Working for the future is more than foreseeing the future: Impact of the balanced organizational capabilities on the proactive policy orientation

Abstract

This study explores what kinds of (and how) organizational capabilities (benchmarking, modeling, forecasting, and backcasting), respectively and collectively, help an organization to have a more proactive policy orientation. An analysis of the public agencies in South Korea in 2021 shows several significant findings. First, all four of the organizational capabilities are conducive to a proactive policy orientation, which may be intuitively acceptable. Second, however, in contrast to expectation, the relative impact of forecasting capability on proactive policy orientation turned out to be the weakest among the four capabilities. An interpretation of these findings indicates that, proactive policies might be better produced in the organizational environment where forecasting can be supported by empirical evidence (benchmarking), methodical reasoning (modeling), and tangible planning (backcasting).