Trading speed for accuracy? Managing goal conflict and accommodation in the U.S. unemployment insurance program.(Report)

Introduction

Public programs and public organizations typically carry more than one objective, and managers must consider these multiple criteria in strategic and day-to-day decisions. These circumstances, it is often assumed and asserted, compel managers to make tough choices about what to emphasize among competing goals. Indeed, astute observers contend that a superficial appearance of inefficiency in a public agency may actually be a manifestation of political irresolution, hypocrisy, or worse on the part of those who design policy and stipulate a list of different and sometimes contradictory goals. Administrators along with other public bureaucrats in these situations are pilloried unfairly for conflicts and tensions within the public or among the political institutions of government (Hall, 2002; Meier, 1997).

These assertions contain much truth, succinctly captured in the maxim that many public managers face "impossible jobs" (Hargrove & Glidewell, 1990). Such claims, however, can mask an important issue that has received surprisingly little systematic attention. Specialists in public management too often ignore the point that virtually all large organizations must wrestle with multiple and complex performance criteria; the challenge is not a public-sector monopoly, nor is it entirely a product of politicians or a schizophrenic public. It is, rather, a standard feature of modern administrative life (Bozeman, 2004).

A related point is equally important--and also signals an irony. Although some goal conflicts clearly pose direct challenges for public managers, in that achieving more of one objective necessitates sacrificing one or more others, it is too often assumed without evidence, however, that juggling multiple performance criteria inevitably involves some version of a trade-off or sacrifice--that seeking more of one output inevitably comes at a cost to the others. For some situations, as explained in this article, the trade-off assumption should be critically appraised. A key reason has to do with public management itself. Ironically, when researchers and practitioners of public management adopt this assumption of all-but-certain trade-offs, they implicitly marginalize the potential contributions of public management in delivering results. For managers of public organizations are responsible, in Appleby's (1949) droll expression, for "making a mesh of things"--finding ways of coordinating people and other resources to improve overall performance. Skilled, savvy managers might be able to influence their staff, setting, and institutional arrangements to make improvements on multiple dimensions, rather than being trapped in a set of trade-offs implied by static and zero-sum modes of production.

Does the world of public management, then, find itself constrained by inevitable trade-offs? Or can the managers of public programs shape the production of high performance across, rather than merely within, outcome criteria? No single study can answer these questions for all programs, times, and places. In this article we focus on one important and surprisingly understudied initiative, the U.S. Unemployment Insurance (UI) program, to examine one key sort of trade-off--between timeliness and accuracy. The UI program is a long-established component of the nation's social safety net. UI success requires scoring well on a combination of objectives, the examination of which offers a clear way of testing for the inevitably of goal trade-offs--or, alternatively, the importance of public management in, to use today's catch phrase, adding public value. We begin with a sketch of UI, situate this investigation in the conceptual and empirical literature of goals and goal conflict, and then outline the data and methods used.

Unemployment Compensation

To examine the question of public organizational goals and the possible tradeoffs among them, the U.S. UI program provides an ideal empirical setting. UI was created in 1935 through the UI provisions of the Social Security Act (SSA). SSA Title IX provides for a Federal Unemployment Tax to fund operations, and SSA Title III provides for Federal Administrative Grants to the states for purposes of administering the state's program. The UI program is designed to provide income to workers during temporary periods of unemployment. Doing so supports social objectives, allows workers and their families to maintain consumption of basic necessities, and affords workers the option to conduct a better search for new employment that fits their skills and experience. The program is also intended to provide a form of automatic economic stimulus to counter the effect of layoffs during periods of economic contraction. In particular, UI assistance is targeted to regions of the country that experience high unemployment. These general objectives are largely complementary; the matter of possible goal trade-offs emerges in the details of what such objectives entail as UI benefit claims are processed and determined.