Creating Effective Rules Through Green Tape
Rule Stakeholders
Re-Conceptualize Rule Effectiveness - Needs to be thought of broadly: as achieving organizational purposes but also as a vehicle for eliciting voluntary cooperation through interactions between the individual and org
Rules are effective to the extent that they accomplish what public organizations intend
Organizational purposes - Include rule outcomes and objectives
Voluntary cooperation - It is not enough to demand compliance. Rules must be defined by how they elicit voluntary behavior
Rule Writing Conditions
Interaction
Rules are points of interaction between employees and
organizations
Procedural fairness, legitimacy, and status- leveling alternately cement or fracture the emotional connection between employees and their orgs
Recurrent, consequential,or salient problems
Reasonably certain solutions
Avoid writing rules in response to extreme events, to a handful of people, or to a particular employee.
Problems that involve multiple people and for which solutions have been attempted
Prospective rule solutions need to express a common- sense relationship between rule requirements and objectives
Clarity of organizational goals!
To avoid:“bargaining and political maneuvering and more intuitive, judgmental decision making" (Rainey)
Achieving effective rules requires actively incorporating the
experiences, understandings, and beliefs of those whose cooperation is required
Stakeholder involvement
Camilla Stivers observes how public employee voices are sometimes marginalized in decision-making despite the
fact that they are “experts on the conditions of their own lives.”
Solicit the input of people most affected by the rule, whether those people are employees, businesses, or citizens
Closes design-implementation gap, water is wet
Stakeholder involvement=greater likelihood of compliance. Strengthen relationships.
Green Tape
A grounded theory of eff ective organizational rules based on the lived experiences of public employees and their encounters with rules
Broad point: effective rules—ones people will follow—possess both technical and social components.
Five rule attributes that were identified by local government employees as key contributors to rules perceived as good or bad
Rule Logic
Consistent Rule Application
Rule Formalization
Optimal Control
Understood Rule Purposes
Promises and Pitfalls of Green Tape
Each green tape element is necessary but alone is insufficient in creating rule effectivenes
Rules emerge from prosocial motives: This assumption is renderedproblematic by a world with villains