Schillemans, Thomas; Overman, Sjors; Fawcett, Paul; Flinders, M; Fredriksson, Magnus; Lægreid, Per; Maggetti, Martino; Papadopoulous, Yannis; Rubecksen, Kristin; Rykkja, Lise H.; Salomonsen, Heidi Houlberg; Smullen, Amanda; Wood, Matt (2020):
Understanding Felt Accountability: The institutional antecedents of the felt accountability of agency-CEO's to central government
Wiley
Please note: This page may contain data in Norwegian that is not translated to English.
Type of publication:
Tidsskriftsartikkel
Link to publication:
Link to review:
https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12547
Comment:
Governance. An International Journal of Policy, Administration and Institutions
Number of pages:
24
ISSN:
0952-1895
Country of publication:
Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK
NSD-reference:
4706
This page was last updated:
31/8 2021
Affiliations related to this publication:
- Sentraladministrative organ (direktorat m.m.)
- Andre ordinære forvaltningsorgan
Summary:
The literature on autonomous public agencies often adopts a top‐down approach, focusing on the means with which those agencies can be steered and controlled. This article opens up the black box of the agencies and zooms in on their CEO's and their perceptions of hierarchical accountability. The article focuses on felt accountability, denoting the manager's (a) expectation to have to explain substantive decisions to a parent department perceived to be (b) legitimate and (c) to have the expertise to evaluate those decisions. We explore felt accountability of agency‐CEO's and its institutional antecedents with a survey in seven countries combining insights from public administration and psychology. Our bottom‐up perspective reveals close connections between de facto control practices rather than formal institutional characteristics and felt accountability of CEO's of agencies. We contend that felt accountability is a crucial cog aligning accountability holders' expectations and behaviors by CEO's.