You’re Fired!

Abstract

American counties are emerging as leaders in local governance. As such, they are being called on to provide a wide array of new services to an ever-growing population. County managers acting as top-level administrators are known to play a critical role in the provision of these services. County managers, however, are affected by a multitude of factors that contribute to abridged tenures; a scenario that can have harmful effects on organizational performance. Identifying and understanding these factors, and the negative consequences they have on county managers, can benefit both practitioners and scholars. Past research on local government administrator turnover broadly categorizes factors that affect shortened tenures of administrators into two areas. The first, push-induced factors, generally consists of organizational or community characteristics that precipitate an elected board to dismiss the administrator, or encourage him to seek employment elsewhere. The second, pull-induced factors, refers to conditions that facilitate administrator’s departure due to career advancement. This study focuses on push-induced factors and their effect on county manager turnover. Data was collected from large American counties—populations greater than 500,000—functioning with a council-manager form of government over an 18-year period (1992-2009). The analysis reveals that measures of political conflict precipitate push-induced county manager turnover. Increases in measures of fiscal stress—although significant—provided somewhat conflicting results. Measures of jurisdictional adversity, that is, a county’s unemployment and poverty rate, were found to have no significant impact on involuntary county manager departures.