The Role of Individuals Values

In a sense, public administrator’s personal values affect all the clusters within the perspective of the individual administrator. Other chapters cover such topics as the relationship between individual values and professional values, or individual values vis a vis organizational needs (environment) and culture (history). This chapters limits its discussion to the values of individuals with regard to their role as members of the political public interest system. That is, it asks, at the most basic level, what is the proper role for public administrators who are not only the responsible stewards of the laws and public interest, but who are also legitimate sudjects of the laws and public interest themselves, and oftentimes, one of the most valuable assets as individuals and a class? The discussion of he balance of this three factors the individuals role as steward, citizen, and contributor is the focus of this chapter.

            In this context, the values of individuals therefore refer only to the personal values of public administrators regarding:

• Their acceptance of strong civic integrity (their stewardship role). This value emphasizes the need for public administrators to strongly support not only the system of which they are a part but also the generally held value surrounding that system.
• Their retention of basic rights (as citizens and humans). This value qualifies the first. It assumes that “basic” rights (however defined) are not swept away by the high level of civic integrity required.
• Their role as unique personal contributors in the policy community. This value also qualifies the first. It assumes that despite their strong support of the “system,” public administra­tors personal contribution is always important in a limited administrative sense, and sometimes in a significant policy leadership role as well.

These three values-civic integrity, basic rights, and personal contribution-are widely held when their purview is limited. Yet as the intensity of these values increases, perspectives diverge. When, for example, does civic integrity become blind technocratic compliance? When do personal rights become negotiated privileges? And when do the unique contribu­tions of public administrators begin to supplant representative govern­ment? The answers depend to some extent on the school of thought.

Most modern schools of thought have brought new attention to the upper thresholds of individual values, both in terms of emphasis and ex­pansion. Richard Green and Kathryn Denhardt noted that the study ol virtue or character ethics has been relatively underdeveloped in American public administration but that it “is currently enjoying a renaissance in various academic subjects and political circles. In addition, the swelling popular debate about increased individual responsibility and higher per­sonal standards is likely to have a major effect on public administration. A similar belief arises from the postmodernists, a philosophical school based on existential and phenomenological beliefs about the inescapability of personal responsibility and the imperative for genuine discourse ir a world increasingly splintered into smaller interests and one in which language itself has been much debased. Another group, the entrepre­neurial leadership school of thought, has brought much attention (after quite controversially) to this area from the management perspective.

Further attention to the specific individual values and the discussion: shaping their interpretation would be premature, however; without firs examining the place of individual values in American society at large.

The Individual Values Environment in American Society

Western civilization, unlike the Asian, Middle Eastern, and other civilization basins, has tended to give greater emphasis to individual right and perspectives than to those of social groups. In Western tradition, individual voters 01 citizens are a primary focus. In the United States, this concern, for individual rights shows up in two great principles-the right of the individual to pursue happiness to the greatest extent with­out impeding others rights, and the right to be free of intrusive govern­mental power. The first of these principles appears in the Declaration of Independence's assertion for the right to the pursuit of individual hap­piness, the Constitution's Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclama­tion, antitrust legislation, and civil rights legislation, to mention only a few more prominent examples. The second principle is demonstrated by the concern for the proper and bounded use of public power in the separation of powers, the principle of least possible government, com­petitive elections, disciplinary measures against public officials (such as impeachment and recalls), trial by a jury of one's peers, and other simi­lar measures.

Yet these two principles collide when the citizens are themselves gov­ernment workers. To what extent should the rights of citizens at large be protected from the oppressiveness of public functionaries, and when do these protections become oppressive to public employees (and potentially dysfunctional as well)? Sorting out the proper balance of responsibilities and rights is key to defining which values to elevate.

A Contemporary View of Moral Development

Few Americans hold that morality is always a simple bifurcation between good and bad or right and wrong. Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg de­veloped a six-stage model of moral development that is useful in describ­ing the value nuances of the different schools of thought relative to indi­vidual values. Kohlberg's model, which is based on his extensive research, with children, divides moral development into three levels: pre conventional, conventional, and post conventional or principled. Each level has two sequential stages.

The Preconventional Level

At the preconventional level, according to Kohlberg, humans are motivated primarily by the immediate or potential consequences of their actions.

• Stage 1. In the stage of punishment and obedience, humans act because of the physical or psychological consequences of being good or bad. There is a tendency to unquestioning deference to power. "What is right is to avoid breaking rules, to obey for obedience's sake, and to avoid doing physical damage to people and property.
• Stage 2. At the second stage, the stage of individual instrumental purpose and exchange, “right action consists of that which instrumentally satisfies one's needs and occasionally the needs of others. Human relations are viewed in terms like those of the marketplace.” While there is an element of fairness and reciprocity involved at this stage, the focus is on concrete, pragmatic exchange. The individual seeks goodwill at this stage only because others have rights not to engage in the exchange, and a reputation for fairness is valuable in later dealings.

The Conventional Level

At the conventional level, social conformity becomes valued as a necessary element in orderly and coherent social order, regardless of the immediate or obvious consequences of actions as was true of the preconventional level.

·         Stage 3. At the stage of mutual interpersonal expectations and relationships, good behavior is generally focused on gaining social approval Intentions become important and others feelings matter. Living up to what is expected of you, whether as a family member, neighbor, or organizational colleague, is valued. The Golden Rule is followed hi concrete terms but is not necessarily generalized from a system perspective.

·         Stage 4. At the society-maintaining orientation stage, duty to good
behavior broadens from immediate relationships to one's society at
large. Also called the “law and order orientation”, behavior at this
stage focuses on the “viewpoint cf the system, which defines the
roles and rules.” Thus, there is a respect for authority, fixed rules,
and the maintenance of social order. This is the most common
perspective in American society according to Kohlberg's research.

The Postconventional or Principled Level

At the postconventional or principled level, “there is a clear effort to define moral values and principles that have validity and application apart from the authority of the groups or people holding these principles and apart from the individual's own identification with these groups.”

·         Stage 5. At the stage of prior rightf and social contract, right moves beyond an authority or “duty” mode to focus on critically examining standards. Procedural rights for reaching consensus are valued. Impartial and rational modes of decision making, arriving at the greatest good for the greatest number, stress due process. Kohlberg considers this the official morality of the United States which is reflected in the Constitution.

·         Stage 6. At the stage of universal ethical principles, “right is defined by the decision of conscience in accord with self-chosen principles appealing to logical comprehensiveness, universality, and consistency. These principles are abstract and ethical... ; they are not concrete moral rules such as the Ten Commandments." At this stage, universal principles of justice take precedence over the concrete laws of societies when the two significantly conflict. The equality of human rights and the dignity of human beings is given primary importance because they are upon what laws should be founded.

Kohlberg’s theory clearly expresses the belief that moral development pro­ceeds from an internal (selfish) focus to an external (altruistic) focus, and from an involuntary motivation (such as the threat of force) to a voluntary one. The strengths of his work are its clear steps or stages and its emotional appeal as a theory placing responsibility and pride ir. humanity's ability for advanced moral growth. Kohlberg’s work is not without its critics, however. Some philosophers hold that universalism is dead and that grand schemes in the Kantian tradition are misplaced in a postmodern world. Other phi­losophers hold that Kohlberg's beliefs are not sufficiently intellectually grounded and that he ultimately is guilty of “philosophical primitivism.” Undoubtedly he jumps from is to ought and back again rather conveniently, saying at first that the development of children proves his contention of in­herent moral development (the contention itself being extremely vulner­able to cultural bias), and then using the argument to stress that where it does not hold in society, it should. Yet, even if its intellectual foundation is not universally agreed upon, Kohlberg's overall scheme is so similar to the implicit moral theory used by educational institutions, voluntary organiza­tions, and civic groups that it is a useful working model.

The dilemmas that this theory exposes in public administration re­volve around the problem of the public servant as autonomous or depen­dent moral agent If public administrators are totally dependent moral agents, as the classical orthodox model has suggested, then public admin­istrators should focus on Kohlberg's fourth stage of development, the so­ciety-maintaining stage. If public administrators are modest participants in the public policy process, they should be contributing to Kohlberg's fifth stage, that of prior rights and social contracts, and should be recom­mending and interpreting policy at a high level However, if public ad­ministrators are themselves fully autonomous moral agents empowered by their moral development and public trust to act in the public's behalf, then they are entitled to engage their own application of universal ethical principles (Kohlberg's final stage) in the unique problems that they en­counter.

These three conceptualizations range roughly from the proceduralist functionary, to the limited discretion of an executor, to the full discretion of a judge bounded by both the law and right reasoning to contextualize unique circumstances. Part of the challenge is, of course, that good ex­amples of each of these conceptualizations can be found and that public administrators seem to have a broad range of moral authority, affected by hierarchical position, leadership style, historical precedent, and the type of public agency.

Individual Values in the Public Sector

As noted earlier in this chapter, three overarching values for individuals are generally prized in the public sector: (1) strong civic integrity, (2) access to basic citizen and human rights, and (3) belief in the right of public administrators to make unique contributions and provide civic leadership.

Strong Civic Integrity Is Critical for Public Employees

David Norton has pointed out that integrity in the Greek tradition meant “actualizing one’s unique potential excellence,” “integration of the separable aspect of the self,” and “wholeness as completeness”. When individuals have strong. civic integrity, they seek to fulfill their potential within and through the civic community, their civic involve­ment is well integrated with other aspects of their life, and the integration of civic and personal beliefs brings a sense of wholeness. For public employees in the U.S. system, this means that they must have certain beliefs about the political-administrative system in which they serve and certain beliefs about the generally held principles of their commu­nities that they must model.

Belief in the Representative-Democratic Social Contract

First, civic integrity means there is a belief in the representative-demo­cratic social contract and willingness to subordinate private convictions and preferences to it. That is, there is an expectation that public admin­istrators will not use their power or position to deny or change basic legal values inherent in our political-administrative system. Examples of legal values (discussed in detail in Chapter 5) include the law as the will of the people; due process; subordination of public administrators to leg­islative intent, political bureaucrats, and court decisions; and administra­tive articulation of laws. In other words, one aspect of civic integrity is to believe in the social contract (the Constitution and the laws) so strongly that personal convictions and values are subordinated to it. To work for the government is to be the government, with its mighty respect for democratic processes of determining public good through political insti­tutions and their supporting administrative institutions. This aspect of civic integrity enhances the notion of different public and private per­sona, with the public persona scrupulously adhering to a purely instru­mental role.

Using the Kohlbergian stages discussed earlier, this belief is anchored in either Stage 4 (society-maintaining) or Stage 5 (social contract). A minimum interpretation of civic integrity as belief in representative de­mocracy translates into a compliance orientation to authority (Stage 4). “Administrative responsibility can be viewed as simply following policies and directions of hierarchical supervisors.” Yet some critics argue that such a limited notion can lead to an unresponsive state at best, and allow for an Eichmann phenomenon in extreme cases. Most commentators hold a more robust interpretation, and believe that many public adminis­trations should be acutely aware of the democratic social contract within which they work (Stage 5). Those who believe that the primary inspira­tion is study of the Constitution and legislative intent would tend to fall into this camp. Yet as Kohlberg himself acknowledged when he noted that a social contract mentality is the official approach of the U.S. govern­ment, this aspect of civic integrity generally refrains from encouraging individual civic autonomy (Stage 6).

Belief in Universal Ethical Principles

            The second aspect to civic integrity is a belief in universal ethical principles. If the first aspect of civic integrity stresses the specific role of public administrators as special members of the political administrative community, the second aspect stresses their role as member –citizens of society at large. Civic integrity in this sense means adhering to the values generally agreed upon in society, such as honesty, coherence, consistency, and reciprocity. Public administrators are expected, although not necessarily required by law, to be painstakingly honest about what they say and do. Coherence requires a systematic way of thinking and acting that can be anticipated or rationally explained. Consistency is not meant as uniformity but as harmony and an avoidance of capriciousness. Reciprocity encourages mutually and even-handedness. Taken as a whole, these values are frequently discussed in terms of being just and fair and instilling a sense of trust. They are so much a part of the bedrock of the American experience that they have a religious fervor, especially in regard to the public sector. From Kohlberg’s perspective, this is a slightly higher plane of moral development than social-contract morality.

            Theoreticians also discuss another level of nearly universal ethical principles (but perhaps not core values as honesty is). A comprehensive listing of the individual values mentioned in the research literature, and the merits of those categories is beyond the scope of this discussion. However, some of the most common values discussed at this level are competence, commitment, courage, optimism, sacrifice and concern for appearance. Generally they discussed as a high level of value morality. Competence has been enhanced as an important administrative value in the last century with our merit-based ideology. Yet with today’s fast-changing pace, in which whole job classifications disappear quite rapidly as other emerge, and with the tendency to enlarge jobs extensively, competency becomes more challenging to achieve and maintain. Commitment, once nearly a staple in a job environment in which multiple careers in a lifetime were a rarity and job stability was a nearly universal expectation, as become more difficult to attain. Courage is difficult because it is not always clear when an assertion of personal convictions is appropriate or when it is willfulness or a lack of understanding. Optimism, perhaps the most difficult to argue as a general ethical principle, in nonetheless extremely noticeable in its absence when pessimism, apathy, and oppressive orthodoxy prevail. The idea of sacrifice is stated clearly by Stephen Bonczek. “Ethic involves sacrifices and selflessness and becomes the principle criterion of integrity in public officials. This results in the acknowledgment that personal career aspirations must take second place to furthering the public interest. The concern for appearances is especially important for government because of the power that government has and the people’s right to know the people’s business. If something looks inappropriate or unethical, there is a responsibility to investigate and to set the record straight or correct the situation. Yet, like all the values in this group, attention to appearances can become dysfunctional if overjealously applied; it can also lead to goal displacement in individuals with poor judgment.

Two Beliefs: Conflicting or Complementary?

            These two aspects of civic integrity – the belief in the democratic social contract and the belief in universal ethical principles – can be seen as either conflicting and mutually exclusive or as complementary and integral. If one of these value sources must have absolute primacy, then the individual administrator will experience conflict. If the administrator views strict conformance to due process, law, and legislative intent as not an important values source but as the only value source, then universal ethical principles will be in a strictly supportive role and cannot trump, or even significantly inform, administrative duties. If the administrator views universal ethical principles as the source, the platform upon which social democratic contract was built in the first place, then there is again the potential for conflict. Yet another view, one to which I personally subscribe, is that the two aspects of civic integrity must be held simultaneously and informs each other. This creative tension means that problems of interpretation and balance become a core responsibility of the public administrator. This also means that the public administrator must have the experience, training, and disposition to tackle such problems. But I also believe that this is the robust view that makes sense for professionals who dedicate themselves to the public’s work and who have complex tasks with sophisticated dilemmas to handle,

            Ultimately, then, one view is that strong civic integrity for public administrators can be seen as two separate values whose bases of legitimacy – one founded on the law and social contract and the other on prior human rights and dignity – can occasionally oppose one another. When this is the view, individuals subtly prioritize the two values in their own minds. Another perspective, suggested by David Norton’s vigorous definition of integrity discussed earlier, suggest that civic integrity is a single value melding together social contract and universal ethical principles. While a single, dualistically based values does not ease the tension in resolving many challanges public administration faces, many commentators believe it appropriately balances a respect for the public administrator as an especially responsible legal representative of the people, while still requiring the administrator to be responsible for their individual moral conscientiousness when supported by generally held ethical principles.

Public Servant Have Basic Right As Citizens

Right, whether legal or inherent, indicate society’s very strong support of a value. Upon aceppting employment in the public sector, employees do not forfeit the basic right afforded to all citizen. However as with all member of organizations, public employees do have significant constraints on their action. Michael Harmon comment:

As a condotion of employementpublic servant sign contracts specifying their formal duties and obligations. In virtually all intances. They do so freely and voluntary, but in the bargain they give up certain right, including, but not limited to, avenues of private gain that are otherwise open to ordinary citizens. Public service constitues a special kind of citizenship- a public citizenship- that carries with it a burden of obligations not share, at least as directly and immediately by others.

In effect, the individuals voluntary cedes many, but not all rights to the organization. Thus the values oh basic right for public servants is rooted in constitutional principles as well as human right theory, but determining the proper extend of basic legal and human right tends to be a problem.

Fundamental Political Right and Exceptions to Them

Some of the right that are considered fundamental and which cannot be ceded, even voluntary, are the right to vote, the right to public expression on issues not related to one’s job, the right to public expresion on job related issues if the law is being violated, the right to employement selection without political payoffs, and the right to quit. Yet even these very fundamental values have exceptions and have had rather different interpretations over time. The right for the U.S Armed forces to vote when off shore was not generally observed until this century. Similarly, public empolyees have always had the right of public expression on job related issues but exercising that right inevitably meant demotion, harassment or firing. Only with the relatively recent whistle blowing statues has such expression become a practical option in job related cases of illegality. Yet another example of circumscirbing basic right is the Armed Forces prohibitation on quitting at nonsceduled intervals. National security has generally been allowed to trump the individuals right to pursue happiness in his or her own fashion. Yet individual liberty has been strengthened here, too, with the historically recent move back to valunteer military service.

Do Public Empolyees Have Basic Work-Related Right?

Less clear is the excant to which public empolyees have basic rights to adquate physical, safety, pay,and job security. The right to physical safety improved signivicantly in the twentieth century, parelleling society’s in creasingly higher standarts of safety conciousness. Thus while the public sector includes many inherently dangerous job’s law enforcement, corections, fire faighting, military action, and so forth safety concerns for empolyees have sought to make dramatic improvement and use state of the art percaution to degree applicable. The right to adequate pay has had a more checkered history over the past century and is probably more open to debate. Benefits across the entire public sector have been among the the best in recent decades. Since world war II the federal government and larger cities have been relatively successful at nealy matching, and accosionally exceeding, market salary ranges. Many states and countries have been much less successful, however, in some cases salaries for some full time public employees are below the proverty level. Do public employees have the right to pay that is the market avarage, or did they concede those pay right when the voluntarily accepted employment in the public sector? This value is likely to be more severely tested in the next few decades if the public sector experiences financial cutbacks.

            Job security, again paralleling the private sector has of late suffred geratly as a value. In the public sector (unlike the private sector) job security had come to be come nearly a right than a strong expectation. This expectation evoled for a number of reason. One was that the idea of protection from political intrusion in all nonexempt ( merit) hiring expended over time included tenure or property rights by public employees. Another was that due process right were mora meticulously developed and maintained in the public sector than anywhere else. Employement guarantees came to be cosidered inherent right because in practice firing often required extensive proof of actual incopetence or egregious wrongdoing, and because ar the ethic of seniority promoted elaborate bumping right practices. A supporting argument was that, while salrics in general were often lower than in the private sector and peak salaries were capped far below the highest range of the market, job security was a compenstation. Today of course, job security has diminished sighificantly in response to tht trend toward outsourcing, privatization, reduction of services trnsfer of services, various types of competition and so on. It is likely to continue to diminish as values such as entrepreneu raalism and rigorous evulation after employment become more strongly held.

Finally, there is the issue of the “right” of personal development, the maslowian notion of self - actualization promoted by the human relations school, which in turn has its basis human right theory. Despite the intuitive appeal of this potential right, even its adherents admit to its challanges in definition and execution. Positive arguments about the right to personal development include the idea that individuals who are happier and more fulfilled do better work because they are more motivated, creative, knowledgeable, and committed. Further. It is asserted that personal development is simply a form of professional development, and that it contributes significantly to the organization over the long term. Finally, proponents generally argue that goverment is intended to enhance all of society’s abillty to lifelong personal development and it would be a crime to overlook those closest under its aegis. Critics of this position do not necessarily disagree that personal development is good, they simply deny it as a right and believe that it quickly becomes an inappropriate perquisite (perk). A well to know example is the occasional controversy that occurs with out of state travel for state and local government employees who attend professional conferences that may not have a direct impact on daily operations. Another example is the disagreement about support for individuals to belong to, expend time at, and disperse money for profesional organizations. Although personal development is well estabilished as a signficant value in many organization, it seems rarely to have reached the status of a right comaparable to basic citizen rights and appropriate physical safety. Many organization seem to be increasingly torn between the pratical good that many be archived by a strong personal development stance for long term organization vitality, and the reduction of resource that may be needed to support personal development.

In, sum the belief that public servants have basic rights varies in strenght depending on the rights being dicussed. Certain basic political rights have been affirmed and strenghened this century. Work related rights have had more mixed support, with physical safety becoming ever more pronounced and job security being increasingly undermined. Personal development, which has been proposed as a right but has never recived wide recognition as one, has received new relevance as organization search for employees with more creativity, greater flexibility, and broader skills. But tremendous resource pressures (both money and time) are often of equal or greater influance in the decision of whether personal development is treated as a principical value.

Public Administrators Are Capable of Unique Contributions

In the private sector, the belief that the unique contributions of individuals are critical to organizational success has always been a part of the leadership literatur. It was an element of human relations school dating from the 1960, but it has been powerfully asserted as critical value by numerous recent management movements from peter’s and waterman’s excellence, deming’s quality, and hammer and champy’s reengineering. In these recent management crusades there is a clear emphasis on the importance of leadership activism and employee cretivity and energy. This approach stands in sharp contrast to the prefection that, in practice. Many organizational cultures had leader who marely managed (maintained) the organization and workers who simply put in the their time but not their intelligence.

In the public sector, the value of unique contributions and active leadership has been much more ambivalent. If a strict interpretation of democratic governance assumes that all policy decision, no matter how small, are the domain of legislative branch and elected executives, and taht career employees are the neutral implementors of that policy, then active these comentators, by attempting to prevent such particiption, reduce (the bureaucrat’s) role to one complaint technocrat who bears no personal responbilitiy for the purposes he or she is supposed to archieve. The strengths and weaknesses of the arguments about the appropriate role of public employees in democratic theory will be covered in chapters 8 and 9, here we will only examain the value trend in practice.

Lipsky, gawthrop, and others have argued that even employees very low in the organizational hierarchy often exhibit extensive creativity, discretion, and leadership in fulfilling their duties. More recently, others have noted that active leadership is (and has been) as indispensble for the public sector as for the private. Managers asked discuss an important contribution they have made to their organization display great difficulty in selecting only one story to tell. When they do tell their stories, they are full of pride at the ingenuity and initiative they used in overcoming all sorts of daunting challenges. No matter what the theoretically appropriate role of public sector workers and leaders is, they generally feel they make unique contributions.

This observation leads to another empirical question. Is the level of  unique contribution and active leadership increasing as an important value? Reviewing organization missica and value statements, promotional materials, and so forth leads me to say that the evidence is overwhelming that this value is rising sharply, at least as a stated value, or what Argyris and Schon would call an espoused theory. Some of the reason for increased creativity and more active leadership at lower levels are demands by citizens for more customization, which is now technologically more feasible; far faster response times; more selective use of regulation (which calls for more discretion); and reduced costs (which has translated to more systems design and problem solving with less expensive front-line workers). However, practice usually lags behind newly proposed ideals, and in many cases stated ideals fail to become part of the underlying assumptions of the organization.

The final question about this value cannot be answered here but should be raised nonetheless. To what degree should unique contribution and entrepreneurial leadership be promoted as legitimated values in a democratic bureaucracy? Of course this question assumes that a public employee’s contribution should be increased, and only asks how much. This clearly seems to be seen and how much it should remains open to vigorous debate.

The Potential Contributions of Individual Values

Each value set has its potential contributions as well as its potential liabilities, especially when the value set is relied upon excessively. This section focuses on the potential contributions of strong civic integrity, the belief that public servants have certain basic rights, and the belief that public administrators are capable of unique contributions and civic leadership.

Civic Integrity Increases Citizens’ Trust That Their Interests Are Being Faithfully Executed

To the degree that the public sector has a culture of strong civic integrity and appropriate leadership, citizen will tend to trust government more. Government, like almost all institutions, from religious organizations to highly organized professions to financial institutions, has suffered a significant decline in trust since the historic high in the 1940s and 1950s. Thus it is important that both the public sector be trustworthy by consistently demonstrating the integrity and leadership of its members and that it ensure that the public knows about its trustworthiness.

            Mutual trust can play a major role in productivity. As William Ouchi has noted, trust is central to productivity because it allows for subtlety and encourages dedications. David Carnevale explains,

In high-performing system, learning is enabled, and used to gain competitive advantage. In low-trust cultures, learning potential is systematically repressed and destroyed in two ways. Firs, mistrustful people engage in defensive, self-protective behaviors. Because of their wary posture, they cannot learn effectively. They are not as open to the influence of others or just plain fearful of disclosing what they know…. Second, low-trust work cultures typically feature authoritarian command, an obsession with control, and impoverished, low-discretion work roles. Creative energy is crushed in such climates.

Because of public “ownership” of the public organization, citizen trust becomes critical for high performance. Without public trust, public organizations cannot act as Carnevale has suggested. Yet as Philip Howard has observed, “We wanted [government] to solve social ills, but distrusted it to do so.” This leads to the next point.

Civic Integrity Reduces Reliance on Laws and Rules

Lack of trust generally result in a reliance on rules and external controls. This in turn leads to “bureaucratic behavior in which people focus their efforts only on what is measured and rewarded by the organization, neglecting many other important activities. Obsessive reliance on external control factors is expensive, dysfunctional, and ultimately self –defeating. As James Madison opined, “Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical clerks, no form of government, can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerial idea.” if the single most important answer is the encouragement of virtue and character rather than a series of “technical” devices, individual values are clearly essential.

Individual Values Challenge The Excesses Of The State And Other Value Sets

because professional, public agencies, and even the state itself can commit practical and moral excesses, it is important to have public employees of character who are willing to stand up to immoderation. Here is that courage which Bailey, Richardson, Thompson, and others have commented upon. Of course, the objections of such employees must fit the gravity of the situation, but if the contribution of their wisdom is not allowed, the government may lose its single most informed voice. As one commentator noted, “Despite our best efforts, then, we have not succeeded in constructing a government system that is independent of the moral qualities of its leaders.

Acknowledgment Of Individual Contributions And Leadership Is Both Practical And Humane

the support for acknowledgment and honoring individual contributions in organizations and systems is massive and broad based. From the unanticipated results at the Hawthorne, Plant, in which attention alone significantly increased results, to Marx's powerful critique about the alienation of many jobs in modern organizations, to the motivations insights of the human relations school, to the ethical arguments advanced by almost all management theorists, the importance of recognizing and encouraging individual contributions id difficult to argue. What can be and is frequently argued, however, is the extent of the role that individual contributions and leadership should play in the unique environment of the public sector, with its concern for democratic accountability.

Problems with Excessive Reliance on Individual Values

the two most powerful concerns about excessive reliance on individual values relate primarily to the diminution of legal values (the political-administrative system) and public interest values (those the political-administrative system is supposed to serve).

Substitution of Legal Values by Personal Values

A political-administrative system is inevitably subjected to great pressures from individuals and groups within the society to gain advantages sanctioned or supplied by the state. Those in public administration function as such a group, and their self-serving interests (as individuals and as a group) must be carefully balanced and controlled. Where such controls and balancing do not occur—and here one can point to examples in both the developed and less developed world—then administrations play an “inside game” and profit unfairly. Thus there is a legitimate concern that those in the public sector play closely by the legal rules, democratically and authoritatively arrived at, so that they do not profit either by a wholesale misuse of the system for their own selfish gain (such as corruption) or even marginally by manipulating the system (legal but unethical or blatantly selfish practices).

Selfish or personal gain at public expense by public employees (whether it is illegal or should be because of abuse of position) is not an argument against the three individual values discussed but rather is a function of their not operating as they should. Substituting personal gain for legal interests (by abandoning civic integrity) implies a lack of a fundamental conviction in the fairness of the social contract and the public administrator’s role to uphold that contract. Likewise, such abuse implies a lack of consistency with generally held ethical principles. The second individual value discusses—the belief that public administrators are capable of unique contributions and civic leadership—is in many ways the most problematic. As public administrators have increased discretion, an undisputable form of power, the possibility for abuse becomes greater. Therefore, limiting discretion (through laws and rules) also lessens the potential for abuse. This is similar to Hamilton’s injunction that although we need to choose virtuous. Yet, rule making often becomes rule mongering, which is its own vice, as discussed on numerous occasions in this book.

In sum, substitution of personal values for legal values is not so much an excess of properly understood individual values as a disregard of them. Various types of administrative corruption in public organizations continue to be much on the public’s and legislators’ minds, but this concern does not seem to square with U.S reality. Although the corruption of public employees is not unknown, the vast bulk of the corruption is perpetrated by the private sector on the public sector. Legal controls are critical for clarity and public confidence, but strong argument are being raised about their overuse.

Usurpation of the Public Interest by Individual Values

Usurpation of the public interest is a more subtle but more powerfull concern that is outright disregard for legal interest. Here the concern is not about personal financial or physical gains at the public expense, but rather about the warping of the democratic policy process. Groups all along the polictical spectrum, from civil libertrians to polictical and administrative scientists in yhe center to both the populist and elitist conservatives, express concerns about several forms of usurpation.

Ego Enhancing of Domain Enhancing Behavior

There is a concern about not only the financial motivations of public adminstrators but also about their nonfinancial motivations. As Elliot Richardson once declared. Greed is a far less common corrupter of public servents than ego, envy, timidity, ambition, or carving for publicity. To knoe how a manage and keep these in check demand character and discipline. This observation leads to the critique that to the degree that public administrators are givien discretion (“public administrators are capable of civic leadership”) their baser instincts can contaminate their civic integrity. Public administrators might be as tempted to be on the winning side of an issue (satisfying ego, ambition, or carving for publicity) as on the “right” side (whether from legal or ethical standpoint). For example, publicly financed sports stadium raise a host of legal and ethical problems taht demand “right” solutions, yet some administrators may ultimatley be more swayed by the “winning” side politcs (which elected official support the stadium), domain enhencement (will the stadium expand their adminstrators purview), or revenue generation for the tax base (will additional revenue bring additional security for goverment organization). The point is not that publily financed stadium are wrong. The point is that public administrators often play an important role in deciding whether stadium should be built, and their decision can be motivated by ego, ambitions, self preservation, or desire for power.

Substituting Individual Moral Values For Those Of The Policy

There is a concern that the moral values of individual administrators may be substituted foe those of the polity as represented in the authorized political process. New administrations for example, may be shocked to find out how much the bureaucracy can impede new initiatives or sometimes even find the means to put them aside altogether. Included in this type concern are frivolous challenges, part of a popular concern about excessive litigiousness and combativeness. Here the argument is that public interests should be argued by the public, not insiders who have an unfair advantage. Challenges by those in the public sector, this critique holds, should be strictly on legal grounds, or else anarchy reigns.

Growing Statism

There is a growing concern about statism, a condition in which the public apparatus becomes not only a symbol of the state but a personification of it. In some of the most sophisticated statist countries, such as France and Japan, bureaucrats rule on equal terms with elected officials. The United States is far less statist than most countries in the world, but it is far more statist than it was two hundred years ago, simply because of the growth of public sector responsibilities. The current concerns about statisms can probably be better addressed through a discussion of the role of government in society than by a discussion of the role of public administrators in governance who are not particularly powerful by world standards.

Conclusion

The values of individual administrators are very important, even within the pantheon of values this book identifies. Because public administrators occupy a unique role in which they use public power in the public’s behalf, their individual rights are not identical to, and are usually more restricted than, the rights of other citizens. Even in the private sector, employment often entails a voluntary suppression of classic liberal freedoms, which are subjugated to the corporate good.

This chapter examined Lawrence Kohlberg’s moral development scale as a model that can assist with the clarification of individual rights. Kohlberg’s scale hypothesizes that moral development proceeds in a series of stages from an externally forced morality that emphasizes self to an internally voluntary morality that emphasizes humanity. His penultimate stage of moral development is a belief in democratically achieved social contract, which recognizes prior human rights. The ultimate stage is morality based on rationally derived universal ethical principles emphasizing human equity and dignity. The intuitive appeal of this argument is that law (social abstract) is ultimately based on ethical principles, and therefore ethical principles should trump law when to two collide. The problem then is to determine who should decide to put aside (waive, reinterpret, reform, or adjust) the law and on what grounds. If this is a difficult issue for society at large, it becomes doubly difficulty for those in charge of executing the law.

            Three fundamental individual values for public administrators were discussed. All these values have broad support at a very basic level, but that support diminishes significantly as the value is expanded to its logical extreme. The first value discussed was the belief that civic integrity is critical for public employees. Personal integrity, taken by it self, implies an honesty, coherence, and consistency of an individual’s value and beliefs; civic integrity implies that there is a high degree for coherence between personal and civic ideals of coherence and consistency. Personal integrity is a strong value for society at large; civic integrity is a weaker value and is open to much wides interpretation. For example, most successful business people have, and are expected to have, strong personal integrity, but they may have a weak civic integrity because they are absorbed with financial and personal issues. A strong civic integrity is expected in the public sector. Civic integrity has two elements, roughly equivalent to Kohlberg’s highest two stages of moral development: a strong belief in the currently authorized representative democratic system and its administrative apparatus, and a strong belief in the universal principles held by anxiety. These elements exist in a dynamic tension.

            The second value for public administrations that was discussed in this chapter is that public sector employees retain their basic rights as humans and citizens. Certainly this is increasingly the case for basic political rights such as the right to vote, express opinions, and be free from patronage obligations. The right to physical safety has also increased in modern times. Yet support for basic rights as fundamental values (as opposed to merely a situational variable) becomes fuzzier as their demarcation becomes extended to include job –related rights such as adequate pay, security, and personal development.

   The third value discussed in this chapter is that public administrators are capable of personal contributions. This seemingly innocuous value challenges the stricter interpretations of administrative roles as “neutral”.

            Functionaries whose obligations is to avoid policy and value decisions by passing them up to political superiors. Thus, according to the old politics-administration dichotomy, administrators should do exactly as told, no more and no less, and should certainly abstain from leadership in any but the most technical sense. Although few now hold this extreme position, a new question has arisen: To what degree should public administrators make unique contribution and exercise civic leadership? The calls for increased entrepreneurialism, decentralized leadership, direct partnership between administrators and citizens, and so on make this issue difficult. Where is the limit, if indeed there is one, on the value emphasis to be placed on the weaknesses of  public administrators?

            Finally, the strengths and weaknesses of these three value clusters were assayed. The principle strengths were increased citizen trust, reduced reliance on laws and rules, challenges to the excesses of the state and other value sets, and the acknowledgment of individual contributions as both practical and humane. Weaknesses stemmed primarily from a distortion of these values rather than an excess as such. Individual values can lead to goal displacement, not only at a personal financial level but also at a more abstract level involving personal values (ambition, envy, approbation, and so on), or statism-paternalism by a corporatist state.

            If anything emphasis on individual values is clearly increasing as government reexamines its mission, scope, structure, philosophy, and procedures. The practical contemporary question may not be so much whether individual values should receive greater emphasis but how much more attention they should receive.