When line meets agile in public service organizations: Exploring the role of felt accountability amongst line managers

2.1Agile government and the impetus for agile practices in public service organizations

Public service organizations around the world are under increasing pressure to provide citizen services in a faster and a more personalized manner prompting adoption of agile methodology prescriptions initially implemented and popularized by its benefits in IT environments (BCG, 2019). Mergel et al. (2018) describe agile government in administrative parlance as “responding to changing public needs in an efficient way”. More recently, Agile government has been described as “a form of governance innovation consisting of organization-specific mixes of cultural, structural, and procedural adaptations geared towards making public organizations more flexible in changing environments, ultimately pursuing the goal of increasing efficiency, effectiveness, and user satisfaction” (Neumann et al., Forthcoming). This view of agile governance necessitates examination of the organizational structure choices that PSOs make with the goal of striving for increased efficiency relating to their provisioning of citizen services.

Governments around the world rely on public service organizations to deliver a variety of direct and indirect citizen services. As governments fully or partially own these enterprises, PSOs are an important area of enquiry for understanding the implementation of agile practices, as in many industries and sectors such as electricity, transport, postage and telecommunications they are the key national players (Florio, 2014).

2.2Partial introduction of agile units in largely hierarchical and line based PSOs

Agile organizational designs seem quite effective and intuitive by their promise of greater customer responsiveness and flexibility, and have prompted enterprises to adapt how they introduce agile and its variants internally (Gerster et al., 2020). However, implementation challenges of agile approaches and organizing principles in the public sector are in abundance, given the preference for hierarchical organizing, idiosyncratic leadership styles and complex partner relationships (Nuottila et al., 2022). Given these obstacles, past research has shown that implementation of organization wide agile transformations is often difficult (Wisitpongphan & Khampachua, 2016), and public sector organizations have experimented with introduction of agile ways of working mostly partially, and typically in their IT departments (Ylinen, 2021) to respond to citizen calls for more responsive and agile public services (Janssen & Van der Voort, 2016).

A possible remedy to the task of a complete overhaul of the organizational structure from hierarchy to flatness has been suggested with the adoption of a “dual structure organization” (Kotter, 2014) harnessing both “network” and the “hierarchy” and promising to combine benefits of hierarchy and the agility of flatness. McBride et al. (2022) argue that in Agile government, both structure and agility are dual necessities. This may provide a possible explanation as to why public service organizations embrace these line-agile unit combinations.

In public sector contexts, hierarchy provides stability and accountability for the enterprise, while parallel agile arrangements allows for entrepreneurialism, innovation and citizen centricity to flourish without being bogged down with rules, standard operating procedures and strict routines which are often lamented and said to plague contemporary PSOs (Baxter et al., 2023). This dual structure is possibly pursued so that the non-agile units provide guardrails of accountability necessary for a large, complex organization, while the agile units provide freedom of innovation that public sector organizations aspire for.

The choice of parallel maintenance of agile and (hierarchically organized) line units is a form of hybrid organization design which although prevalent in private enterprises is not a widely studied structural form in public administration scholarship. However, scholars in the adjacent field of strategy have examined such structural arrangements through the concepts of dual operating structures (Kotter, 2014) bimodal organization (Haffke et al., 2017) ambidexterity (O’Reilly & Tushman, 2013), exploration-exploitation (March, 1991), hybrid organizations (Battilana & Dorado, 2017) and matrix and project organizations (Ford & Randolph, 1992).

Accountability concerns in traditionally organized PSOs which are addressed by virtue of vertical orientation of hierarchical relationships are potentially exacerbated in agile forms of organizing and work arrangements. This is not surprising since the problem of accountability in agile set-ups is not new and has been documented in earlier academic research (Sharp & Taylor, 2020). Agile team members are often perplexed with issues of accountability and expect it to be “automatically” resolved and ensured through self-organized interactions but are left wanting. To remediate this, past research has predominantly focussed on developing accountability architectures within the agile units in the private sector contexts (Ross et al., 2019). However, as public organizations are not operating with a pure play, fully agile design, especially at scale, questions of maintaining internal accountability in structures combining agility and hierarchy assume even greater importance.

2.3Evolving role of line managers in agile governance transformations

In the public sector, line managers implementing agile governance efforts by interacting with agile units are paradoxically faced with the challenge of managing teams which should be autonomous and yet accountable. This renders the role of line managers even more crucial.

The opportunities and challenges presented by the role and response of line managers in public sector environments has gained increased scrutiny as their adoption, support and acceptance of agile mindsets and practices is considered to be crucial to the success of agile governance initiatives (Mergel, 2023). The perception of line managers towards introduction of agile methods and organizing remains an empirical puzzle and is central to understanding why they may support or undermine success of agile governance programmes.

The specific dynamics of line managers’ interaction with their agile unit counterparts has also gained increased prominence in recent academic studies and have shown that even though middle level line managers are charged with facilitating agile implementation, they struggle to make sense of the change themselves and experience intense confusion (Annosi et al., 2020). Further, the evolution of line managers’ roles in their interactions with agile unit counterparts has been found to be quite important to success of agile transformation efforts (Annosi & Lanzolla, 2023).

Within this backdrop, line managers operating in dense webs of accountability are faced with the difficult challenge of providing both the necessary freedom to their associated agile units, but also erect necessary scaffolding to ensure requisite accountability.

2.4Felt accountability amongst line managers in public service organizations

Accountability is generally defined as a “communicative interaction between an agent with a responsibility for some actions and decisions and an audience or accountability forum, demanding accountability and equipped with the ability to correct and punish the agent” (Bovens, 2007). Given the high expectation of accountability in the public sector (Schillemans, 2016), PSOs delivering citizen services operate in an “dense web of accountability” (Page, 2006) and are held to account at a number of forums to both justify their decisions, work and performance (Bovens et al., 2014).

Although accountability remains a well-researched topic in public administration scholarship, Overman and Schillemans (2022) have highlighted that empirical research within governance and policy domains has overwhelmingly focussed on the macro-organizational level, and that empirical insights are required to understand micro level actions and behaviours of managers or organizational actors to unravel how accountability mechanisms aggregate at the organizational level.

A possible way to understand accountability at the individual level – that of managers in the public sector, is through the concept of ‘Felt Accountability’ which has recently received increased attention and has been extended to public administration scholarship (Overman & Schillemans, 2022). Felt accountability has been defined as “an implicit or explicit expectation that one’s decisions or actions will be subject to evaluation by some salient audience(s) with the belief that there exists the potential for one to receive either rewards or sanctions based on this expected evaluation” (Hall & Ferris, 2011).

The advantage of viewing accountability through the lens of felt accountability amongst line managers during the course of adoption of agile practices in PSOs is that the focus of accountability considerations moves from the organizational to the individual level – an area of enquiry which is understudied in the current public administration and agile government scholarship. Han and Perry (2020) have suggested that accountability is a “state of mind” rather than a “state of affairs” for managers in the public sector. So, understanding the unfolding of felt accountability amongst managers operating at the interface of line-agile unit combinations presents itself as an especially interesting avenue for empirical explorative research and helps enrich understanding of accountability challenges in agile implementation (Burga et al., 2022).

Staying accountable and attending to accountability expectations is a major time commitment for managers in public service organizations as they typically spend 20–40 per cent of their time on administrative matters related to accountability (Li, 2023). So, it is likely that they will be spending an even greater proportion of their time on accountability maintenance in these line-agile structural forms where accountability is not mantained through vertical hierarchical relationships between line managers and their agile counterparts.

Moreover, managers consider accountability as a pervasive contingency in their professional lives and part of their professional identity (Schillemans, 2016). This especially presents line managers as an appropriate unit of analysis for understanding accountability challenges at the interface of agile and non-agile units.

3.1Research setting and relevance of the case to the research question

Empirically, this qualitative interpretive case study (Walsham, 1995) is based and drawn from the IT function of a large state owned Nordic postal service organization with more than 27000 employees. The case organization is a PSO and has been in the postal business for many decades and has witnessed multiple rounds of mergers and acquisitions. The organization fulfils the definition of a public enterprise as defined by Florio (2014) as it is fully owned by two national governments and internalizes a public mission of ensuring postal connectivity even in sparsely populated areas with inadequate business case. The organization has a public service logic and shoulders a universal postal service obligation in two of the countries that it operates in within the Nordics and is subject to policies enshrined in the state ownership policy of one of the national governments which directly owns it.

The organization’s activities are divided into two areas: parcel and logistics services (eCommerce and Logistics) and digital and physical communication (Communication Services). The organization by virtue of its complete state ownership and universal public service obligation faces the twin challenge of ensuring reliability in services and delivering on national promises of citizen centricity.

Faced with the dominant megatrends in the postal and logistics industry of digitalization and sustainability, the IT department of the case organization has been faced with increasing internal and external stakeholder demands for quicker, more citizen centric and innovative IT offerings. This has to an extent been driven by the need for various business functions to optimize operations, dynamically plan and price offerings and arranging real time delivery information to citizens. This has necessitated the organization to dabble into adoption of advanced analytics and development of custom in house IT applications for use by other business areas.

The IT department in the organization is quite large with more than 1000 employees and had over the years, given the nationally strategic nature of the sector, not least universal postal service responsibilities, prioritized reliability over agility. However, evolving citizen expectations and the way competitors were organizing themselves, coupled with the imperative to stay competitive, necessitated the IT department to embrace agile ways of working and organizing to become more effective in meeting internal customer and external citizen requirements. At the same time, the organization didn’t want to tweak with a well-functioning organizational arrangement which was based on hierarchy and was grounded in the waterfall approach to software development and IT operations.

Given this particular situation, the organization decided to embark on an agile transformation journey which picked pace in 2019 and focussed on developing software utilizing “agile methodologies” and having an “agile organization” for software development which was structurally separated from other parts of the IT function where reliability was a higher priority, and where interdependencies amongst units was high. The pre and post agile transformation structure is given in Figs 1 and 2.

Figure 1.

Pre-transformation hierarchical structure of the IT function. Legend: The solid lines in the figure depict formal reporting relationships in the hierarchical non-agile arrangement. The organizational structure is hierarchical with clear cascading lines of responsibility and ensuing accountability.

Figure 2.

Post transformation combination of agile and non agile units in the IT function. The dual structure organization has hierarchy on one side and flat agile teams on the other. In the new set-up, reporting relationships of agile team members (engineers, testers etc,) are to line managers. The Agile coaches and masters of ceremonies (scrum masters, product owners) report to the central Agile Office. The IT Maintenance function continues to be organized in a non-agile manner for stability considerations. Legend: The solid lines in the figure depict formal reporting relationships between agile teams and associated Line Manager. The POs and SMs report to the Project Managers in the agile organization. PO: Product Owner. SM: Scrum Master. E: Engineer. T: Tester.

This case was selected and considered to be appropriate to explore our research question to explore how line managers situated in hierarchical non-agile units maintain accountability in agile units because the case organization presented a unique opportunity to explore proliferation of agile governance in a public service organization with a clear citizen service mandate and having non-agile units existing parallelly to agile work units. The case organization afforded the opportunity to explore and understand through the lens of felt accountability as to how line managers reconcile their interactions with perceptibly ‘less accountable’ counterparts in agile units in a public service organization context.

3.2Data collection

The data for the study was collected during multiple rounds of interviews in fall 2022 and early 2023. Given our interest in exploring accountability challenges at the interface of agile and non-agile units, we conducted in-depth interviews with members of the IT leadership team in the case organization to understand the public sector character, business model, organization design and set-up, internal governance and accountability routines. We initiated the data collection process by relying on analysis of internal organizational documents and free flowing conversations with the key IT department leadership team members to identify successes and challenges surrounding the implementation of a dual organization structure combining agile and non-agile units. The focus of these initial exploratory discussions and interviews was on gaining a comprehensive understanding of the organizational context, strategy, devolution of key work tasks and its allocation across line and agile units.

Subsequently, our emerging interpretation and understanding of the organization was refined and validated through a corroborative interview session with the entire group IT leadership team. In collaboration with the IT leadership team, relevant employees and internal stakeholders were identified for further interviews based upon their knowledge and placement in the organizational hierarchy with almost an equal split of informants across line and agile units. A total of 19 interviewees were initially identified, while 17 interviewees participated in the second phase of interviews. The details of informants are presented in Table 1. The informants represent those who shouldered both line and agile responsibilities to ensure that the voices, concerns and viewpoints of employees across the line-agile divide were equally represented to gain a complete and comprehensive picture of perspectives relating to accountability challenges and concerns.

The interviewees included both the upper and the middle management functionaries, as well as Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) agile role holders such as scrum masters, testers, product owners and product managers. We applied several measures such as rapport building, guarantee of anonymity and confidentiality, avoiding judgemental comments and inviting additional comments when the recording was stopped. The one-to-one interviews which lasted on an average more than 60 minutes each were recorded and the IT leadership team in the case organization was not made privy to individual responses. The data management plan for the project was registered and approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research data and best practices for protection of personal data were observed in line with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements. The interviews were transcribed and resulted in more than 700 pages of written data.

3.3Data analysis

To analyse the collected data, we relied upon established techniques (Gioia et al., 2013) of developing a data structure based upon first order codes, second order themes and aggregate dimensions. The application of Gioia method to analyse our data is appropriate as epistemologically it is interpretive, suits single case study research designs, and allows for maximizing revelatory potential, richness and trustworthiness of data. The data structure so developed is presented in Fig. 3.

Figure 3.

Data structure and coding scheme.

The recorded interviews and transcripts were systematically analysed to identify dominant themes, keywords and patterns to make sense of the accountability challenges and role of managers using a data driven approach (Walsham, 2006). We analysed the interview data inductively to identify the accountability challenges of ‘non-overlapping goals’ and ‘role and responsibility confusion’ amongst the agile and non-agile unit functionaries. Power quotes have been extensively used to present systematic claims (Rockmann & Vough, 2023). Further we inductively analysed the interviews of line managers in non-agile units to understand their experiences of felt accountability and drawing meaningful claims (Langley & Meziani, 2020). Finally, by iterating between the case data and theory we arrived at our findings.

4.1Architectural structure of the IT department – move from hierarchy to a line-agile structure

As a starting point, we wanted to understand the reasoning and motivation of the PSO for transitioning from a purely hierarchical to a partially agile organization. The Head of IT Architecture and Strategy described the current organizational choice as that being that of:

We found that the choice of this dual operating structure was driven to an extent as the agile way of organizing and working promised to provide the organization with the ability to become quicker in IT delivery, allow for on-the-go specification development and customizations as per internal customer needs and help realize the organizational strategy to be a winner in the digital communications business while attending to the government’s push for niftier citizen experience in the postal business. At the same time, the need for stability and reliability was ensured through continued use of line managers situated in the organizational hierarchy.

The organization established an Agile transformation office to spearhead the new initiatives and ensure that the newly created agile organization was adhering to and embracing agile practices, ceremonies and ways of working. Given that there were more than 50 agile teams operating at the same time it was considered prudent to adopt the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) to manage both the scaling and the coordination challenge that emerged.

The adoption of SAFe suggested that the organizational IT leadership already had an inkling that given the scale of their operations, legacy work practices and culture, along with diverse stakeholder requirements, they required a systematic framework to ensure accountability.

4.2Emergence of accountability rupturing forces in line-agile unit combinations

4.3Line managers propelled by felt accountability to forge workable compromises for repairing, restoring and remediating ruptured internal accountability

The emergence of disequilibrium in the internal accountability landscape underpinned by non-overlapping goals and unclear allocation of roles and responsibilities prompts line managers to feel a sense of accountability deficit, and metamorphize their role from that of traditional task allocators, to accountability “instillers” and “custodians”. In this new organizational set-up, the line managers interpret their roles to be that of accountability enforcers.

To a great extent the motivation for adoption of this new role by the line managers in our case organization is both due to the accountability pressures from senior leadership that they experience, but also due to their own strong perception of being accountable for the agile teams they are managing from the periphery. By virtue of working in the public sector, and their imprinted habits (Marquis & Tilcsik, 2013), they are more inclined to erect (missing) ladders of accountability which no longer exist between them and their agile counterparts to deliver on the accountability demands which haven’t disappeared due to the adoption of agile practices.

The line managers who had been used to working in a hierarchical structure, and still do, take it as their own responsibility to hold agile teams accountable, even though they are no longer controlling their day-to-day work. This inclination and propensity of line managers to enlarge their roles to become accountability custodians’ aids in the repair of the ruptured accountability brought about by parallel maintenance of agile and non-agile units. The reparative measures that they undertake are based upon “forging workable compromises” with their agile counterparts in absence of formal reporting or hierarchical relationships to bridge the accountability gaps.

The managers attempt to reconcile the differences in performance metrics and role confusion by trying to make the agile teams more amenable to accountability demands. Even though there is no formal reporting relationship between the agile coaches and the line managers, they remain tied to the teams through administrative reporting relationships with the team members (engineers, testers etc.).

As the line managers are still responsible and accountable for (human) resource allocation, deployment and development, they attempt to bridge the line-agile divide by surfacing questions and accountability concerns on measures such as team cohesion, cost etc. which escape the narrow focus of agile teams alone.

The line managers seem to appreciate that accountability seeking behaviours are best sustained by them being at the periphery of the agile teams and not within, as it allows the agile units to not perceive an encroachment on their ‘agile territory’.

The actions of the managers and their perceived sense of accountability prompts them to forge workable compromises with their agile counterparts. These compromises typically entail participation in agile routines and meetings, informally collaborating with agile coaches and product owners to align perspectives relating to budgetary controls, employee development, career progression and team cohesiveness. These actions of line managers resulting in closer collaboration with agile units are deemed to be workable compromises as they are not mandated by roles descriptions or structure, but by a sense of felt accountability.

Overall, our findings suggest that pursuit of agile governance through introduction of agile units alongside non-agile units in public sector context is a complex process and entails emergence of unanticipated accountability challenges relating to non-overlapping goals and role confusion. Moreover, in public sector contexts, the aspect of felt accountability amongst line managers in such structural configurations is underappreciated. Figure 4 graphically illustrates our findings.

Figure 4.

Felt accountability amongst line managers prompting them to metamorphize as accountability custodians and instillers in line-agile combinations in public service organizations.

Through the above analysis of the case organization, interviews with stakeholders on both sides of the line-agile divide, we have outlined how internal accountability gets ruptured owing to no longer being ensured by hierarchy and exacerbated by non-overlapping performance metrics and role confusion. The same is partially repaired by line managers who acts as accountability custodians and operate at the periphery of agile teams to restore the same by means of forging workable compromises with their agile counterparts. Their primary motivation for assuming this role is because of “feeling” accountable and is in line with the theory of felt accountability in public administration.

Our analysis suggests that public service organizations having a dual operating model (line units interacting with agile units) when undergoing an agile transformation underestimate the role of imprinted felt accountability amongst line managers and their consequent adoption of the role of accountability custodians. The overlooked felt accountability amongst line managers in agile and non-agile unit combinations helps address a shortcoming of agile governance which assumes inherent and automatic accountability maintenance.