Managerial Strategies and Behavior in Networks: A Model with Evidence from U.S. Public Education

This manuscript provides the first systematic test of a formal theory of managing government programs in a network context (see O’Toole and Meier 1999). Using data from several hundred school districts in Texas, we create a measure of network management that reflects the time school superintendents interact with several sets of significant actors in the environment. We find that network management is not only related to overall organizationalit has positive impacts even in the presence of a lagged dependent variable. Further, management appears to interact with other organizational resources in a nonlinear manner to further augment organizational performance. Although public school networks are not as complicated or as populated as those of many other public organizations, the findings suggest how management might matter in these other networks.