A Public Choice Approach to Motivating People in Bureaucratic Organizations

This paper examines the problem of motivating people in organizations from a public choice viewpoint. A number of propositions are derived deductively from assumptions regarding individual goals, discretion, and preferences. These suggest how managers can improve productivity by changing either incentive systems or work group size, job design, and personnel rotation practices. Public choice is the application of economic analysis to the study of political behavior. Within public administration, public choice has formed a theoretical basis for a critique of government bureaucracy and for an examination of market and quasi-market mechanisms for the delivery of public services, including privatization, voucher schemes, contracting out, and competing bureaucracies. This growing body of research has been reviewed by Straussman (1981) and Weschler (1982). Little attempt, however, has been made to apply public choice methodology to the problems facing those who must manage people in large bureaucratic organizations. This is surprising because a central concern of public choice focuses on how rational individuals cooperate to

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