Not Seeing Eye to Eye on Frontline Work: Manager‐Employee Disagreement and Its Effects on Employees

• Author: John D. Marvel
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12798
• Published date: 01 November 2017
• Date: 01 November 2017

904 Public Administration Review • November | December 2017

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 6, pp. 904–918. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI:10.1111/puar.12798.

Not Seeing Eye to Eye on Frontline Work:

Manager–Employee Disagreement and Its Effects on Employees

John D. Marvel is assistant professor in

the Schar School of Policy and Government

at George Mason University. His research

focuses on work motivation and citizens’

evaluations of public sector performance.

E-mail: jmarvel@gmu.edu

Abstract : The author uses nationally representative data on matched pairs of public school principals and teachers

to test whether principal–teacher disagreement about the severity of school problems is associated with teacher turn-

over. More specifically, the author tests a managerial efficacy hypothesis that proposes that employees will be less likely

to leave their jobs when their managers perceive problems to be severe, holding employees’ perceptions of the same

problems constant. The author also tests a managerial buffering hypothesis that proposes that employees’ perceptions

of problem severity will be more weakly related to their turnover probability when managers perceive problems to be

severe. Little evidence is found for either hypothesis, raising questions about public school principals’ ability to translate

problem recognition into problem remediation. More generally, the findings suggest a reexamination of the generic

claim that “management matters,” which implies that public managers have the power to do things that can help

employees perform their jobs well.

Practitioner Points

• Public school principals’ ability to translate problem recognition into problem remediation is limited.

• Recommendations that public managers attempt to see things from their employees’ perspective are often

overly simplistic.

• Public managers who want to help frontline employees meet the challenges of frontline work should consider

how context will help or hinder their efforts to do so.

John D. Marvel

George Mason University

P ublic managers and frontline employees

approach organizational life from different

perspectives. Whereas public managers

are inclined to worry about their organization ’ s

aggregate performance, frontline employees are

concerned with the daily, concrete exigencies that

define “street-level” work (Lipsky 1980 ). Public

school principals, for instance, tend to worry about

school-level performance—as captured, say, in

daily attendance reports—while teachers tend to

worry about student apathy, classroom disorder,

and an array of other factors that make their jobs

challenging (and potentially rewarding) (Jones and

Egley 2006 ). Similarly, police managers worry about

precinct-level crime statistics, while patrol officers

confront crime firsthand in all of its disaggregated,

messy immediacy (Eterno, Barrow, and Silverman

2017 ; Toch 2008 ).

These differing perspectives are responsible

for an inherent tension in the manager–

employee relationship, a tension that manifests

in disagreements about the job demands that

frontline employees face in the course of doing

their work (see, e.g., Jones 2001 ; Maynard-Moody

and Musheno 2003 ; Sandfort 2000 ). Consider,

for instance, conflict between teachers and

administrators in the Atlanta Public Schools over

federally mandated standardized testing. Aviv ( 2014 )

describes how, during the early 2000s, the teachers

in one particularly disadvantaged Atlanta school

(Parks Middle School) clashed with their principal

and the district superintendent over the feasibility

of meeting the school ’ s performance targets. In the

teachers’ view, the targets were unrealistic given their

students’ troubled home lives; in the principal ’ s and

the superintendent ’ s view, this was merely excuse

making. The recent conflict between New York City

police officers and high-level police managers and

policy makers—including, most prominently, New

York City mayor Bill de Blasio—provides another

example.

1 In this case, frontline police officers

appeared to disagree with their formal superiors

about the urgency and stress of urban policing and

whether, in the face of danger (real or perceived), the

exercise of tact and restraint is always feasible.

Not all manager–employee disagreements will be as

dramatic as these. Whether dramatic or not, though,

manager–employee disagreement about frontline