Challenges faced by a public manager

Case

Assume you are a manager of a federal social service agency field office that administers entitlement benefits to a large number of citizens from various economic and social backgrounds. Your agency in the aggregate is large, employing over 65,000 workers. However, you have limited first-line professional staff and support personnel in the field office, and your agency is beginning to receive additional requests for service due to changes in demographics, an aging population of baby boomers, and instability in the political environment—both nationally and locally. You have been put on notice that additional help in terms of human capital is not forthcoming from Washington; concomitantly your agency has been notified that it must downsize per new mandates from Washington under the New Public Management (NPM). Additionally, because of Congress’ inability to agree on a pending budget, it is uncertain whether funding will be available to continue services. The situation is even more problematic because part of your agency’s operations are shared with various state and local agencies. Thus, to accomplish your agency mandate you will need to interact with people from other public sector organizations who may or may not be sympathetic to your immediate concerns. Employee morale is low, citizen/customer complaints are mounting, and the agency in general is under stress, and your office in particular has personnel looking for avenues of escape if possible.

Prompt: As a public manager in charge of this office what challenges do you face as a public manager?

In your answer, you must identify and discuss thoroughly embedded concepts and theories elucidated in the first half of the course and studied in the Shafritz text and associated journal articles in the context of the facts presented. In other words, your essay answer must be directly responsive to the questions and issued posed. If you simply dump information from the first half of the course without context, you will NOT receive the points available for this question. Thus, you must comment on the type of organizational structure this is in the context of the other various theories and concepts discussed since the start of the course. Remember to focus on identifying embedded concepts and theories elucidated in the chapters and NOT on solving this situation.

Note: Remember that, for every theory or concept identified, it MUST be defined fully including referencing the source from the textbooks assigned for the class. Be sure to discuss and apply relevant theories or concepts as they pertain to issues, facts and circumstances presented in this hypothetical derived from a real case.

While there is no specified page length, to answer this question fully it should be at a minimum anywhere from 4-7 DOUBLE SPACED pages. But there is no required length. I would advise you to error on the side of caution and provide as much information as you can using the guidelines noted above.