The Unbureaucratic Personality

Abstract

After sixty years of scholarship on the rule-bound bureaucratic personality, this article turns attention to the unbureaucratic personality. Identified by a willingness to bend rules, the unbureaucratic personality is thought to be influenced by individual and workplace attributes, each which shed light on the nature of rule-bending. Individual attributes investigated include nonconformity, risk propensity, and public service commitment, all expected to stimulate the unbureaucratic personality. Workplace attributes include formalization and centralization, which are expected to suppress the unbureaucratic personality, and red tape, which is expected to trigger it. These hypotheses are tested using mail survey data collected from employees of four cities in a Midwestern state. The results of ordered probit modeling of the data suggest that nonconformity and risk taking increase the unbureaucratic personality, as do red tape and centralized workplaces. By contrast, the unbureaucratic personality appears to be lowered by public service commitment and workplace formalization. The implications of these results for the normative aspects of rule-bending are discussed.