PROGRAM CHANGE AND BUREAUCRACY.

It is frequently asserted that bureaucracy impedes change and discourages innovation. But bureaucracy is a multifaceted form of organization. The extent to which it facilitates consideration by insuring reliability and predictability of behavior is commendable. It was hypothesized that the rate of program change would be positively related to degree of complexity and job satisfaction, and negatively related to degree of centralization and formalization. It would appear, therefore, that the agencies with the highest level of expertise, the greatest amount of decentralized decision making, and the greatest flexibility in job assignments were the most amenable to program change. Hierarchical control, usually regarded as a major characteristic of bureaucracy, bore little relation to the agency's capacity to change (-.09). It might be argued that some of these criteria could be interdependent, thereby rendering the above correlation coefficient unreliable. To correct for this possibility, the authors calculated the partial correlation coefficient of each. That is, they determined the correlation between each criterion and program change when the other six criteria were controlled.