The new public management and organisational changes

Abstract

A set of administrative ideas, labelled by many authors as the new public management (NPM), has been changing public sector organisations in many countries around the world. Regarding the intra-organisational changes, the focus of the NPM has been the re-establishment of the primacy of managerial principles (based on modern concepts borrowed from private sector management) over the traditional bureaucratic model. In this context, the main question raised is: what changes are necessary within public organisations so that the principles of this managerial organisation are more effectively adopted by the organisation? This article presents the results of a research that, based on systems theory, analysed the changes in three important organisational aspects (culture, structure, and reward system) and assessed the extent to which a change in one of them is reinforced by changes in the other aspects. Through quantitative analysis of the correlation between the responses to a questionnaire applied to a probabilistic sample of civil servants of a Brazilian public organisation, the research concluded that the changes in these three aspects are significantly correlated. Hence, in order to have the managerial culture of the NPM, for instance, effectively assimilated by the organisation, changes in the other organisational components are also necessary.