City Managers Under Fire: How Conflict Leads to Turnover

Abstract: To evaluate the influence of turnover among city management professionals, data were gathered and analyzed in a study that followed the careers of 133 city managers in Florida since 1986. In contrast to previous studies, conflict was found to be a frequent cause of turnover among those city managers who left their positions during the study period. The type of conflict involved made a difference. Situations involving policy or style disagreements between a manager and the city council were more likely to cause turnover than conflictual conditions emerging from disagreement among council factions. However, other factors, such as electoral changes in council composition and opposition by a popularly elected mayor, were found meaningful. More concern for conflict and conflict-management skills among city management professionals and educators may help solve areas of conflict. Abstract: The council-manager form of local government is supposed to reduce conflict in city governance and increase cooperation between the executive and the legislature. Because the city council is responsible for hiring and firing the city manager, as James Svara puts it, "there is no question about who has ultimate authority, and thus there are few battles to protect prerogatives" (1990, p. 54). The council's clear authority over the executive they appoint also frees council members from the pressure to compete with an elected executive for public support. Chester Newland sums it up this way: "The great strength of council-manager government has been precisely in the combined presence of those two qualities: a powerful council, oriented to community brokerage, and a coordinated executive framework, characterized by diverse expertise and professionalism and free of narrow factionalism" (1985, p. 8). Nevertheless, conflict does occur in council-manager cities, and, as we will show, conflict has been a frequent cause of managerial turnover in at least one state's municipalities. These cases of conflict-generated turnover permit us to examine what ""went wrong" with the anticipated relationship between council and manager. More constructive management of conflict depends in part on a fuller understanding of the ways council members and managers generate and deal with conflicts