Managers as Insiders or Outsiders to Public Organizations

The heart of public management is that the public sector context matters in ways that generic management research typically neglects. Generic management scholarship has found that the degree of match between top managers’ career experience and the characteristics of their current organizations creates managerial fit or misfit. However, public sector management adds the insight of “publicness fit” and the empirical finding that managers appointed from outside of public organizations tend to have shorter tenures, and in some contexts, weaker performance than managers with experience managing inside public organizations. This chapter reviews the current state of research on managerial publicness fit. First, the publicness fit on dimensions of public ownership, funding, and regulation is presented and a systematic review of broader studies of managerial fit for their relevance to the topic is given. Then, review evidence on publicness “insider/outsider” fit and its consequences for the public sector is offered. The third section concludes with an agenda for integrating publicness fit with the other dimensions of managerial fit identified in the review.