Does public managers' type of education affect performance in public organizations? A systematic review

• Published date: 01 November 2022
• Author: Søren Netra,Peter Sørensen,Camilla Hansen Nejstgaard
• Date: 01 November 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13553

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Does public managers’type of education affect performance

in public organizations? A systematic review

Søren Netra

1

| Peter Sørensen

1

| Camilla Hansen Nejstgaard

2

1

Department of Political Science and Public

Management, University of Southern Denmark,

Odense, Denmark

2

Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine Odense &

Cochrane Denmark University of Southern

Denmark, Odense, Denmark

Correspondence

Søren Netra, Department of Political Science

and Public Management, University of Southern

Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense,

Denmark.

Email: snetra@sam.sdu.dk

Abstract

Although scholars agree that public managers’education could affect performance

in public organizations, no attempt has been made to synthesize the empirical evi-

dence on this relationship. Consequently,we ask, do public managers with a general

management education, such as an MPA, or a specialist education, such as an MD in

the context of a hospital, affect different types of performance in public organiza-

tions? Based on a preregistered systematic literature review, we find 548 effect sizes

from 50 quantitative studies by screening more than 12,000 potentially eligible stud-

ies. Our meta-regression analyses show that specialist managers have a statistically

significant small average advantage on field-specific performance compared to

other managers, and that generalist managers have a statistically significant small

average advantage on financial performance compared to other managers. Based

on these results, we recommend that future research investigate the theoretical link-

ages between public managers’education and performance in public organizations.

Evidence for Practice

•We investigate whether public managers’type of education affects performance

in public organizations, because decision-makers may hire public managers

based on their education—a visible characteristic—and thus, use public man-

agers’type of education to steer performance in public organizations.

•We show that public managers’type of education is associated with perfor-

mance in public organizations across 50 studies and 548 effect sizes. We empha-

size two findings. First, specialist managers have a positive, small, statistically

significant effect on field-specific performance compared to other managers.

Second, both generalist and specialist managers have a positive, small, statisti-

cally significant effect on financial performance compared to other managers.

•We contribute to the literature by identifying important limitations in the exist-

ing empirical evidence. We thereby take the first step in overcoming them and

thus, we pave the way for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship

between public managers’education and performance in public organizations.

INTRODUCTION

Does the formal education of public managers matter for

performance in public organizations? Unfortunately, pub-

lic administration research provides conflicting answers

to this question. Although scholars in public administra-

tion agree that public managers may affect strategy and

performance in public organizations for better or worse

(Boyne & Meier, 2009; Boyne et al., 2011a,2011b;

Hill, 2005; Jas & Skelcher, 2005;O’Toole Jr. & Meier, 2003,

2011; Petrovsky, 2010), the field is bogged down by con-

tradicting empirical findings that hinder our understand-

ing of this relationship.

Existing public administration research distinguishes

between managers with specialist education and general-

ist education. The generalist manager has a formal

Received: 22 May 2021 Revised: 12 July 2022 Accepted: 31 July 2022

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13553

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use,distribution and reproduction inany

medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

© 2022 The Authors. Public Administration Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Public Administration.

1004 Public Admin Rev. 2022;82:1004–1023.

wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar

education in general management such as an MBA, MPA,

or an equivalent degree in management (Anessi-Pessina &

Sicilia, 2019; Kirkpatrick et al., 2017; McCrea &

Teodoro, 2018; Sarto et al., 2019). The specialist manager

has a formal education from a profession crucial to the

organization they lead, for example a doctor leading a

hospital, an engineer leading a water treatment plant, or

an economist leading a central bank (Bøgh Andersen &

Pedersen, 2012; Goodall & Bäker, 2015; Pierson, 2014;

Teodoro, 2014; Veronesi et al., 2015). The key difference

between specialist managers and generalist managers is

that specialist managers are educated to a single field of

work, whereas generalist managers are educated to multi-

ple fields of work.

Empirical research on the relationship between general-

ist managers, specialist managers, and performance in pub-

lic organizations has yielded contradicting results. The

hospital sector is an illustrative case. Here, some scholars

have found that specialists managers—physicians—are

better for hospital-specific performance, such as quality of

care indicators and mortality rates (Kirkpatrick et al., 2017;

Sarto & Veronesi, 2016; Veronesi et al., 2013,2015)whereas

others have found that generalist managers—MBAs—are

better for hospital-specific performance (Bloom et al., 2009;

Kaiser et al., 2020; McCrea & Teodoro, 2018). Likewise, some

scholars have found that generalist managers are better for

financial performance in hospitals (Kaiser et al., 2020;

Kirkpatrick et al., 2017) whereas others have found that spe-

cialist managers are better for financial performance

(Goes & Zhan, 1995; Molinari et al., 1993; Veronesi

et al., 2013). This crisscrossing pattern hampers our under-

standing of the relationship between public managers’edu-

cation and performance in public organizations.

We need to resolve the contradictory research out-

comes concerning generalist managers, specialist man-

agers, and performance in public organizations in order

to help practitioners do evidence-based policymaking.

This is important because of the consequences perfor-

mance outcomes have for users of public organizations.

As a case in point, Teodoro (2014) shows that water treat-

ment plants led by engineers have fewer violations of

toxin-levels in the drinking water compared to water

treatment plants led by non-engineers. Likewise, Sarto

et al. (2019) show that hospitals led by physicians have

lower mortality rates and more proper treatment of

patients compared to hospitals led by non-physicians.

These outcomes affect the lives of citizens and should

therefore attract careful attention from both public

administration scholars and practitioners. If there is a gen-

eral relationship between public managers’education

and performance in public organizations, then it feeds

important information to policymakers about which pub-

lic managers to recruit in order to improve the perfor-

mance in public organizations.

A sound way of clarifying the contradicting empirical

evidence is using a systematic literature review and meta-

regressions to systematically compare existing empirical

results. Such a procedure allows for broad generalizations

across large numbers of study outcomes, which provide a

more comprehensive picture of the empirical evidence in

a field than any individual empirical study (Gurevitch

et al., 2018). Thus, such a procedure may reveal whether

there is a general relationship between public managers’

education and performance in public organizations.

Our study contributes to the literature on public man-

agers’education and performance in public organizations

by providing scholars and practitioners of public adminis-

tration with the wanting empirical synthesis of how pub-

lic managers’education affects performance in public

organizations. We achieve this empirical synthesis with a

preregistered systematic literature review reported in

concordance with the PRISMA reporting guidelines

(Liberati et al., 2009; Moher et al., 2009) and meta-

regression analyses following established conventions in

public administration research (Ding et al., 2020; George

et al., 2019,2020; Gerrish, 2016; Homberg et al., 2015;

Ringquist, 2013; Zhang et al., 2021). Thus, we pave the

way for a more nuanced understanding of the relation-

ship between public managers’education and perfor-

mance in public organizations.

The roadmap for the article is as follows. The first

section defines performance in public organizations

inspired by Boyne (2002b). The second section presents

three hypotheses on how specialist and generalist man-

agers prioritize between different types of performance

based on theoretical arguments of normative isomor-

phism (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Teodoro, 2014). The

third section presents the methodological procedure for

the systematic literature review and the meta-regressions.

The fourth section presents the results from the system-

atic literature review and the meta-regressions. The fifth

section discusses the implication of the results, the limita-

tions in the review, and areas for future research. The final

section concludes.

THEORY

Defining performance in public

organizations

It is challenging to define the performance in public orga-

nizations for two reasons. First, public organizations have

multiple, vague, and even contradictory objectives that

cannot be captured in a single definition or measure of

performance (Boyne, 2002a; Wilson, 1989). Thus, defini-

tions and measures of performance in public organiza-

tions must be multidimensional. Second, some public

organizations have objectives that are wicked problems

(Alford & Head, 2017; Rittel & Webber, 1973). That is,

objectives with no clear solution or perhaps no solutions

at all (Peters, 2017, p. 388). Thus, cases of wicked prob-

lems obscure the meaning of performance in public

organizations.

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