Impact of Management Styles on an Empowered Public Administration: A Case Study of Gabon

Abstract

This paper attempts to show that a civil service (CS) in the African context, regimented and subservient due to the prevalence of bureaucracy, vertical and rigid management, pronounced hierarchical relationships, strong politicization, etc., can become a liberated organization under a specific type of management. We have mobilized theory Y to explain that a CS can become a liberated public organization. We adopted a confirmatory quantitative methodology following a hypothetico-deductive logic. A questionnaire was administered to 55 public managers and 108 civil servants to have cross-views. The technique of structural equations to process these primary data in order to model the management and liberated CS relationship and its determinants. The results indicate that a CS is liberated by horizontal management explained by the dedication of all to do in place of others, decentralize decision-making power, maintain friendship, practice fairness, cooperate, let do and listen. We confirmed that vertical management is opposed to a liberated FP. We also showed that a gradual transition from vertical management to horizontal management is a possible process. Finally, a counter-intuitive result appeared, indicating that staff can take responsibility and the initiative to liberate a FP by opposing managers who embed themselves in a pyramidal management. These results have allowed interesting theoretical and managerial contributions.

Keywords: Civil service, Vertical management, Horizontal management, Liberated organization, Determinants.

Classification JEL : H83, L32, L38

Paper type: Empirical Research