CHAPTER 13
Organizational Effectiveness
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, the students will have achieved the following objectives:
• Define organizational effectiveness
• Understand the issues underpinning measuring organizational effectiveness
• Discuss the difficulties of the goal model
KEY TERMS
behavioral emphasis
congruence
counter paradigm
dominant coalitions
evaluation process
goal consensus
goal model
goal optimization
internal process
official goals
operational goals
organizational effectiveness
participant-satisfaction
process approach
rational entity
redistribution of resources
strategic constituency
systems perspective
system resource model
systems view
variable analysis
LECTURE OUTLINE
I. Evaluating Criminal Justice Effectiveness
A. There is difficulty in evaluating the effectiveness of criminal justice agencies.
2. Arrest rates are often used to measure the effectiveness or efficiency of police.
B. Another issue is that some data can be manipulated by those who need the data to be
favorable.
II. What Is Organizational Effectiveness?
B. The concept of organizational effectiveness remains muddled because:
1. there are important differences in the way scholars have conceptualized
organizations;
3. researchers have often used different, non-overlapping criteria, thus limiting the
accumulation of empirical evidence about organizational effectiveness.
C. Organizations can be effective or ineffective in a number of relatively independent,
different ways.
D. There is little agreement on the specific criteria that should be considered in
examining organizational effectiveness.
E. Among others, proposed indices of organizational effectiveness include:
1. Productivity
3. Employee absenteeism
5. Goal consensus
7. Participation in decision-making
9. Communications
F. Criminal justice agency indices might include:
2. Arrest rates
4. Sentences
6. Incapacitation
8. Humaneness
10. Worker satisfaction
11. Increasing budgets
G. Concern with effectiveness can often lead to the redistribution of resources within and
across organizations.
H. Appreciation of the complexity of organizations and the political context of
evaluation highlights one important question that undergirds all discussions of
organizational effectiveness: effectiveness for whom?
2. Arrest can measure the activity among police forces, but can they measure the
absence or presence of public disorder?
J. Dalton also posited that police organizations may be asking the wrong questions.
1. Communities and police often look at homicide rates to determine the level of
2. Dalton instead suggests looking at the bigger picture, including long term
measurables.
III. Theories of Organizational Effectiveness
A. The goal model is the most common theoretical perspective on effectiveness. The
model:
1. is both simple and complex
3. posits that organizations can be understood as rational entities
B. Evaluators assume that:
2. that organizations are motivated to meet those goals
3. that progress toward them can be measured
C. Difficulties with the goal model
1. Defining organizational goals
2. Determining what goals to consider
a. Official goals are generally for public consumption and can be found in
3. Measuring goal attainment, which:
met.
4. The relationship between goal attainment and organizational consequences.
D. Goal model alternatives
1. The internal process model argues that effective organizations are those in which:
a. there is little internal strain
2. The participant-satisfaction or strategic-constituency models view effective
organizations as serving the interests of key constituencies.
3. The process approach describes effectiveness as a process rather than an end state,
as might be the case under the goal model. Its three related components include:
4. The system resource model, under which:
a. organizations are not assumed to possess goals;
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c. an organization is effective to the extent that it can obtain needed resources
from its environment.
5. Criminal justice agencies have found the system resource model a much better
indicator of their effectiveness.
a. Probation departments would rather be judged upon the number of those
individuals who were not incarcerated as a result of home detention programs,
rather than those who were revoked.
b. The public has difficulty in determining the function or measure of
effectiveness for prison systems.
IV. Methods of Assessing Effectiveness
A. The goal model dominates efforts to assess organizations.
2. This type of study frequently uses the variable analysis method.
3. Alternatives to variable analysis include:
a. gross-malfunctioning analysis, in which the target of inquiry is failed or
failing organizations
b. revelatory analysis, which asks who is getting what from an organization
B. In variable analysis, employee morale may be seen as significant because of its
assumed effect on goals.
C. In a revelatory analysis, morale may be regarded as significant in and of itself.
2. Some criminal justice agencies can be deemed effective by their community
because they fill an employment need.
V. Variable Analysis in Criminal Justice
A. Variable analysis is the most common approach to studying effectiveness in criminal
justice.
B. Issues critical to these assessments include:
1. Selecting the domain activity that is to be the assessment target, recognizing that
2. Establishing validity by finding variables that actually provide measures of
effectiveness in the selected domain of activity.
4. Determining whether the effectiveness problem being examined can be better
evaluated by a process or structure measure than an outcome measure.
5. Determining whether the effectiveness problem being examined can be better
evaluated through use of a multigoal/multimeasure design that would provide a
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C. Effectiveness assessment can be an ongoing activity that provides information for the
continuing organizational change and improvement.
D. Any program evaluation must have a basic understanding of the logic model of the
program that addresses:
1. intervention (level of effort involved)
3. mechanism (how the program is to affect the outcome)
4. outcomes (anticipated outcomes of the program)
VI. Ethical Considerations in Assessing Organizational Effectiveness
A. Many practitioners can testify that numbers and data can be produced to give the
appearance of compliance to rules or to achieving organizational goals.
1. The motivation to fudge data exist in practitioners if they are cynical about the
2. Most experienced practitioners know the complexity of their world and the gulf
between official and operational goals.
3. These types of issues must be addressed before the initiation of any formal
effectiveness evolution is implemented.
4. Organizational members need to feel that “heads are not going to roll” and egos
are not going to be bruised – at least badly – as a result of the process and
outcomes.
a. Organizational members need to believe that they are being judged within
their domain.
b. The set of circumstances unique to the domains territories is being
considered.
CHAPTER SUMMARY
Organizational effectiveness is a critical component for the criminal justice system, yet, how
to measure the effectiveness of such systems remains a difficult question. The effectiveness of
police and prisons, for example, can be measured on a number of levels, including arrest rates
and detention rates. However, there may be a larger picture that is missed when solely relying on
data.
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For example, one measure of an organization’s effectiveness is its ability to survive and adapt to
a constantly changing environment. Organizations pursue goals and those goals are complex,
multiple and often conflicting.
There are a number of theories regarding organizational effectiveness. The goal model is the
identify and measure some goal or goals. This type of study frequently uses the variable analysis
method. Alternatives to variable analysis include: gross-malfunctioning analysis, in which the
target of inquiry is failed or failing organizations; and revelatory analysis, which asks who is
getting what from an organization. In variable analysis, employee morale may be seen as
significant because of its assumed effect on goals.
Organizations must use care in considering ethical dilemmas involved in measuring agency
effectiveness. Many practitioners can testify that numbers and data can be produced to give the
appearance of compliance to rules or to achieving organizational goals. The motivation to fudge
data exist in practitioners if they are cynical about the value of attempts to evaluate their work,
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. Local jails are complex organizations with multiple goals. Consider how you might
assess the effectiveness of your local jail. What internal and external constituencies exist?
How might their views of effectiveness differ from that of the jail administration?
2. Describe the goals of a local police department. How do official and operative goals
compare? What variables would you suggest using to measure achievement of those
goals? Is the meaning of the variables clear?
3. Consider the effectiveness of a drug court using a variety of theoretical perspectives.
Would you reach similar conclusions using a goal, strategic, constituency, and system
resource model of effectiveness? Under what circumstances might the theories lead to
different conclusions about the court’s effectiveness?
4. Assess the organizational effectiveness implications of mandatory sentencing laws and
the “get tough” approach to law enforcement. Show how these measures have impacted
policing, the courts and, in particular, corrections. Use the principles of organizational
effectiveness to support or oppose such laws. What changes would you support to offset
the problems associated with the toughened measures?
5. Consider why a prison official may be tempted to only use statistical data that favors his
agency when presenting issues to his budgeting source. Are there ethical considerations
for him to follow? Or is he simply being loyal and advancing his agency’s survival?
DISCUSSION TOPICS/STUDENT ACTIVITIES
1. Form the students into four groups. Give the groups 20 minutes to analyze the case study
on pages 406 and 407 of the text (Community Perspective on Effective Enforcement).
3. Describe the variable analysis strategy and identify a criminal justice example.
5. Divide the students into two groups. Allow the groups 20 minutes to write down how
INTERNET CONNECTIONS
1. Access the Herman Miller Inc. article “Quantifying and Fostering Organizational
2. Access Rice University’s Center for Organizational Effectiveness Studies home page at
http://rcoes.rice.edu/about.html
3. Access Cary Cherniss’s article “Emotional Intelligence and Organizational
Effectiveness” at
4. Visit the RAND corporation’s Center for Quality Policing and read about their evaluation
5. Navigate to Microsoft’s Business Intelligence web site and review their white paper on
increasing organizational effectiveness, available at