Dependent variable
Organizational adaptation is the dependent variable in this study. We explained the concept in detail in the theoretical part of this paper. The variable is based on three dimensions, referring to adaptation in terms of (1) commitment, (2) allocation of responsibilities and resources, and (3) monitoring and reporting. First, from the seven themes of FiA, the respondents were asked to select the objective in which they were most intensively involved (compared to the other objectives). In the next question, they were asked to what extent they agreed with the statements, as presented in Table
1. For each of the items, a 5-point scale was used (strongly agree—somewhat agree—neither agree nor disagree—somewhat disagree—strongly disagree). Table
1 shows the average, standard deviation, minimum, and maximum per item. The average per item varies between 3 and 4, with the average for the item with respect to the allocation of resources to be the lowest. Factor analysis shows that the six items clearly load on the same factor, meaning that the items coevolve in the survey responses and that an index of these items can be used to measure the concept of “organizational adaptation.” Hence, the scores of the items were aggregated, and an index of “organizational adaptation” was created by taking the average. The index of organizational adaptation has a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.8648. (Cronbach’s alpha of this index is high: 0.86). Since the distribution was non-normal, the log of this variable was used in the subsequent analyses.
Table 1
Construction of the dependent variable “organizational adaptation”
Commitment (toward crosscutting objectives) | Feels overall strongly committed to this crosscutting objective | 4.00 | 0.84 | 2.00 | 5.00 |
Gives equal attention to this crosscutting objective compared to the routine activities in our organization | 3.34 | 1.08 | 1.00 | 5.00 |
Allocation of responsibilities and resources | Has assigned a specific responsible person who coordinates the progress on this crosscutting objective | 3.75 | 1.04 | 1.00 | 5.00 |
Has allocated a substantial share of the organizations’ budgetary resources to implement our tasks related to these crosscutting objectives | 3.05 | 1.12 | 1.00 | 5.00 |
Monitoring and reporting | Has linked a systematic internal monitoring system to the implementation of this crosscutting objective | 3.52 | 1.05 | 1.00 | 5.00 |
Gives regular feedback to the senior management of the organization and reports about the progress of our organization regarding this crosscutting objective | 3.70 | 0.98 | 1.00 | 5.00 |
Table
2 shows the seven crosscutting objectives and gives further information about the average and standard deviation of the “organizational adaptation” index per objective, as well as the number of organizations which mention the involved FIA objective as the one they contribute to the most (in comparison with the other objectives). “
Appendix 2” shows a table including how the 44 organizations are distributed across the 13 ministries and 7 themes (as well as indicating which ministry is the lead for each theme). We see that the number of organizations as well as the extent of organizational adaptation differs across the objectives. These differences might be due to the different structural and cultural features of the organizations of the contributing organizations, as well as the vertical control of their portfolio minister regarding the involved FIA objective (see for the analyses below). We also perform some additional robustness checks with variables which relate to the specific FIA objective (see below). However, it is likely that a part of the variation with respect to organizational adaptation across the objectives is due to other factors of a more idiosyncratic nature of the involved crosscutting objectives. However, due to the low number of organizations working on each FIA objective, we cannot integrate further variables related to the specific nature of the crosscutting objective into the analyses.
Table 2
Extent of “organizational adaptation” per crosscutting objective within FiA
1. The open entrepreneur | 0.11 | 0.13 | 3.00 |
2. Lifelong learning | 0.46 | 0.31 | 4.00 |
3. Innovation center Flanders | 0.46 | 0.06 | 2.00 |
4. Green and dynamic region of cities | 0.24 | 0.17 | 9.00 |
5. Smart distribution center of Europe | 0.56 | 0.39 | 3.00 |
6. Warm society | 0.26 | 0.33 | 8.00 |
7. Decisive government (7 sub-objectives) | 0.5 | 0.22 | 15.00 |
Independent variables
We took six independent variables into account as factors regarding organizational structure and culture, as well as vertical control (of the portfolio minister).
Formal legal distance: Legal distance from government was coded as a dummy variable, with a value of 1 for agencies with their own legal identity (i.e., separate from the state, vested in public or private law); otherwise, the value was set to 0. This variable has been coded by the researchers based on statutory information about the organizations’ legal status.
De facto personnel management autonomy: For this variable, we used strategic managerial autonomy regarding human resources (HR), referring to the extent to which an organization has the ability to decide upon regulations, procedures, and criteria concerning the salary level, appointment, promotion, evaluation, dismissal, and the total number of staff itself without interference from above (ministers or central departments). For each of the three items, organizations could respond to this by selecting “for all of their staff,” “for most of their staff,” “for some of their staff,” or “not at all.” An index was created by aggregating these items (Cronbach’s alpha of 0.7). Based on that index, a variable was constructed with a value equal to 0 for organizations that scored lower than the average; otherwise, the variable was set to 1.
Having policy development as primary organizational task: For this task, we distinguished between policy development and implementation. The dummy equals 1 if the organization’s primary task is policy development. All tasks related to policy implementation were set to 0. In Flanders, often, departments combine policy development as a primary task with minor aspects of policy implementation. In that case, the departments’ primary task was coded as policy development. Most agencies, although not all, have policy implementation as their primary tasks. This variable has been coded by the researchers based on statutory information about the organizations’ tasks.
Innovation-
oriented and customer-
oriented culture: Organizational culture is multi-dimensional in kind, and several analytical frameworks and measurements have been developed to study this concept. A measurement instrument for organizational culture as developed and tested by Tepeci (
2001) was used in the original COBRA survey (see also Lægreid et al.
2011), as well as in the survey used in this study. The survey instrument developed by Tepeci (
2001) and used in the COBRA survey contains an encompassing 36-item survey battery to measure 9 dimensions of organizational culture, each by 4 items. The respondents were asked to score these 36 items according to the extent to which this feature was characteristic of the organization on a 7-point scale ranging from “very characteristic” to “very uncharacteristic.” The internal consistency of each of the different dimensions was confirmed by COBRA research.
1 Following Tepeci’s (
2001) clustering of culture items, “innovation-oriented culture” was measured in terms of the extent to which the following four aspects are valued within an organization (see also Lægreid et al.
2011): (1) risk taking, (2) experimentation, (3) creativity, and (4) innovation (Tepeci
2001; see also Lægreid et al.
2011; Wynen et al.
2013; Wynen and Verhoest
2015). The set of items as suggested by Tepeci to measure the dimension of customer-oriented culture was used to construct the “customer-oriented culture” variable: (1) emphasizing quality of service delivery, (2) giving customers what they expect, (3) valuing customers, and (4) maintaining relationships with customers. In line with Tepeci’s study and earlier COBRA research, the Cronbach’s alpha values for both variables are high (0.75 for innovation-oriented culture and 0.79 for customer-oriented culture, respectively).
Vertical control of the portfolio minister regarding crosscutting objectives: This independent variable was constructed as an index on the basis of four items referring to the vertical control (of the portfolio minister) in terms of attention to the crosscutting objective by the portfolio minister as perceived by the CEO of the organization. The portfolio minister is responsible for the organizations under his or her remit items which refer to the control by other actors like the ministerial management committee or horizontal departments have been excluded. The respondents were asked how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the following statements:
With respect to the FiA objective that you selected as the one your organization is most intensively involved in, is there attention for your organization’s contribution to this crosscutting objective by the portfolio minister:
1.
during the bilateral meeting between your organization and the portfolio minister about the design of the performance contract and business plan of the organization (a multi-annual contract that stresses obligations);
2.
during the yearly evaluation of the performance agreement and business plan;
3.
during the yearly evaluation of the senior management of the organization.
Also an item from the next question was used whether the organization experiences pressure to translate this crosscutting objective into internal objectives of the organization in your management and business plans by the portfolio minister.
For each of the items, a 5-point scale was used (strongly agree—somewhat agree—neither agree nor disagree—somewhat disagree—strongly disagree). The scores were aggregated, and an index of “organizational adaptation” was created by taking the average. Cronbach’s alpha of this index is high (0.84). In “
Appendix 3,” we present the means and frequencies for each of the dependent and independent variables (including the components of the indices when appropriate), stratified by ministry and the departments and agencies.
Because all the data for the dependent variable and some of the independent variables (de facto personnel management autonomy, innovation-oriented culture, customer-oriented culture, and vertical control by portfolio minister) were self-reported and collected through the same questionnaire during the same period of time with a cross-sectional research design, common method variance (variance attributed to the measurement method rather than the constructs of interest) may have caused systematic measurement error and further biased the estimates of the true relationships among the theoretical constructs. In our study, researchers examined official policy documents to collect information on the formal legal status of the organization and the data used in the robustness checks (organizational size, organizations under the coordinating minister, and organizations led by the administrative coordinator). For variables that could not be verified using external sources, in addition to the use of interview data for the validation of the survey findings, extra steps in the survey design were taken to reduce the likelihood of common method bias.
First, a separation between the measures of the independent and dependent variables has been suggested as a way to reduce common method bias (CMB) in a survey (Podsakoff et al.
2012; Jakobsen and Jensen
2015, p. 17). Therefore, the respective set of questions for the different variables, which we had to measure through the survey, were placed in different locations of the survey and displayed as separate web pages, not in consecutive order. Second, in order to avoid issues of common method bias due to item characteristics, we tried to avoid and rephrase abstract items (Podsakoff et al.
2012; Meier & O’Toole Jr
2013; Jakobsen and Jensen
2015). The independent variables “de facto personnel management autonomy” and “vertical control by the portfolio minister,” as well as the dependent variable, refer to focused items and concrete practices that measure current states (see Jakobsen and Jensen
2015, p. 17). We asked respondents about their perceptions of their HR management autonomy, such as whether or not their organizations had the authority to decide on regulations, procedures, and criteria concerning the promotion of staff without interference from above (from ministers or central departments). Before launching the survey, it was piloted among potential respondents to check the comprehensibility of the survey items. Also, different answer categories were used to measure different independent variables like de facto personnel management autonomy and innovation-oriented culture, as well as to measure the dependent variable (5-point Likert scale), in order to avoid common scale properties (Jakobsen and Jensen
2015, p. 17). The use of concrete items for most of the variables diminished the capacity for personal interpretation and in turn reduced the likelihood that responses would be subject to social desirability effects and other underlying causes of common method bias. Finally, and most importantly, we analyzed evidence from interviews in order to check whether similar findings arose from this additional data source. These interviews were part of a larger project about the implementation of the FiA program and its subthemes. In total, 54 interviews were conducted with both coordinators and implementers of this crosscutting program. In the first round, open interviews with 25 coordinators were conducted, followed by 29 fully structured interviews. Respondents were selected of different organizations, in terms of type (departments and agencies), size, thematic focus, and ministry, this selection ensures that different options and standpoints were heard and taken into account. The first round of interviews concerned the tensions that coordinators experience during the implementation phase (based on the obstacles of 6 et al.
1999, p. 66). The respondents’ perceptions of horizontal program coordination (Molenveld et al.
2020) and the subsequent organizational adaptation were the focus of the second round. The quotes presented in this article were specifically selected to explain the mechanisms shown in the statistical analyses. Quotes were not analyzed to check their representativeness for the whole population. However, we feel that the
different focus of organizations with either an innovation- or customer-oriented culture is acknowledged by almost every respondent.