The competing values approach to organizational effectiveness: A tool for agency administrators

Contemporary social work administrators Junction in a turbulent environment in which escalating costs of delivering services are coupled with diminished resources. This often requires them to make trade‐offs between efficiency and effectiveness, as well as among different effectiveness criteria. These criteria, however, are often not explicit. Furthermore, the question of effectiveness from whose perspective is seldom explicitly addressed. This paper describes a framework of organizational effectiveness, called the Competing Values Approach, that is useful both in assessing organizational effectiveness and in addressing the multiple constituency issue. An application of this framework to a longitudinal assessment of organizational effectiveness is examined.