政府绩效视角下的行政管理体制改革战略反思——基于地方政府公务员的感知调查

Rethinking China's Government Reform Strategy from a Perspective of Government Performance:A Survey of Local Government Civil Servants

改革开放以来,我国行政管理体制改革一直坚持以组织结构调整为主的模式。对于这一模式的影响,尤其对地方政府的影响,一直缺少科学层面的检验和理论层面的反思。本文选取政府绩效作为标杆,利用地方政府公务员的问卷调查数据,探索政府部门间关系和部门管理制度建设影响部门绩效的路径和程度,使用结构方程模型实证检验了行政管理体制改革战略在地方层面的有效性。结果表明,部门间关系作为政府结构的核心特征对于政府绩效并没有直接的影响作用,其影响作用是通过部门制度建设和部门文化间接发挥的;部门制度建设对政府绩效的整体影响要大于部门间关系。因此,在今后的改革中应该给予管理制度层面的改革更多的重视,通过局部的、具体制度的改革为整体的、基本制度的变革创造条件。同时,还应在改革过程中维护政府组织文化的凝聚力和激励性。

The objective of this paper is to examine the validity of the administrative reform strategy which emphasizes government organizational restructure at the local level.A Linear Structure Model,based on the public organizational theory,is employed to empirically test the association between inter-departmental structure,management mechanism,departmental culture and perceived departmental performance by using data from the questionnaire survey of 427 local government civil servants from 37 government departments of 10 provinces.The results show that the overall impact of departmental management on the performance is greater than inter-departmental structure,and inter-departmental structure impacts departmental performance mainly through its impact on the management system.Additionally,government organizational culture,as an intermediary variable,has a significant impact on the departmental performance.The key limitation of the study is that the questionnaire survey covers the local civil servants at and below municipal level,which makes it difficult to generalize the results to all Chinese local government.Another difficulty arises from the subjective criteria employed in constructs,especially in the government performance.The tested theoretical framework can assist the policy makers to rethink the reform strategy,allocating more reform resources to management improvement while paying more patience to structural reorganization.The finding that administrative culture matters on government performance reminds the policy makers that cohesive and incentive power of organizational culture should be maintained during the reform process.This study posits and tests a series of propositions,which link the inter-departmental structure,management mechanism,and departmental culture to perceived departmental performance,to illustrate how the current administrative reform strategy fail to achieve its best effectiveness and to show the potential improvements.Article Type: Research paper