The Independent Regulatory Agency(IRA) is an institute that achieves organizational performance more effectively through autonomy. It has been said that autonomy, not political control, is important in management of the IRA. From this point, I suggest...
The Independent Regulatory Agency(IRA) is an institute that achieves organizational performance more effectively through autonomy. It has been said that autonomy, not political control, is important in management of the IRA. From this point, I suggest the question that why is autonomy of IRA important? To answer about this question, I study the relationship between autonomy and the organizational performance of the IRA in my research.
I analyze the autonomy of the IRA, especially the Fair Trade Commission in three steps; I conceptualize the definition of autonomy of the IRA, measure the level of autonomy and analyze the influence of autonomy on organizational performance in IRA. At the same time, I analyze the impact of political control during the growth of the Fair Trade Commission.
At first, from the review of the contemporary research, I define autonomy as a concept with three components, decision-making competencies, exemption of outside control and influence on other organizations. The Decision-making competencies are the IRA's ability to make decisions about managing the organization and choose policy tools independently. Exemption of outside control means that the IRA is insulated from interception when using the decision-making competencies. Influence on other organizations means that the IRA impacts other organizations (especially elected principals like the president and assembly, minister of central government and so on) to achieve organizational performance.
The analysis result suggests three conclusions.
First, autonomy is important for the organizational performance achievement of the Fair Trade Commission in part. From the correlation analysis and regression analysis, autonomy influenced the performance of the Fair Trade Commission when the number of item determined in committee operation and the number of case processing (for example reference to prosecutor's office, corrective order, corrective recommendation, request for correction, warning etc) are variables of performance. However the autonomy doesn't impact the industrial concentration.
Second, in the component of Autonomy, only exemption of outside controls and influence on other organizations have causal relationship with the performance. However the decision-making competencies don't have any relationship with performance. Also, autonomy in the process has a causal relation with the performance. From this result, I suggest that more focus on exemption of outside controls, influence on other organization and autonomy in the process, rather than the decision-making competencies and autonomy in input stage, are needed to increase the performance of IRA. Especially, influence on other organizations is important when the government establishes an independent agency in the situation of a government driven economy development like Korea.
Lastly, the relationship between the IRA and political principals is a mutual adaptation(Krause, 1996). Therefore in the relationship between IRA and political principals, both the influence of political control and the autonomy of the IRA are important. On one side, political control has a lot of positive influence on the FTC. For example, in 1990, when the FTC became the IRA, the assembly was a decisive driving leader. Also in 1996, when the FTC became the main executive ministry department, the will of president Kim Young Sam was decisive. But the other hand, political control has a negative influence on the FTC, especially when the control of the president invades the autonomy of the FTC in diverse dimensions.
To conclude, autonomy is important to the performance of the IRA. Of all the components of autonomy, exemption of outside controls, influence on other organizations and autonomy in process should be emphasized.
Key Word : Autonomy, Political Control, Independent Regulatory Agency. Organizational Performance.