Can Managerial Turnover Be a Good Thing? The Impact of City Manager Change on Local Fiscal Outcomes

• Date: 01 May 2018
• Author: Jennifer M. Connolly
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12892
• Published date: 01 May 2018

338 Public Administration Review • May | June 2018

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 78, Iss. 3, pp. 338–349. © 2018 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12892.

Can Managerial Turnover Be a Good Thing? The Impact of

City Manager Change on Local Fiscal Outcomes

Abstract: A long line of private sector research outlines the positive and negative impacts of employee and managerial

turnover on organizations. However, public administration scholars often treat turnover as a phenomenon to be

avoided and focus more on the antecedents of managerial turnover than on its consequences for public organizations.

Within the context of local government, the impact of city manager turnover on organizational outcomes is unclear.

This article identifies how city manager turnover influenced local fiscal outcomes during the Great Recession. Analysis

of 165 council-manager municipalities in California, more than one-third of which experienced turnover during the

height of the recession, allows for empirical examination of the impact of turnover during the test period of 2008–11

on local fiscal outcomes in 2011 and 2012, specifically the degree and incidence of budget deficit spending. The

results demonstrate that managerial turnover may lead to better fiscal outcomes, conditional on how long the new

manager has held the position. This suggests that while cities that hired new managers during the recession did better

than those that did not, the earlier in the recession a manager was hired, the better .

Evidence for Practice

• City manager turnover during the Great Recession is associated with improved municipal fiscal outcomes in

later years.

• The longer a city manager is in place after turnover (within a four year window), the better the organization’s

performance.

• Newly hired managers should be given time (at least a few years) to implement new ideas and improve

municipal outcomes.

• While the results should not be taken to encourage the termination of otherwise high-performing city

managers, city council members should be careful not to assume that managerial turnover during a time of

fiscal stress will necessarily lead to poor outcomes for the city.

Jennifer M. Connolly

University of Miami

A rich literature in public administration

offers numerous explanations for city

manager turnover but little in the way

of understanding the impact of this turnover on

organizational-level outcomes, specifically local fiscal

outcomes. While management scholars have offered

theories and empirical analysis of the positive and

negative consequences of turnover in private sector

organizations (Abelson and Baysinger 1984 ; Dalton

and Todor 1979 ; Kellough and Osuna 1995 ; McElroy,

Morrow, and Rude 2001 ; Price 1977 , 1989 ; Staw

1980 ), public administration scholars have largely

treated turnover as having an assumed negative impact

on public organizations. Meier and Hicklin ( 2008 ,

574) argue that public administration scholars have

devoted a relatively low level of attention to turnover,

but the work that has been done typically starts with

the “conventionally accepted, but largely untested,

assumption that turnover is bad, and then treats it as

a dependent variable, something to be minimized.”

Absent a theoretical reason to believe that the impact

of public sector managerial turnover would have

systematically different organizational impacts than

managerial turnover in private sector organizations,

public administration scholars should empirically

investigate the impact of managerial turnover on

public sector organizations.

Meier and Hicklin ( 2008 ) offer evidence that

turnover in school districts may provide benefits to

the organization, but there has been little empirical

work in the local government context to directly

examine whether city manager turnover has a

positive or negative impact on local government

outcomes. A notable exception, Clinger et al. ( 2008 )

offer important and novel evidence of the negative

impact of managerial turnover on local government

fiscal outcomes, specifically local borrowing patterns

in the late 1980s. However, there is reason to suspect

that the nature of city management has changed

Jennifer M. Connolly is assistant

professor of political science at the

University of Miami.

E-mail: jmconnolly@miami.edu

Research Article