Learned helplessness and external locus of control in the public sector
- Authors: Bilney, Chris , Pillay, Soma , Jones, Robert
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Conference paper
- Relation: Manageable cooperation? 16th European Academy of Managment Conference (EURAM 2016); Paris, France; 1st-4th June 2016
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Governments worldwide have pursued privatisation and corporatisation agendas as a way to divest themselves of the financial responsibilities and administrative burdens that managing public sector organisations entail. Due to these organisations’ perceptions of the requirement to maintain their traditional risk averse behaviours in the management of the public funds involved, many government organisations require their employees to observe the traditional bureaucratic methodologies with which their administrations have always been run. The intent is to maintain legislative accountability and public transparency. As a result many organisations maintain their tall and rigid hierarchical structures. In the face of this many public sector workers at this level adopt the risk averse culture they perceive their employing organisations possess, leading them to virtually abdicate their responsibilities for ownership of their job outcomes through the perception that the responsibility that comes with greater authority higher in the organisation will cover them. This breeds a culture of learned helplessness.
Double bind in the public service : Competing Paradigms in the Australian public sector
- Authors: Bilney, Chris , Pillay, Soma , Jones, Robert
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Conference paper
- Relation: Reshaping Management for Impact, 28th Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management Conference (ANZAM 2014); Sydney, Australia; 3rd-5th December 2014 p. 1-19
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: A dramatic transformation has taken place in the public sector worldwide as many governments have privatised many of their organisations and agencies. As a result, public sector employees worldwide have been exposed to contradictory pressures as their senior executive managers demand adherence to the traditional bureaucratic mechanisms for which they have always been known while concurrently attempting to conform to the economic reductionist principles of their private sector competitors. We argue that this has led to many staff, as well as the organisations in which they work, experiencing situations of double bind. Through the lens of autoethnography, this paper examines the double bind with which I, as an Australian public sector worker, am faced and some of the effects.