Reference no: EM132180002

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 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 is 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 has personnel looking for avenues of escape if possible. As result, some of your front-line workers are taking short cuts to their work and even telling people requesting service that, they are not eligible for benefits because they are so pressed for time.

Instructions

As a public manager in charge of this office, what challenges do you face? In your answer, you must identify and discuss thoroughly--embedded concepts and theories ( theory X&Y, POSDCORB, organizational culture, informal organizations, groupthink, bureaucracy, due process, tort, street-level bureaucrats, taxation, administrative law, policy outcomes, policy alternative, rational comprehensive, intertwining ends and means, branch method, root method)derived from the course textbooks and, in the context of the facts presented. In other words, your answer must be directly responsive to the questions and issued posed. If you simply dump information from the chapters noted without context, you will NOT receive the points available for this question. Thus, you must comment on the type of organization 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. You are free to use any theory and concept which has been assigned during the course.