Wales Centre for Public Policy

Abstract This article analyses the economic, political, and institutional antecedents and performance effects of the adoption of shared Senior Management Teams (SMTs)—a management innovation (MI) that occurs when a team of senior managers oversees two or more public organizations. Findings from statistical analysis of 201 English local governments and interviews with organizational leaders reveal that shared SMTs are adopted to develop organizational capacity in resource‐challenged, politically risk‐averse governments, and in response to coercive and mimetic institutional pressures. Importantly, sharing SMTs may reduce rather than enhance efficiency and effectiveness due to redundancy costs and the political transaction costs associated with diverting resources away from a high‐performing partner to support their lower‐performing counterpart.

National governments are increasingly focusing on ‘place’ in attempts to tackle economic challenges. This puts pressure on regions to deliver productivity improvements. Drawing from stakeholder interviews, document analysis and secondary data analysis, this paper considers the productivity policy levers available to regional leaders. Three UK regions are compared in relation to four policy levers (nodality; authority; treasure; organization) and four drivers of productivity (investment and innovation; transport infrastructure; entrepreneurship and employment; skills). Despite differences, all three regions can be identified as ‘nodality institutions’, lacking the authority, treasure and organization to drive productivity improvements.

Our MissionThe Wales Centre for Public Policy provides ministers, senior policy makers and public service leaders with authoritative independent evidence and expertise which helps them to identify effective policy responses and practical solutions to some of the biggest policy challenges facing Wales.The Centre has worked on a wide range of policy challenges and is currently focusing in particular on developing fresh thinking about community wellbeing, the environment