Public Trust in Government in Japan and South Korea: Does the Rise of Critical Citizens Matter?

Based on the Asia Barometer Survey of 2003, 2004, and 2006, government performance, citizen empowerment, and citizen satisfaction with self‐expression values are associated with public trust in government in Japan and South Korea. This study finds, first, that government performance on the economy, controlling political corruption, the quality of public services, crime, and attention to citizen input are significantly associated with broad public trust in government in both Japan and South Korea. Likewise, citizens’ satisfaction with their right to gather and demonstrate and to criticize the government is closely connected to trust in central and local governments in Japan. In South Korea, citizens’ satisfaction with their right to gather and demonstrate is intimately linked to trust in local government. Implications for government leadership to enhance performance, transparency, citizen participation, and public trust in government are analyzed and elaborated upon in this insightful study.     

Public sector innovation in the Asia-pacific trends,challenges, and opportunities

Public organizations face a multitude of challenges that force them to innovate existing processes, policies, programs, and products. Indeed, in recent years, innovation has become a core topic of study in public administration. However, the vast majority of the public sector innovation literature stems from the United States and Western Europe. The lack of Asia-Pacific studies is particularly striking given that countries like Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan consistently rank high on public sector innovation. This special issue brings together state of the art empirical research on public sector innovation in the Asia-Pacific region that examines a range of drivers and outcomes of innovation, including studies comparing Asia-Pacific countries and countries in the East and the West. The findings show that public sector employees in the studied countries all seek opportunities to innovate, whereas cultural norms and values either constrain or enable innovative behaviour and affect the extent to which employees experience leadership support for displaying such behaviour.     

Efficiency,Incentives, and Transformational Leadership: Understanding Collaboration Preferences in the Public Sector

In the public sector, participant attitudes are an important determinant of the success of inter-organizational collaboration initiatives. In this study, a model of employee willingness to collaborate is proposed in which the influence of transformational leadership is determined in part by the performance orientation of the organizational context in which it is enacted. The theoretical model is tested empirically using survey data collected from public employees in South Korea and regression-based Monte Carlo simulation. The analysis suggests that the effect of transformational leadership is amplified by an organization’s emphasis on internal efficiency and its use of performance-based incentives, factors that themselves have independent positive and negative effects, respectively, on attitudes about collaboration. This study links transformational leadership to an increasingly necessary process in the public sector and highlights its context-dependent influence. Implications of the findings are discussed, including the notion that the efficacy of tactics adopted to support inter-organizational collaboration may be a function of their consistency with the realities of established organizational policies and processes.     

Innovation and Implementation in the Public Sector: An Examination of Public Entrepreneurship

This article develops an empirical measure of public entrepreneurship and uses it to discover the correlates that distinguish between those participants in a policy domain who are seen as more or less important in the entrepreneurial process. Looking at two rural regions dealing with telemedicine technologies, the authors examine the role of personal attributes and situational attributes in predicting who will emerge as the most mentioned public entrepreneurs on these issues in their community. Status in the local community, membership in the health professions, and strong local focus and ties are the most instrumental variables in distinguishing between those in a policy domain who are more likely to be identified as entrepreneurial. The authors provide an empirical test that can, for the first time, identify in a comparative context the traits that distinguish more entrepreneurial individuals from less entrepreneurial ones (or nonentrepreneurial ones) participating in the same policy domain.     

Entrepreneurship-driven public management reforms in Southeast Asia: Critical implications for public accountability

In recent decades, public management has been restructured worldwide for greater efficiency and innovation based on entrepreneurship-driven models such as Reinventing Governance, New Public Management, and post-NPM frameworks. The primary intent of these business-like models is instilling entrepreneurship, which would encourage risk-taking innovation, managerial autonomy, performance orientation, and customer choice. Such entrepreneurial orientation is embedded in organizational-managerial reforms related to human resource management, budgeting framework, performance benchmarking, and so on. These entrepreneurship-driven reforms have significant impacts on administrative structure, procedures, and norms affecting the process of public sector accountability. In line with such global trends, most countries in Southeast Asia have embraced some of these pro-market business-type reforms in public management to enhance its entrepreneurship, innovation, and competition, which have implications for managerial control, neutrality, regulation, and integrity required for public accountability. This article explores these entrepreneurship-driven reforms in the region and evaluates their critical implications for the long-established institutions, structures, and procedures of public accountability.     

Entrepreneurial orientation and generic competitive strategies for emerging SMEs: Financial and nonfinancial performance perspective

In the competitive markets, business ventures have not only emphasized financial performance but nonfinancial performance has also become the need of the day due to its significant role in increasing customers. However, minor attention is given to the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation, business strategy and nonfinancial performance of emerging small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This study scrutinizes the effect of each dimension of entrepreneurial orientation (i.e., innovativeness, risk‐taking, and proactiveness) and each of generic competitive strategies (i.e., differentiation and cost leadership) on the performance (financial and nonfinancial) of emerging SMEs. We surveyed 373 SMEs operating in Pakistan through a structured questionnaire. For the data analysis and hypotheses testing, we used AMOS.21. The findings display that innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk‐taking significantly improve financial performance while insignificantly impact nonfinancial performance. Differentiation and cost leadership strategies significantly spur financial as well as nonfinancial performance of SMEs. This study advises that top managers of SMEs in the emerging economies need to maintain a focus on entrepreneurial activities and formulate unique competitive strategies to attain higher performance. This research further recommends policymakers to initiate entrepreneurship programs for SMEs to configure entrepreneurial posture of the businessmen. Further recommendations have stated.     

Of ‘Strong’ Leadership,Crisis Communication,and Pooper Scoopers: Change in the Queensland Public Service Under Newman

Governments have historically offered their workforce a public service bargain founded on stable pay and conditions and job security. However, while the Westminster system aims for public service employment to be protected from the whims of government, public servants are nonetheless affected by the political environment in which they operate and changes to this bargain can occur with a new government. This paper focuses on a Queensland public service change process that resulted in large‐scale forced redundancies, non‐renewal of temporary contracts, and legislative changes that nullified the provisions in job security, organisational change, and redundancy policies. Using communication as a lens through which to understand leadership, it examines how the government communicated with the public service about this organisational change, immediately before and after the 2012 election. In particular, through analysis of public and media commentary, speeches and Hansard records, it examines Premier Newman's change leadership and communication by contrasting pre‐election messages to the public service with post‐election messages about the public service and the justifications for change during this period of downsizing. This analysis is used to reflect on political leadership, communication, fair treatment, and trust in public service change.     

Mapping EU agencies as political entrepreneurs

The European Union relies on decentralised agencies to implement important transnational regulations, such as certifying the safety of medicines. However, the authority of these agencies does not have ‘hard’ legal status and crucially depends on disseminating ideas and information effectively: what can be termed ‘political entrepreneurship’. This article provides the first comprehensive analysis of the political entrepreneurship of EU agencies by constructing a conceptual typology of entrepreneurial strategies. Drawing conceptually on transnational public administration, a new database is constructed of the ‘entrepreneurship’ of 33 EU agencies in 2014 based on their media communication activities, face‐to‐face networking in workshops and collaborations, and knowledge dissemination and ‘learning’ exercises. This is mapped against the political salience of agencies in the European Parliament and media. The mapping exercise shows four types of entrepreneurial strategies covering the population of EU agencies: technical functional, insulating, network‐seeking and politicised. The typology is validated through semi‐structured interviews in 11 EU agencies, showing the core characteristics of each type of strategy. The article concludes by arguing that this typology provides an important addition to existing categories of EU agencies based on autonomy and accountability, and advocates a future research strategy examining the interaction between agencies’ entrepreneurial strategies and the expectations and reactions of stakeholder audiences.     

Impact of positivity and empathy on social entrepreneurial intention: The moderating role of perceived social support

Social entrepreneurship is a growing area of interest among practitioners. Social entrepreneurship meets and satisfies social needs and brings social change through innovative ideas. This study aims to investigate the impact of positivity and empathy of individuals on social entrepreneurial intention. This study considers the mediating role of social entrepreneurial self‐efficacy between the relationship of positivity, empathy, and social entrepreneurial intention. In addition, this study investigates perceived social support as a boundary condition between the relationship of social entrepreneurial self‐efficacy and social entrepreneurial intention. Findings show that positivity and empathy positively influence social entrepreneurial self‐efficacy, which subsequently positively influences social entrepreneurial intention. Furthermore, results show that high perceived social support strengthens the relationship between social entrepreneurial self‐efficacy and social entrepreneurial intention. Discussions and implications based on the study findings are reported.     

Ministerial Leadership and Endorsement of Bureaucrats: Experimental Evidence from Presidential Governments

Scholars have debated what constitutes effective ministerial leadership with respect to administrative competence versus political influence. The authors contribute experimental evidence to this debate through a unique survey design of endorsement experiments. Using original data from 949 national civil servants in South Korea, this article examines civil servants’ assessments of ministerial leadership in three central dimensions of public management: internal management, interbranch coordination, and policy formulation/implementation. Further, existing variation in the characteristics of agencies is used to test whether such variation induces systematic differences in civil servants’ responses. Findings show that that civil servants’ attitudes toward ministerial leadership are asymmetric in nature. Ministers with civil service backgrounds are endorsed in all three dimensions, whereas ministers with legislative backgrounds receive increased support only for interbranch coordination skills. The levels of support for ministers with different backgrounds also vary across agency types. This analysis has implications for public management practice and agency control in presidential governments.     

From national identity to national security: China's changing responses toward India in 1962 and 1998

This article examines Russian Government policy towards Northeast Asia as an interplay between aspirations, which have been expressed by government leaders, parliamentary figures and prominent academics and journalists and actual results. The article uses three levels, global, regional and bilateral, as a basis for the analysis. In terms of global interests the Russian leadership has sought diplomatic balance against the US, in terms of regional interests the leadership has pursued the aim of economic and security integration while at the bilateral level Russian leadership has sought specific benefits from particular relations with China, Japan and South Korea. The article notes that Russia has obtained certain diplomatic benefits from the relationship with China which serve its interests at the global level. At the regional level policy aspirations have been frustrated by Russia's dire economic condition and the tendency to be treated as an ‘outsider’. Russia has benefited from an improvement of bilateral relations with China, Japan and South Korea but these gains do not translate into an improved position at the regional level yet. while the Russian leadership has been nurturing the development of bilateral relationships problems particular to those relationships hinder its wider regional acceptance.     

Drifting towards convergence? Motivation and performance management in state and private companies in the provision of telecom services in Ghana

The concept of expectancy on which many of the theories of workplace incentive programmes are based, claims that when employees are given a particular level of motivation, it will result in some level of performance. The general perception in Ghana is that public sector employees do not perform as efficiently as private sector workers because they lack incentives to do so. However, few studies have compared the incentive structures of the two sectors. Using empirical evidence from four telecom companies in Ghana, this article shows that the gaps between ‘state’ and ‘private’ have narrowed. Also, while incentive structures such as salary, fringe benefits and job (in)security are converging, critical performance management processes like employees' participation in decision‐making, performance appraisal, monitoring and credibility of sanctions are drifting apart. This article concludes that differences in performance between state and private companies may be explained by performance management processes and not incentive structures. It cautions that improved salaries and other office perquisites may not by themselves achieve organisational performance. Rather, incentives should be embedded in a broader approach through effective performance management processes. The information in the article is relevant to the ‘borderline’ part of the public sector under a deregulated environment. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A worldwide consensus on nudging? Not quite,but almost

Nudges are choice‐preserving interventions that steer people's behavior in specific directions while still allowing them to go their own way. Some nudges have been controversial, because they are seen as objectionably paternalistic. This study reports on nationally representative surveys in eight diverse countries, investigating what people actually think about nudges and nudging. The study covers Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Japan, Russia, South Africa, and South Korea. Generally, we find strong majority support for nudges in all countries, with the important exception of Japan, and with spectacularly high approval rates in China and South Korea. We connect the findings here to earlier studies involving Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Our primary conclusion is that while citizens generally approve of health and safety nudges, the nations of the world appear to fall into three distinct categories: (i) a group of nations, mostly liberal democracies, where strong majorities approve of nudges whenever they (a) are seen to fit with the interests and values of most citizens and (b) do not have illicit purposes; (ii) a group of nations where overwhelming majorities approve of nearly all nudges; and (iii) a group of nations that usually show majority approval, but markedly reduced approval rates. We offer some speculations about the relationship between approval rates and trust.     

Rethinking Academic Entrepreneurship: University Governance and the Emergence of the Academic Enterprise

The theory and practice of academic entrepreneurship, like many domains of public management, requires active recognition that context affects individual behavior. In this Viewpoint essay, the authors contend that the operational logic of a university affects the values and activities of actors within that university in ways that shape the broader entrepreneurial activities of the university. The authors describe a new entrepreneurial organizational logic, termed the “academic enterprise,” and situate it in relation to the more established academy, bureaucratic, and market logics. The academic enterprise is inherently entrepreneurial in terms of the management of the university and its reliance on faculty and student entrepreneurship as a tool for broad-scale social and economic transformation.     

Towards virtuous and ethical organisational performance in the context of corruption: A case study in the public sector

With the increasing number of ethical violations reported across the public sector, the emphasis on ethics and values in governance is on the rise. Corruption is widely accepted as a form of unethical behaviour that can have detrimental effects on organisations as well as society at large. Research calls for empirical studies focusing on the contextual factors surrounding corruption. Based on the Contextually Based Human Resource Theory and using the case study method, this paper examines the role of context through a systematic analysis of corruption in a public sector organisation. We integrate corruption and human resource literature to understand employee behaviour, employee relations, HRM strategies, and organisational outcomes in the context of organisational corruption.     

Corporate policy entrepreneurship and cross-boundary strategies: How a private corporation champions mobile healthcare payment innovation in China?

The private nature of corporate actors does not necessarily preclude them from contributing to public interest. When business strategies and genuine public motivation are favorably aligned, corporate actors from the private sector can also drive public sector innovations. For a private corporation, policy entrepreneurship inherently entails crossing not only the public–private boundary but also various policy domains. This study formulates five propositions to characterize the cross-boundary strategies of corporate policy entrepreneurship, a distinct form of policy entrepreneurship in a developing authoritarian state. The case study of mobile healthcare payment innovation in China finds that the corporate entrepreneur used a series of cross-boundary strategies adeptly that eventually made the innovation not only adopted in one locality but also rapidly diffused nationwide. These strategies were not used in isolation or in a pure stepwise fashion but appeared to be recursive and interactive, suggesting the dynamic nature of corporate policy entrepreneurship in a multilevel governance system. More studies could be done to further examine strategies and processes of other forms of policy entrepreneurship in various national and sectoral settings.     

Effects of deregulation and performance on government accountability: Role of trust in Korea,Japan, and the United States

Public administration has been struggling to address the balance between conflicting government values. Trust in the study is employed as nodal value to reconcile modern management dilemma concerning conflicting relationships between performance and accountability and between discretion and accountability. Using 2012 International Social Survey Program data, this paper analyzed the moderator and mediator role of government trust among discretion, performance, and accountability in cases of South Korea, Japan, and the United States. This study used factor analysis and ordinary least square multiple regression analysis. The statistical results partially confirmed the hypotheses regarding the mediating and moderating role of trust: (a) the moderating effect of the trust on the relationship between performance and accountability in South Korea; (b) the moderating impact of the trust on the relationship between deregulation and accountability in Japan; and (c) when governments work well, it leads to high level of trust, in turn followed by high accountability in the United States and Japan.     

We’re Not all Happy Yet: Attitudes to Work,Leadership, and High Performance Work Practices among Managers in the Public Sector

This article explores the attitudes of male and female managers in the public sector toward high performance Human Resource Management (HRM) policies and practices, work, and organisational leadership, and compares these attitudes to those of managers in the private sector. It finds that female public sector managers are most positive about high performance HRM policies and practices. Male public sector managers are less positive than female managers in the public sector and male and female managers in the private sector across all the measures. Psychological contract theory suggests either the changes associated with high performance HRM policies and practices, or attempts to decrease the disadvantage felt by women in the public sector may have resulted in a sense of disadvantage among some men in the sector, and created a changed, more transactional psychological contract between these men and their organisation. Strategies are needed to reengage public sector men.     

Livelihood strategies and performance of Ghana's health and education sectors: exploring the connections

The public sector in Africa is riddled with widespread ineffectiveness. Although some countries have implemented various reform programmes with the support of international development agencies, the results so far have been disappointing. One reason for the failure is that the policies have focussed more on achieving macroeconomic stability than making the organisations effective. This article explores a fundamental problem of the policies—the need to focus on the human component of organisational performance. Using education and health organisations in Ghana as examples, the article advances a hypothesis that the livelihood strategies of public sector employees and the performance of their organisations are interconnected. Specifically, it is argued that as public sector employees have become more dependent on multiple sources of income, they have developed multiple social identities, which influence the culture of their organisations. The organisational culture may have encouraged employee effectiveness in some cases, but for most organisations, it has resulted in practices that perpetuate inefficiency and poor performance. To be successful, public sector reform policies must therefore involve deliberate efforts to change organisational cultures. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.