also have a gift for wonderful word pictures. The title of their book is one example. Another is the title of chapter 7, "Donut Shops and Speed Traps," a clever, catchy summary of its subject.

The data for Chapter 7 come from Albert Reiss's large 1971 study of police in Washington, Boston, and Chi- cago. The authors caution the reader that large problems with the data obliged them to manipulate it a great deal to make it useful (which in my judgment diminishes its credibility to some degree). The data were not gathered to study what Brehm and Gates wished to study and the observer's notes provide "miserable documenta- tion at best." The authors compare the Reiss data with data collected 10 years later by Elinor Ostrom, Roger B. Parks, and Gordon Whittaker in a study of police in Rochester, St. Louis, and Tampa-St. Petersburg. These data are much better, but were not gathered for the purpose Brehm and Gates have in mind. This is both a weakness and a strength. It is a weakness in that the data must be manipulated, and new measures must be derived by combin- ing answers. Such manipulation could make the data suspect. Although they mitigate some of this concern by pro- viding detailed appendices that show how they manipulated the data, Brehm and Gates are nonetheless forced to use

indirect measures because the data needed to study their questions were not gathered directly. Indirect mea- surement is problematic, but there can be no suspicion that they asked only questions that would support their hypotheses. They take data from exist- ing surveys and test their hypotheses. That is very reassuring to me.

Again, they construct measures of preference, working and shirking, and supervisory influence. For police in these two studies, the most important factors leading to compliance (working) were solidarity factors. Police professionalism had more to do with working and shirking than any other factor. As the authors note, "In recent years, political science has adopted a set of models that from the outset re- gard the fundamental connection in organizations to be between agents and principals, not between the agents. The importance of solidarity likes and dis- likes ... suggests that the relations between agents may be as important as any between agents and principal" (Brehm and Gates 1997, 144).

In Chapter 8, the authors look at what they consider extreme sabotage-police brutality. They use the Reiss data again as well as two other data sets on police brutality. The major problem with these data, which is also a major blessing for our society, is that there are not many reported cases of police brutality. Although good for society at large, this fact makes data analysis much more difficult. This chapter sheds more light on the working, shirking, and sabotage continuum. First, the factors that influence working may have no impact whatsoever on shirking and vice versa. It is somewhat alarming that the same solidarity factors that promote working also seem to support brutality. The single most important variable in brutality cases was the number of police officers on the scene. The question is: Do large numbers lead to mob action or did the incident require a large number of police officers because it had

higher risk of violence to begin with? The data in these studies do not answer this question. One reassuring note in this is that professionalism, another solidarity factor, is the best preventive against brutality. Profes- sionalism leads to restraint, but only up to the point where a critical mass of police officers become involved. (The size of that critical mass is not clear either, but it generally means more than 10 officers on the scene.) One fact becomes clear from the data so far: Functional and solidarity preferences are much more important to subordinate performance than is the role of the supervisor.

In the final chapter, which looks at bureaucrats, the authors examine utility regulators. The data come from in- terviews conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s by William Gormley, Jr. He interviewed staff and members of public utility commissions, citizen groups, proxy citizen representatives, and utility company representatives. This is the least satisfying chapter in the book because in it the authors cre- ate a new hypothesis or set of hypotheses and then set forth the data to support it. I would have been more con- vinced if the data had been presented and then the new hypotheses derived. Perhaps I am too critical. The hypotheses are fascinating and another example of Brehm and Gates's skills with words. The authors start with McCubbins and Schwartz's descrip- tion of Congressional monitoring of bureaucracies as fire alarms rather than police patrols. The complaints of con- stituents which Congress uses to moni- tor agencies, resemble fire alarms rather than routine monitoring, which is more like police patrols. Brehm and Gates add a new category-smoke detectors-to the metaphor. They pro- pose that bureaucrats act as smoke detectors for the average citizen's concern. With a fire alarm, someone from the outside comes to handle the problem. With a smoke detector, the citizen is alerted to the problem and

284 Public Administration Review * May/June 2000, Vol. 60, No. 3



handles it alone. They argue that when citizens complain to bureaucrats and their problem is resolved, they have chosen the most efficient method of resolution. The legislative body has not become involved. The agency has adapted to clients in a manner very similar to how a market might operate. And the citizen has received what s/he wants and feels good about government. The rest of the chapter "dem- onstrates" that this is what happens with public utility commissions. To reiterate, I liked the notion of smoke detectors and think the analogy has some power. I am not as comfortable that the data were not shaped to support the notion.

The concluding chapter summa- rizes the findings of the previous ones. Subordinate performance depends first on functional preferences, then on solidarity preferences, and last on the efforts of the supervisor. Who controls bureaucrats? First, they control themselves. Second, they control each other. And last, the supervisor controls them. This does not mean supervisors have no impact, but only that their impact is very limited. These conclusions are at odds with the basic as- sumptions of principal-agent theory. Even though it is recognized that information asymmetry gives the agent the upper hand, the principal is pre- sumed to be able to prevail due to control over incentives and sanctions. In this empirical world, that simply does not seem to be the case.

I have shared the general findings of this book with management friends and colleagues. Most were only mildly surprised at the results. Some however were clearly upset even if not surprised. How could supervisors not be important? What is my role if not to control the work of my staff? What justifies my rank in the organization if not my ability to get staff to accom- plish the mission of the agency? Brehm and Gates reach another dis- comforting conclusion: "[T]he stron- gest and most positive role that our

research identifies for the potential of supervisory control over bureaucracy is in the process of recruitment.... Put in the language of agency theory, our results suggest that the problem of adverse selection trumps moral hazard" (Brehm and Gates 1997, 202). While I certainly agree with that conclusion, what will I do with all the employees I already have on board?

On the other hand, I take great com- fort in the authors' findings. First, it is reassuring to know that principals are humans just like agents with their own preferences and tendencies to work and to shirk. Much more comforting is the fact that coercive power is largely a fiction. It is reassuring to know that if I want to have influence, I have to give up control. I certainly will have only minor impact by at- tempting to force change. I am greatly relieved to know that I serve the organization and its mission better by spending my time on educative and supportive supervision than by spending it on administrative supervision. I may be able to influence staff by ap- pealing to their preferences and by making assignments that allow them to exercise their preferences. And that, of course, is the thing to do with all those employees already on board.

References

Brehm, John, and Scott Gates. 1997. Working, Shirking, and Sabotage: Bu- reaucratic Response to a Democratic Public. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Peters, Thomas J., and Robert H. Waterman. 1982. In Search of Excel- lence: Lessons from America's Most Successful Corporations. New York, NY: Warner.

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working, shirking, and sabotage

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