Abstract
The dissertation explores an important question in public administration: what are the antecedents of the adoption of management innovations? Existing public administration literature has overlooked the study of management innovation, an indispensable and powerful innovation in the public sector. Distinct from service innovation, management innovation is a special kind that is characterized by its internal and capacity building focus. The goal of adopting management innovations is to revolutionize and transform government by making it more efficient, responsive, transparent, and accountable.Under ongoing change and turbulence in the past decades, local government, as the direct service provider and policy implementer, has committed to the adoption of various management innovation. Many novel practices had emerged and prevailed, such as performance monitoring and management by objective. In contrast to its popularity among practitioners, management innovation is relatively disregarded in the discipline of public administration, especially the lack of focus on the dynamics and complexity of its adoption processes.
To fill this research gap, this dissertation explores how factors at three levels respectively influence the adoption of management innovation in local government: external organizational environment, organizational characteristics, and people. Three varying perspectives enable us to reveal the decision-making process of the adoption of management innovation. Specifically, what factors promote and what factors obstruct its adoption, and what are the mechanisms behind it. The empirical setting is the adoption of one-stop service and website in Chinese local governments. By resorting to event history analysis and collecting data from various sources, this dissertation reveals the following three main findings. First, environmental complexity exerts an inverted U-shaped influence on the adoption of management innovation. Second, fiscal slack imposes a U-shaped influence on the adoption of management innovation and moderates the effect of neighboring diffusion. Third, the leadership entry positively affects the adoption of management innovation, while the leadership exit negatively affects its adoption.
This dissertation makes the following theoretical contributions. First is to enriching existing scholarship of organization task environment by unveiling the relationship between environmental complexity and adoption of management innovation. Second is to extending the existing fiscal slack thesis of innovation by proposing competing mechanisms to understand the non-linear influence of fiscal slack on management innovation. Third is to developing existing theory of leadership turnover by putting forward an entry-exit framework to test the effect of leadership turnover on management innovation.
| Date of Award | 1 Sept 2021 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Richard M WALKER (Supervisor) |