نشریه مطالعات مدیریت دولتی ایران
سال چهارم شماره 3 (پیاپی 13، پاییز 1400)

The complexity of public issues, the diversity of policy-making circles, and the cognitive limitations and intellectual capabilities prevents governments from policy-making in the context of rationality. When policy issues occur, governments are strongly inclined to adopt feigned policies. Policy traps are formed when complex policy issues arise and then suddenly, crises, or fiery storms of the media pressure arise. “Feigened policies” is a term that the author first used in 2016 and is similar to what McConnell referred to in 2019 as “placebo polices”. In this issue, I want to talk about this phenomenon.

The period of the Covid 19 virus pandemic in the world is the time to test the quality of facing the crisis in countries. Accordingly, in all countries, including Iran, the leadership of governance, management and field operations in the face of this crisis have been the responsibility of the public sector, because the philosophy of this sector is to protect citizens from emergencies, disasters and all kinds of natural and unnatural disasters. Therefore, public organizations in any country play an important role in the crisis management process, and in this regard, the responsibility for such a serious matter lies with the human resources of the organizations. Government executives have adopted a number of strategies to improve the resilience of their employees in the Covid period. Although several studies have been conducted on this phenomenon, so far the strategies of managers to strengthen the resilience of employees in the public sector in the face of Covid 19 have not been studied. The purpose of this study is to fill such a gap in employee resilience knowledge. The data of this qualitative research are extracted from semi-structured interviews and review of published documents and articles. This study employed the qualitative content analysis methodology to analyze the data. The findings of this study have divided the strategies of managers in public sector into three categories of hardware, software and personnel, in which strategic and operational actions have been presented. The findings of this study can have important practical and theoretical implications for policy makers and managers on the one hand, and human resources thinkers and researchers on the other.

In the last decade, team leadership as a scientific area has had significant progress. Therefore, creating a short form of team leadership measurement tool can facilitate studies in this area. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to design and validate a short team leadership measurement tool. The research used a mixed-consecutive exploratory methodology; qualitative-quantitative. In qualitative phase, the focus group method was used. The research population was all experts in the field of leadership and team, who were selected by judgmental purposive sampling method. Twenty nine experts in the field of leadership and team were selected. The research tools in the qualitative phase were structured interviews and expert survey forms. To analyze the data, item analysis method, content validity ratio and peer review were used. In the quantitative phase, correlation method was used. The study population was all secondary school teachers in Kurdistan province. A sample of 346 teachers was selected by stratified random sampling method based on Cochran's formula. The short form of the team leadership measurement tool in the qualitative phase was used to collect data. For data analysis, exploratory factor analysis and second-order confirmatory factor analysis techniques and Cronbach's alpha coefficient were used by SPSS25 and LISREL10.30 software. Findings show that the short form of the team leadership measurement tool with two transitional and action function, with fifteen items in the qualitative and quantitative phases,  had good validity and reliability. The contribution of this study is to provide a standard tool designed from a mixed study that can be utilized to measure team leadership.

Energy policy-making is considered the most important areas affecting the country's development. It plays an important role in strengthening national incomes and improving the country's governance system. In this study, we will seek to identify the future scenarios of provincial gas companies in Iran by focusing on the case of Tehran Gas Company. The research method is based on scenario writing using global business network methodology, which relies on identifying institutional actors, drivers, uncertainties and drawing future scenarios. After scanning the environment, in order to monitor the propulsions and uncertainties, reliable sources and reports of research and strategic institutes in the field of energy and gas were utilized. Moreover, relying on the company managers and experts’ participation in future workshops and also employing MicMac software, two key uncertainties of “energy governance arrangements in Iran” and “international interaction condition” were identified, and based on these uncertainties, four scenarios of Homay Saadat, Siah Zaghparan, Ghoghnoos Tanha, and Simorgh Darmangar were designed. Finally, in accordance with the scenarios, some strategies for the future of the provincial gas companies of Iran have been proposed based on the case of Tehran Gas Company.

Citizen science refers to the participation of people with scientists, researchers, and policy makers to provide solutions for problems in society, and its successful implementation requires public cooperation in the public issues. The participation of a large group of people with different backgrounds and interests may result in moral problems. The purpose of this study is to identify the ethical challenges in the participatory approach of citizen science with respect to different Performers, actors and stakeholders, and to provide solutions for them. In this regard, first, reviewing the existing literature on ethics in citizen science and crowdsourcing, ethical issues that should be considered have been identified. Then, employing Soft Systems Methodology, the problem was structured, and accordingly, some implications based on the conditions and situation of the problem were proposed. The statistical population of the study was eleven expert including four academic experts with a background in the field of participatory projects and four experts with executive experience, as well as three lawyers. The findings of this study were based on the interpretation of interviews with experts. According to the results, in order to overcome the challenges, there is a need for changes in the ethical system of citizen science participatory projects. These changes include, scrutinizing the enacting process and implementation of laws, strengthening the infrastructure, direct and continuous monitoring of the implementation process, providing participation conditions for all volunteers, compensation of services in accordance with efforts and skills of participants, training of volunteers, process transparency and interact with participants, set standards, and share authorized information with the community at the appropriate time.

This study aims to answer the key question “What are the characteristics of effective governance from the perspective of Nizam al-Mulk, Ghazali and Machiavelli?” In order to find the answer to this question and to understand what similarities and differences are in effective governance from the point of view of these thinkers, their most important works in governance, namely Siyasatnama, Nasihat ol Molouk, and The Prince were studied. Using the comparative-research methodology based on a variable-based descriptive approach and the application of content analysis technique, the data were organized in the form of two main themes (individual characteristics and managerial approaches). Considering the prevailing notion of each source and network of themes, and paying attention to the intellectual system of each of the thinkers, the Nizam-al-Mulk’s desirable style of governance coined “Moderate Governance” which refers to the world, the hereafter, ethics, and politics in the same way and with balanced look. Examining al-Ghazali's set of concerns, his style may be called "Pious Governance", which emphasizes the transcendent traits and attitudes based on the hereafter and mystical view. The Machiavelli's favorable style of governing can be described as “Destructive or Poisonous Governance”.

Corruption is a nasty economic, political, and cultural phenomenon that has many consequences in developed and developing countries. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate the moderating role of quality of bureaucracy in the relationship between government size and corruption in developing countries. Using an unbalanced panel data approach, the study examined the impact of government size on corruption in 118 developing countries from 2003 to 2017, given the moderating role of bureaucracy. Moreover, the variables of economic freedom and the percentage of the population under 15 years of age were used as control variables. The results of model estimation showed that the government size has a negative and significant impact on the corruption perception index score, which means that by increasing each unit of the government size, the corruption perception index score decreases  by 0.382. As well, the quality of bureaucracy has a positive and significant impact on corruption perception, which means that by increasing one unit of the quality of bureaucracy, corruption perception index score increases by 0.782. Finally, the quality of bureaucracy, as a moderating variable in the relationship between government size and corruption, has a positive and significant impact. Therefore, in order to reduce corruption in the developing government, the size of the government must be reduced and the quality of the bureaucracy must be improved.

Today, due to the declining trend of public welfare in the country, it is important to the government, especially the Ministry of Cooperatives, Labor and Social Welfare, as the responsible body of public welfare, to implement appropriate strategies and programs. Therefore, the aim of this study is to design a public welfare model based on good governance in the Ministry of Cooperatives, Labor and Social Welfare. This study is applied, developmental in terms of purpose and is considered a descriptive-survey in terms of implementation method. In the qualitative stage, the theme analysis methodology was used and in the quantitative stage, the structural equation modeling was employed. In the qualitative stage, in order to design a framework, 20 academic and executive experts were interviewed who were purposefully selected. Based on the findings, 5 dimensions of economic, cultural, health, social, and happiness were identified for public welfare. As well, 9 strategies, based on good governance to promote public welfare, were identified to be implemented by Ministry of Cooperatives, Labor and Social Welfare. In the quantitative stage, to validate the research model, 216 managers and specialists in the Ministry of Cooperatives, Labor and Social Welfare were surveyed with a questionnaire, for which the Cochran's formula was used and the random sampling method was employed. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling. The findings confirmed the components of the research model. Moreover, the results showed that the Ministry of Cooperatives, Labor and Social Welfare can improve public welfare in various dimensions of the model using strategies based on good governance.

Job crafting has been one of the constant concerns of human resource managers in organizations. Job crafting is a new approach in which employees are actively changing their career boundaries. The purpose of this study is to assess the job crafting of employees of public banks in Bushehr. This research is applied in terms of purpose and in terms of data collection method is survey type and used structural equation modeling. The statistical population of the study is the employees of public banks in Bushehr. According to Cochran's table, 230 questionnaires were analyzed. In order to measure the variable of job crafting, the 21-item questionnaire of Thames et al. was used. The validity of the questionnaire was evaluated in terms of form, content and structure and its reliability was calculated 96% by experimental implementation and Cronbach's alpha coefficient. The results show that from the perspective of employees of public banks in Bushehr, the component of increasing job social resources, the component of reducing the barriers to job demand, the component of increasing structural job resources and finally the component of increasing job challenge demands had the most impact on job crafting.