Bureaucratic Red Tape and Organizational Performance: Testing the Moderating Role of Culture and Political Support
Abstract
While targeting bureaucratic red tape is a component of most
real-world efforts to improve the effectiveness of government
agencies, academic work has not attempted to understand and develop
the implications of red tape for agency performance. This paper
builds upon developments in the performance management and red tape
literatures to propose and test a model of performance that
explicitly accounts for red tape. Our findings show that
bureaucratic red tape in human resource systems and information
systems impede performance. We also find that organizations with a
developmental culture (characterized by flexibility, readiness,
adaptability and growth) are better able to deal with negative
effects of red tape than organizations that lack these cultural
characteristics.