Friday, December 23, 2005

Why "Turf Wars" in Bureaucracy?

The Post continues its series on the DHS reorganization with todays article--Brown's Turf Wars Sapped FEMA's Strength.

It's full of discussion of the infighting among FEMA's Brown, Secretary Ridge and staff, and the White House. But the authors take for granted that turf wars are natural. Are they?

Reorganizations of big bureaucracies create major uncertainty and stress throughout the organization. It's possible that a reorg will change your boss, give you different duties, redo communication channels, change the prestige of your agency, or do away with your job. So your attention becomes focused on such issues and not on what you're supposed to be doing. By definition a reorg results in a scarcity of information--whatever decisions are being made at the top trickle down to the bottom. With no authoritative information, any information becomes valuable and passes on more quickly than ever before. But the increased speed of circulation increases the difficulty of separating good from bad information, so that increases your stress.

I assume the truth of the idea that people often react to stress defensively. So the first reaction to plans is: "change is bad". That changes the position of the head of the agency, like Michael Brown. Where in normal times an agency head has to make tough decisions, favoring one part of the agency against another, saying: "no" to the pet ideas of his/her subordinates, during times of reorganization things change. There's less happening within the agency. And the boss can get brownie points with her subordinates by fighting vigorously on behalf of the agency against the ill-informed plans of outsiders. In international affairs it's a familiar situation--unify the nation by picking a fight with someone else. (Lincoln's Secretary of State proposed the tactic to avoid the Civil War--pick a fight with Britain that would unify South and North.)

So turf wars are natural, if not rational.

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