An Exploration of Inclusive Management Practices: Through the Lenses of Public Managers Jessica Lee Spencer-Gallucci ABSTRACT This study explores how public managers think about and understand the practices of inclusive management (IM) in the workplace. Specifically, the research explores the lived experiences and perceptions of public managers and their implementation of inclusive management practices. The federal government is among the largest employers in the United States. Past and present presidential administrations recognize the importance of employee inclusion, engagement, and performance management as the foundations for building and sustaining the 21st-century workforce. This dissertation explores the intersection of inclusive management and diversity management. Although inclusive management practices have evolved into diversity management programs, government organizations continue to contend with implementing complex, inclusive practices in the workplace. Executive Order 13583 (2011) established a coordinated government-wide initiative to promote diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce. Changes in inclusive legislation and policies in President Trump's 2019 Management Agenda and the Office of Personnel Management's Strategic Plan 2018–2022 may indicate a shift in diversity and inclusion priorities. The Strategic Plan directs the Office of Personnel Management to provide federal supervisors enhanced public management tools that allow success in the workplace. As in previous years, the 2019 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) identified areas of concern in the workplace. Respondents expressed concerns about how their agency evaluates job performance, processes, merit promotions, and respondents' ability to influence organizational practices. Respondents also were concerned the results of the survey will not improve workplace practices. This research explores the meaning and understanding of inclusive practices through the lenses of eight public managers. Although relying on eight interviews limits the study's generalizability, closely focusing and reflecting on a handful of distinctive voices, this study enabled a greater sensitivity to the lived experiences described by study respondents. The research examines the massive changes taking place in workplaces and societies. The narrative inquiry explored the question: How do public managers and leaders think about and understand inclusive management practices? The literature review guiding the study focuses on theories and concepts related to inclusive leadership, inclusive management practices, inclusion and diversity programs, and theory-to-practice models. Analyzing the eight participants' lived experiences provide a meaningful way of identifying patterns or different ways of doing the same things with inclusive practices, public managers' motivation, and professional training. Overall, inclusive management studies linked historical knowledge of inclusion with current inclusive management practices to enhance public management in the 21st century. The accumulated experiences and perceptions of participants in this study contribute to the existing knowledge of inclusive management practices. The research expands the landscape of inclusive concepts, theories, and practices by focusing mainly on public managers' lived experiences and inclusive management views. This study's results indicate the participants' actions align with the literature related to inclusive leadership concepts and the value of employees' perception of belongingness and uniqueness in the workplace. / Doctor of Philosophy / An Exploration of Inclusive Management Practices: Through the Lenses of Public Managers Jessica Lee Spencer-Gallucci GENERAL AUDIENCE ABSTRACT Although U.S. government organizations have advanced toward a broad view of inclusion, many public managers continue to grapple with an inclusiveness that requires listening, engaging, and supporting all employees in completing core tasks to improve public management services. Most contemporary government work focuses on improved efficiencies and outcomes. Simultaneously, the government workforce demographics have broadened, and inclusion is fundamental to an organization's core values. Inclusion refers to employees' perception that they are part of the organization and its processes. In this paradigm, the employee participates in decision-making, employee work is essential to the team, has adequate access to organizational information, and commands the resources needed to achieve the organization's mission and goals. Massive public management policy changes are taking place in public organizations and societies more generally. Yet, many employees express concern efforts to ensure inclusive practices in public management lack genuine commitment to fostering shared-decision-making, open-communications, trust, fairness, and the ability for employees to contribute to the organization. Inclusive management has emphasized the importance of inclusiveness for the advancement of the workforce in the future. There is limited historical knowledge about how public managers share their practices and learn from experiences of inclusiveness. The existing literature examines the need for managers to practice inclusiveness in the workplace. Additionally, researchers addressed the need for employees to have a sense of belongingness and uniqueness. Despite these queries, relatively little is empirically known about how public managers enact inclusive practices in public management. This exploration seeks to close this gap. Specifically, the inquiry sought a deeper understanding of eight participants' expertise, activity, and knowledge in relational encounters related to inclusive practices. A primary objective is to create a more powerful narrative around the many aspects of the participants' individuality. The results of this study suggest inclusive practices such as inclusive leadership, open-communication, managing workplace challenges, and valuing employees as an asset helps shape the perception of how managers think about and understand inclusiveness. In this study, participants emphasized promoting employee engagement through trust, fairness, and equality for all workplace employees. The study provides a better understanding of inclusive practice patterns that align with existing literature related to inclusive management, diversity, inclusion, and other inclusion literature.

Publishing software publicly is a new phenomenon for U.S. federal government agencies. In August 2016, the White House issued the Federal Source Code Policy: Achieving Efficiency, Transparency, and Innovation through Reusable and Open Source Software (FSCP). The FSCP mandated Chief Financial Officers (CFO) Act agencies to publish at least 20% of their custom developed code as open source software (OSS). The federal government has the responsibility to account for public spending, including spending for IT. The publication of OSS is one way the public can know about government spending. OSS additionally benefits the public by providing access to code, thus, making it the "People's Code." From 2016 to 2019, the progress of CFO Act agencies in implementing the policy was mixed. This study examines whether and how organizational theoretical variables – cultural beliefs, public engagement, structural dimensions, and organizational location – affect policy implementation. The study uses the publication of OSS as an indicator of effective policy implementation, and it identifies the factors that hinder or aid publishing OSS. Using metadata collected from GitHub's application programming interface (API), I created a sampling frame that included 23 of 24 executive agencies publishing OSS before and after the FSCP was published. From the sampling frame, 25 participants from 20 agencies agreed to participate in the study. These participants were from software development units that minimally, moderately, or frequently published OSS. The sample consisted of participants from units mostly located outside a Chief Information Officer (CIO) office focused on software development and data science activities. Grounded theory provided an approach for data collection with elite interviews and artifact gathering allowing for analysis in an iterative, comparative manner for generating a theory of policy implementation for OSS publication. Units more frequently published OSS when they expressed non-monolithic and advantageous cultural beliefs; practiced more and more varied public engagement through bi-directional communication, events, and electronic tools; had structures with less centralization, more formalization, more differentiation, and more coordination; and were located in the "middle" of organizations with fewer hierarchical layers. Additionally, some units expressed both cautionary and advantageous cultural beliefs suggesting beliefs alone are not enough to allow units to publish OSS. This study contributes to policy, public administration, and organization theory literatures. It enhances scholarship by examining a new phenomenon and aids practitioners by providing implications for consideration when implementing policy. / Doctor of Philosophy / Publishing software and its associated source code for public use is a new phenomenon for U.S. federal government agencies. In August 2016, the White House issued the Federal Source Code Policy: Achieving Efficiency, Transparency, and Innovation through Reusable and Open Source Software (FSCP). The FSCP mandated executive-level agencies to publish at least 20% of their custom developed code as open source software (OSS). OSS is software that can be shared within a community of developers through accompanying licenses hosted in online code sharing platforms. The federal government has the responsibility to account for public spending, including spending for IT. The publication of OSS is one way the public can know about government spending. OSS additionally benefits the public by providing access to code, thus, making it the "People's Code." From 2016 to 2019, the progress of executive branch agencies in implementing the FSCP was mixed. This study examines whether and how organizational factors – cultural beliefs, public engagement, structural dimensions, and organizational location – affect agency policy implementation. The study uses the publication of OSS as an indicator of effective policy implementation, and it identifies the factors that hinder or aid publishing OSS. To arrive at a general understanding of agency efforts at policy implementation, I collected data from GitHub's application programming interface (API) and created a list of 23 of 24 executive-level agencies that published OSS both before and after the FSCP was issued. From these agencies, 25 participants from 20 agencies agreed to participate in the study. These participants were from software development units that minimally, moderately, or frequently published OSS. The sample consisted of participants from units mostly located outside a Chief Information Officer (CIO) office that focused on software development and data science activities. Grounded theory provided an approach for data collection with interviews and document collection, leading to continuous analysis for generating a theory of policy implementation for OSS publication. Units more frequently published OSS when they expressed views complementary to those of their parent organization and held advantageous cultural beliefs; practiced more and more varied public engagement through two-way communication, events, and electronic tools; had structures with less centralization, more formalization, more differentiation, and more coordination; and were located in the "middle" of an organization with fewer hierarchical layers. Additionally, some units expressed both cautionary and advantageous cultural beliefs suggesting beliefs alone are not enough to allow units to publish OSS. This study contributes to policy, public administration, and organization theory literatures. It enhances scholarship by examining a new phenomenon and aids practitioners by providing implications for consideration when implementing policy.

abstract: Interviews of nine managers within the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division's Western Region were conducted by a researcher who also works as a Wage and Hour Investigator. The intention of this research was to survey the differences in trafficking-related training and experience throughout the region, to examine the role of the Wage and Hour Division in human trafficking casework, and to explore potential areas for growth. This thesis recommends that upper level agency management produces standards for training, interagency engagement, and procedures and also provides suggestions for best practices and effective enforcement. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Social Justice and Human Rights 2011