Suchergebnisse

Municipal policy leadership is shared between managers, city councilors, and mayors, all of whom vary in institutional power and resources across municipalities. Corresponding with their importance, scholars have established consistent measures of professionalism for Mayors and City Managers. Unfortunately, there is no parallel measure of professionalism for city councils. After reviewing the role of councils in local policy leadership and establishing the need for a systematic measure of local legislative professionalism, this paper uses data from over 4,000 municipalities to develop a measure of legislative professionalism for city councils. We demonstrate that considerable variation exists in levels of professionalism among local legislatures and describe the implications of this variation for questions of municipal policy leadership and local legislative representation.

The quality of the relationships between volunteers and paid staff can have far‐reaching consequences for organizations that utilize volunteer programs to support service delivery. We utilize a mixed methods case study design to explore volunteer and staff perceptions of their mutual interactions within a large library system in the southeastern United States. We consider which areas of these interactions might be vulnerable to conflict. Our findings suggest that conflict is likely to arise due to communication problems, behavioral or attitudinal issues, perceptions of job vulnerability, divergent expectations, lack of trust, and workflow integration hurdles. We argue that to avoid these tensions and promote effective service delivery, staff members must have appropriate training and preparation to interact successfully with volunteers.

Although a voluminous literature addresses organizational change, employee stress, and organizational behavior, we have little understanding of employees' responses to being assigned the role and responsibilities of a volunteer manager. Because many public and nonprofit organizations seek to incorporate more volunteers—especially during times of fiscal stress—employees' responses to an influx of volunteers and additional volunteer management responsibilities can affect organizational performance. We use data from a case study at a large public library system to illustrate how role theory helps advance our understanding of these responsibilities in a human resource context. Our findings suggest that role perceptions, expectations, and conflict all inform the effectiveness and dynamics of managing important unpaid human resources: volunteers. We discuss the organizational implications of inadvertent volunteer managers—employees assigned to the volunteer manager role without prior training and experience.