ABSTRACT

The factors influencing a municipal manager’s choice of approaches to coping with a disagreement with their city council are not completely understood. This research examines two contextual factors – issue criticality and the municipal manager’s informal power – that influence the decision to use four strategies: avoiding, obliging, asserting, and integrating. Results from a survey experiment suggest issue criticality is positively associated with the integrating approach and negatively related to the obliging approach. Moreover, the municipal manager’s informal power encourages the use of the asserting style while suppressing the possibility of using the avoiding or the obliging modes.

摘要

影响市政管理者选择处理与市议会意见分歧的方法的因素尚不完全清楚。本研究考察了两个背景因素——问题的关键性和市政管理者的非正式权力——这两个因素会影响使用四种策略的决定：避免、义务、断言和整合。一项调查实验的结果表明，问题的关键性与整合方法正相关，与乐于助人的方法负相关。此外，市政管理者的非正式权力鼓励使用断言风格，同时抑制使用回避或义务模式的可能性。