Participation in change,job characteristics,and hedonic well-being of senior public managers: The moderation effect of change information

This study contributes to Hobfoll's Conservation of Resources theory by testing a moderated mediation model of the relationship between participation in change and senior managers’ hedonic well-being. Using data collected from 266 Australian senior managers employed in the Commonwealth and State public sector, we tested the interaction of participation in change and change information with job satisfaction, an example of hedonic well-being at work. Findings from the path analysis produced two new insights. First, both participation in change and information about change are key resources that senior managers can deploy to protect and enhance their job satisfaction. Second, information about change has a buffering effect on the indirect relationship between participation in change and job satisfaction through job control. These two findings have practical implications indicating that it is important to train and equip senior managers in the adoption of effective strategies to acquire job resources in assisting them deal with change induced job demands.     

The negative relationships between employee resilience and ambiguity,complexity, and inter-agency collaboration

Employee resilience (ER) is often needed to face demands inherent in public sector work. Some types of demands, however, may hinder its development, rather than provide the type of challenging adversity from which resilience can develop. Public sector job demands have been a long-standing issue for public workplaces and employees but are also growing in salience as organisations face an increasingly variable, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment. Drawing on the Job Demands–Resources model and the challenge/hindrance stress literature, this multi-level study of Aotearoa New Zealand civil servants (n = 11,533) in 65 public sector organisations shows that ER is negatively affected by demands such as job insecurity, unclear job and organisational goals, and inter-agency collaboration. However, organisational resource constraints are positively associated with ER. This study identifies core PA job and organisational demands that hinder ER and offers practical implications and suggestions for further research.

Points for practitioners

• Job role ambiguity, job insecurity, unclear organisational goals, and inter-agency collaboration are common job and organisational demands in public sector workplaces.
• For employees, these demands are stressors that employees do not feel they control, and may therefore hinder employee resilience: the ability to learn, adapt, and leverage networks in the face of challenges.
• Surprisingly, resource constraints, where employees have to ‘do more with less’, might help employees develop ER.
• While inter-agency collaboration has potentially many benefits, it appears to have negative spillover effects on employees unaware of it or not involved in it.
• To encourage ER, agencies should clarify both organisational and job goals, and assure job security, control, competency development, and supervisor support.

     

Endogenous Development Dynamics of Multisectoral Network Management

ABSTRACT

Little is known about the effects of regime change on government workers’ job satisfaction. Conventional theories of work satisfaction have identified various individual or organizational antecedents of public employees’ well-being in many different contexts. In this study, we add an additional level of analysis to the study of job satisfaction. The German reunification in 1990 constitutes a natural experiment where public employees’ institutional work environment changed dramatically. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we show that, after the reunification, East German public employees who stayed in their jobs experienced a “satisfaction shock” by substantially decreasing their levels of job satisfaction. This finding is in line with what has been labelled as “survivor syndrome” in the general management literature. We also find that, after three years’ time, differences in satisfaction levels between East and West Germans reverted to pre-reunion levels. These findings are robust to various model specifications and alternative estimators. The theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed.     

Examining the Effects of Social Media Use on Job Satisfaction in the Australian Public Service: Testing Self-Determination Theory

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between social media usage for work purposes and employee job satisfaction in the public sector. Because social media is a relatively recent phenomenon, the ways in which it affects employee attitudes such as job satisfaction are not well-known. Using self-determination theory (SDT) as a framework, this study tests whether perceived competence, relatedness, and autonomy mediate the relationship between social media usage for work purposes and employee job satisfaction. Data were obtained from the Australian Public Service Commission (APSC). Overall, results generated from the structural equation models support SDT, suggesting that employees using social media for work purposes have higher self-determination and higher self-determination increases their job satisfaction. In particular, the effect of competence to job satisfaction is very high. However, while social media usage for work purposes can enhance employees’ need for autonomy and competence, it does not have any statistical effect to employees need for relatedness. In addition, social media does not have any statistical and direct effect to job satisfaction. The results suggest that social media has an indirect effect to job satisfaction. This article discusses the implications of these findings.     

Innovative work behaviour in the public sector: The roles of task characteristics,social support,and proactivity

This study examines the roles of task characteristics, organisational social support, and individual proactivity on innovative work behaviour (IWB) in the public sector. Analysing empirical data from 154 employees from a government agency in Australia, we found that task characteristics, organisational social support, and proactive personality have a positive impact on IWB. Proactive personality is also found to be a moderator in the relationship between task characteristics and IWB. The findings suggest the need to design human resource practices that better identify proactive and innovative job applicants in the recruitment and selection process. Further, we highlight the requirement to organise and design work that recognises the need to develop social support to improve IWB. The implications of the study for further research on IWB are discussed.     

Job Satisfaction and Gender in the APS: Who’d Want to be a Male?

This article uses the 2008 State of the Service survey data to compare the job satisfaction and attitudes toward work of men and women in the Australian Public Service (APS). It shows that up to and including Executive Level (EL) women are significantly more positive than men about their work and the organisation. At Senior Executive Service (SES) level men are more satisfied. The article also looks at the predictors of job satisfaction separately for men and women at each level, and finds that career progression, support for work‐life balance, agency leadership, role clarity and authority and good immediate management are significant contributors for most employees. It suggests that the APS use these findings to identify those areas which need to be developed in order to attract men, and increase the job satisfaction of existing male staff at Executive Level and below.     

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.     

State of the field: What can political ethnography tell us about anti-politics and democratic disaffection?

This article adopts and reinvents the ethnographic approach to uncover what governing elites do, and how they respond to public disaffection. Although there is significant work on the citizens’ attitudes to the governing elite (the demand side) there is little work on how elites interpret and respond to public disaffection (the supply side). It is argued here that ethnography is the best available research method for collecting data on the supply side. The article tackles longstanding stereotypes in political science about the ethnographic method and what it is good for, and highlights how the innovative and varied practices of contemporary ethnography are ideally suited to shedding light into the ‘black box’ of elite politics. The potential pay-off is demonstrated with reference to important examples of elite ethnography from the margins of political science scholarship. The implications from these rich studies suggest a reorientation of how one understands the drivers of public disaffection and the role that political elites play in exacerbating cynicism and disappointment. The article concludes by pointing to the benefits to the discipline in embracing elite ethnography both to diversify the methodological toolkit in explaining the complex dynamics of disaffection, and to better enable engagement in renewed public debate about the political establishment.     

Managerial Ambivalence and Electronic Civic Engagement: The Role of Public Manager Beliefs and Perceived Needs

This article addresses an important yet often neglected component of electronic civic engagement efforts: managerial ambivalence about public participation. We examine how managers’ beliefs about public participation and their perceived needs for participation in agency decision making work together to shape electronic engagement efforts. Based on observational data collected in 2010 and 2014 and data from a 2014 survey of managers in 500 U.S. municipal governments, we find that managerial beliefs about participation and their perceived needs for participation are two valid and separate constructs. There is a positive relationship between managerial beliefs and electronic engagement. Perceived needs for participation interact with managers’ beliefs to affect electronic civic engagement. A high level of perceived needs for participation reinforces the effect of managerial beliefs on electronic engagement efforts, but a low level does not offset the effect of managerial beliefs on electronic engagement.     

Does the Love of Money Moderate the Relationship between Public Service Motivation and Job Satisfaction? The Case of Chinese Professionals in the Public Sector

To what extent do attitudes toward money—specifically, the love of money—moderate the relationship between public service motivation and job satisfaction among public sector professionals in China? The authors collected data from full‐time public sector professionals who also were part‐time students in a master of public administration program in eastern China. After confirmatory factor analyses, the regression results show that a public servant’s love of money moderates the relationship between public service motivation and job satisfaction—that is, individuals with a strong love of money have a significantly stronger relationship between public service motivation and job satisfaction than those without, a finding that supports the “crowding‐in effect.” Alternatively, for high love‐of‐money civil servants with a “steel rice bowl” mentality, high job satisfaction is explained by the best offer (output) for the minimum amount of effort (input), at least within Chinese culture. Such findings are counterintuitive in light of Chinese personal values, equity theory, public servants’ institutional background, ethical organizational culture, and corruption.     

Leadership and Public Service Motivation in U.S. Federal Agencies

ABSTRACT

This analysis of over 6,900 federal employees’ responses to the Merit Principles Survey 2000 examines the influences of leadership and motivational variables, and especially public service motivation, on the “outcome” variables job satisfaction, perceived performance, quality of work, and turnover intentions. CFA confirms a factor structure for transformation-oriented leadership (TOL), public service-oriented motivation (PSOM), transaction-oriented leadership (TSOL), and extrinsically oriented motivation (EOM). Multivariate regression analysis shows that TOL and PSOM, as well as interaction effects of TOL-TSOL and TOL-PSOM, have strong relations to the outcome variables. SEM analysis examines direct and indirect effects of the main variables. Overall, the results indicate that TOL and PSOM have more positive relations to the outcome variables than do TSOL and EOM. The combination of high TOL and high PSOM has the strongest positive, and hence desirable, relation with organizational outcomes. Among this very large sample of federal employees, those who perceived their leader as displaying TOL (i.e., leadership that is encouraging, supportive, informative, and that emphasizes high standards) also expressed higher levels of PSOM and higher levels of job satisfaction, perceived performance and work quality, and lower turnover intentions. The SEM analysis further indicates that TOL has these effects by way of empowerment, goal clarification, and PSOM, and is distinct from TSOL (transaction-oriented) leadership, which shows no such relationships.     

Still Questioning Cynicism

While political cynicism is often assumed to reduce people’s involvement in politics, others suggest that cynicism may actually increase electoral support for ideologically extreme political parties. Empirical evidence for either statement is often unreliable, contradictive or insufficient. I argue that these inconsistencies are caused by the lack of a proper definition and measurement of political cynicism. While scholars agree that political cynicism is something different than a mere lack of trust, skepticism or even apathy, there is still no widely-accepted definition of cynicism. In this study, I discuss the determinants of political cynicism including untrustworthiness, immorality, dishonesty, incompetence, self-interest and being out of touch with citizens, and I propose a new definition. Given the potential detrimental challenge political cynicism poses to legitimacy and the possible negative impacts of political cynicism on political participation, understanding the nature of citizens’ cynicism is important for assessing the vitality of democratic politics.     

Trajectories of Administrative Reform: Institutions,Timing and Choices in France and Spain

The influence of national administrative institutions on contemporary reforms has often been noted but insufficiently tested. This article enriches the comparative perspective of administrative reform policies by focusing on four interrelated dimensions: the choices of reformers, institutional constraints, timing and sequencing and long-term trajectories. This article tries to determine whether most similar administrative systems exhibit analogous contemporary reform trajectories in content, timing and sequence. By comparing the administrative reform policies of two ‘most similar’ Napoleonic countries, France and Spain, this article analyses the commonalities and divergences of decentralisation, territorial state reorganisation, civil service reforms and policies that focus on performance management and organisational design. The article identifies the ‘causal mechanisms’ that characterise the specific role of institutions and considers both the role of context and the importance of policy intersections.     

Impact of “U.S. Veterans' Access,Choice and Accountability Act of 2014” on employee morale and work behavior: Does “creating an at‐will workplace” lead to better outcomes?

This study estimates the impact of job security rule changes on federal civilian employees' work attitudes and behavior (i.e., job satisfaction and turnover intention) by looking at recent U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)'s Veterans' Access, Choice and Accountability Act (VACAA) of 2014. The data for the analysis are derived from the 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014, and 2015 U.S. Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys. A difference‐in‐differences quasiexperimental methodology was used to examine the effect of a job security rule change on VA employee job satisfaction and turnover intention. This study's results indicate that the overall effect of the introduction of a new job security rule at VA is a decrease of approximately 7 percentage points in employee job satisfaction and 8 percentage points in employee turnover intention, which are a substantial effect. This study contributes to both the theoretical and the empirical understanding of at‐will employment systems and public employee work morale and attitudes.     

Employee Empowerment,Employee Attitudes,and Performance: Testing a Causal Model

The last three decades have witnessed the spread of employee empowerment practices throughout the public and private sectors. A growing body of evidence suggests that employee empowerment can be used to improve job satisfaction, organizational commitment, innovativeness, and performance. Nearly all previous empirical studies have analyzed the direct effects of employee empowerment on these outcome variables without taking into account the mediating role of employee attitudes. This article contributes to the growing literature on employee empowerment by proposing and testing a causal model that estimates the direct effect of employee empowerment on performance as well as its indirect effects as mediated by job satisfaction and innovativeness. The empirical analysis relies on three years of data from the Federal Human Capital Survey/Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey and a structural equation modeling approach, including the use of lagged variables. The results support the hypothesized causal structure. Employee empowerment seems to have a direct effect on performance and indirect effects through its influence on job satisfaction and innovativeness, two key causal pathways by which empowerment practices influence behavioral outcomes.     

Predictors of Administrative and Technological Innovations in Nonprofit Organizations

This study examines the effects of human and structural/process factors on two types of innovation—administrative and technological—in a sample of nonprofit organizations. The results indicate that factors that are favorable to administrative innovations differ from those that are conducive to technological innovation. Three variables are significant predictors of administrative innovation: centralization, transformational leadership, and the executive director’s job tenure. Transformational leadership contributes significantly to the model of technological innovation. Based on the results of this study, the author provides implications for nonprofit management and future research.     

Contemporary Challenges in Local Government: Evolving Roles and Responsibilities,Structures, and Processes

Editor's Note: The International City/County Management Association (ICMA) celebrates the 100th anniversary of its founding in 2014. This article is the first of several that will appear during the next year about the council‐manager plan to commemorate ICMA's 100th anniversary. Three contemporary leadership challenges face local governments today. The first encourages department heads to more actively work the intersection between political and administrative arenas. The second promotes collaborative work, synchronizing city and county boundaries with problems that have no jurisdictional homes. The third argues that citizen engagement is no longer optional—it is imperative—and that connecting engagement initiatives to traditional political values and governing processes is an important mark of successful community building. These three leadership challenges stem from a widening gap between the arenas of politics and administration—that is, between what is politically acceptable in public policy making and what is administratively sustainable. The gap is fueled by conflicting trends experienced locally and common internationally. Failure to bridge this gap between political acceptability and administrative sustainability results in decreasing legitimacy for governing institutions and increasing challenges.     

ORGANISATIONAL THEORY AND ADMINISTRATIVE CHANGE: THE CASE OF REGIONALISATION IN YOUTH AND COMMUNITY SERVICES

Abstract: Conventional accounts of administrative change have relied on an instrumental view of organisations. Based on the notion that administrative arrangements are designed to meet predefined goals, such accounts have been unable to deal adequately with the production of organisational arrangements or to analyse the entanglements of theory in those arrangements. A number of revisions to this orthodox view have been suggested which are based on viewing administrative structures as political arenas within which conflicts organised within wider society come to the fore. The adoption of a regional administrative structure by the New South Wales Department of Youth and Community Services highlights the dependence that administrative arrangements have upon the interests and ideas of key administrative actors and coalitions, and their contingent power to produce and maintain changes in those arrangements. The regional structure was based on ideas of community participation and had the avowed aim of allowing the public to have greater access to departmental affairs. Subsequently, ideas of ministerial accountability and organisational efficiency were used to define strictly the legitimate boundaries of that public participation. Such ideas provided covering fire for different groups in and around the department to obtain and consolidate positions of advantage.     

THE INFLUENCE OF E‐GOVERNMENT ON ADMINISTRATIVE DISCRETION: THE CASE OF LOCAL GOVERNMENTS IN EGYPT

One important but often understudied area of research in public administration is the effect of e‐government on administrative discretion. This article examines e‐government factors that influence administrative discretion through a survey of local governments. The focus of this study is on Egyptian local governments, which are using e‐government to modernise public service delivery. Through a survey of administrative officials in these governments, this study found evidence that e‐government factors of collaboration and organisational change influenced administrative discretion. Other common factors noted in the literature such as size of the local government and demand by citizens for e‐government did not register an effect on administrative discretion. The results of this study imply that local governments should do more to enhance e‐government to reduce administrative discretion, especially in the area of increasing collaboration. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Unionization and Work Attitudes: How Union Commitment Influences Public Sector Job Satisfaction

This article explores whether union commitment dampens public sector job satisfaction. By examining the connection between union commitment and two workplace attributes that are presumed to be more prevalent in public sector workplaces—perceptions of higher red tape and greater public service motivation—this article develops three hypotheses exploring the direct and indirect relationships between union commitment and public sector job satisfaction. The findings from a series of structural equation models indicate that union commitment directly increases members’ job satisfaction, but it more prominently increases members’ job satisfaction indirectly by reducing perceived red tape and enhancing public service motivation.