Doctoral Research and Thesis

Federal Workforce Restructuring: Agency Responses to External Pressures.

To change organizational culture and facilitate a government that "works better and costs less," the first Clinton administration launched a reform effort described as radically different from those Presidential reforms that preceded it.

The National Performance Review sought to change organization structures and management philosophy and involved substantial personnel reductions, to be targeted towards 'management control' positions. While outcomes of the effort to downsize the federal government are well documented, little is known about workforce restructuring outcomes, which critically impact performance.

This dissertation explores changes in the volume and composition of the workforces of federal departments and agencies, as occurred when these organizations responded to external pressures generated by the National Performance Review and the Federal Workforce Restructuring Act of 1994.

Changes are determined using employment data from the US government budget and occupational data from its Central Personnel Data Files. Changes are evaluated in terms of the downsizing and workforce-restructuring goals set forth in the context of NPR and FWRA-94.

To explain changes in the composition of the workforces of federal departments and agencies and goal attainment at the level of the federal government, correlation and regression analysis were employed in testing relationships between several agency characteristics and decline in the proportion of federal employees in so-called 'management control' positions.

The characteristics are: initial workforce volume ("size") and composition ("structure"); whether the agency is part of the defense sector ("sector"), mainly functions in support of other agencies ("function"), or mainly involved in oversight and regulation or in goods and services provision ("product"), the extent of downsizing the agency experienced, and its use of buyout authority.

While government-wide downsizing targets were met ahead of schedule and exceeded, workforce-restructuring targets were not. However, this does not mean no progress was made with restructuring the federal workforce along the lines indicated by the NPR. Rather, downsizing limited progress and obscured workforce-restructuring outcomes.

Downsizing hindered workforce restructuring. Specifically, it prevented the shift of personnel from eliminated 'management control' positions into other "more productive" positions. Nonetheless, most departments and agencies did target personnel reductions, particularly towards supervisors and managers. Given downsizing, progress towards NPR workforce restructuring goals at the agency level depended critically on whether personnel in other target population subgroups were targeted as well.

The political and organizational leadership does not do itself a favor by incorporating multiple and often competing goals such as cost-saving and performance improvement into one reform effort. To the extent that this is unavoidable, care should be taken to avoid such disparate goals to evolve into separate tracks during implementation. Evaluation of reform efforts should not only be systematic but also involve multple angles and indicators.

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