We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Do White House Chiefs of Staff "manage up"?
- Authors
Beckmann, Matthew N.
- Abstract
The White House Chief of Staff (COS) has become the modern presidency's organizational lynchpin, the position tasked with helping presidents "faithfully execute the Office of President." Extending a rich literature about how chiefs manage White House staffers, we consider the other side of the coin: can a COS manage the president? We begin theoretically, sketching three mechanisms—offloading, streamlining, and steering—by which a COS could shape presidents' basic workways. We test resulting hypotheses against original data on presidents' daily work behaviors from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush—a total spanning 48 years, nine presidencies, and 21 Chiefs of Staff (plus one sustained vacancy). Surprisingly, we find little evidence that Chiefs of Staff affected the duration, density, or composition of their president's workday. When it comes to the basic contours of presidential workways, it appears Chiefs of Staff do less "managing up" and more "managing around."
- Subjects
WHITE House (Washington, D.C.); WHITE House staff; KENNEDY, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963; BUSH, George W. (George Walker), 1946-; UNITED States. Executive Office of the President; JOB performance
- Publication
Presidential Studies Quarterly, 2024, Vol 54, Issue 2, p199
- ISSN
0360-4918
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/psq.12873