Our basic model hypothesizes managerial influences on public organizational and program performance, when managers exert effort on external management as well as when they perform the standard internal functions that comprise managers' responsibilities. Chapter 3 has demonstrated that managers do operate externally – presumably to buffer against negative shocks, and also to exploit resources and opportunities in the organization's environment on behalf of the agency and its programs. Indeed, that chapter illustrated the nonlinear interaction of managerial networking with key resources for school districts. The chapter also showed that managerial efforts outward generate performance dividends, although these are not neutrally distributed to stakeholders; networking can have inequitable distributional consequences. Before we address the subject of internal management (Chapter 5), we need to revisit both managerial functions and introduce an aspect of internal and external management that is implied in the initial model but thus far not incorporated into the empirical analyses: the actual quality of management. We proceed to show that quality not only affects performance but links to managerial networking in interesting, nonlinear ways.

The “M” terms in the model obviously refer to managerial functions that have both a quantity, or degree of activity, aspect as well as a quality component. Our measure of managerial networking, introduced in the preceding chapter, obviously has advantages – including validity and reliability; but it lacks a “quality” component.