Unpacking the Effects of Competing Mandates on Agency Performance

• Author: Christopher Carrigan
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12912
• Published date: 01 September 2018
• Date: 01 September 2018

Unpacking the Effects of Competing Mandates onAgencyPerformance 669

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 78, Iss. 5, pp. 669–683. © 2018 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12912.

Unpacking the Effects of Competing Mandates

on Agency Performance

Christopher Carrigan is assistant

professor of public policy and public

administration at the George Washington

University’s Trachtenberg School of Public

Policy and Public Administration and

co-director of the GW Regulatory Studies

Center. His research focuses on agency

policy making and implementation,

including the impacts that organizational

design, processes, and politics have on

agency performance as well as how

regulators and politicians respond to crises

in regulated industries.

E-mail: ccarrigan@gwu.edu

Abstract: Public administration scholars and practitioners uniformly agree that saddling agencies with multiple

mandates breeds dysfunction and impedes performance. However, less is known about the mechanisms by which

combining purposes has these effects. This study of a broad set of U.S. federal agencies finds support for the

conventional wisdom by showing that agencies balancing greater numbers of programs perform worse. The analysis

further suggests that such organizations struggle largely because they are more likely to be forced to simultaneously

adopt conflicting stances toward program targets. Moreover, when programs force agencies into conflicts in which they

are asked to both support and restrain the same target, the resulting uncertainty among personnel regarding agency

priorities helps explain why operations are negatively impacted. Thus, it is not simply that accumulating missions

impedes agency performance but rather how those competing mandates interact that can define whether an agency will

struggle to achieve its objectives.

Evidence for Practice

• Structural arrangements in which agencies are asked to balance multiple programs are detrimental to

organizational performance partly because they increase the probability that agency personnel will be forced

to concurrently support and restrain at least one of the targets of those programs.

• Personnel in agencies that manage conflicting relationships are generally more uncertain about how their

work connects to the organization’s goals and priorities, which helps explain why these agencies are less likely

to achieve their goals.

• Classic remedies to manage conflicts, such as prioritizing a subset of the goals or separating the conflicted

missions within the organization, can introduce other problems, including goal neglect or coordination

failures, that may undermine performance even if the conflicts are managed through those interventions.

• Because many agencies balance multiple priorities, recognizing that such arrangements are typically most

problematic when they foster conflicts with program targets can enable agency leaders and overseers to focus

reforms specifically on those cases in which the difficulties primarily reside.

Christopher Carrigan

George Washington University

Following the explosion on the Deepwater

Horizon drilling ship that led to the Gulf

oil spill, commentators singled out the

agency charged with regulating offshore oil and

gas exploration prior to the disaster, the Minerals

Management Service (MMS). One theory pinned

MMS’s permissive attitude toward oversight on its

organization, motivating Secretary of the Interior Ken

Salazar to assert that MMS “has three distinct and

conflicting missions that—for the benefit of effective

enforcement, energy development, and revenue

collection—must be divided” (U.S. Department of

the Interior 2010). Less than a year later, the nuclear

meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant

in Japan again raised questions about a regulatory

agency’s effectiveness, this time the Nuclear and

Industrial Safety Agency (NISA). News agencies and

policy pundits argued that locating NISA within

Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry

weakened the agency’s capacity to effectively regulate

because the ministry was charged with promoting the

use of nuclear power generated by the same plants

(Onishi and Belson 2011).

The argument that conflicts undermine performance

is hardly confined to contemporary crises. When

the Social Security Administration (SSA) was

commissioned to evaluate disability claims in the late

1970s, the previously well-functioning agency was

nearly torn apart (Derthick 1990). Adding the new

goal challenged the agency’s identity, as “its members

found themselves in conflict with clients who once

had been supportive” (Wilson 1989, 101). Similarly,

before it was split up and relocated in the U.S.

Department of Homeland Security, the Immigration

and Naturalization Service (INS) was asked to balance

Research Article