Public Service Motivation: A Cross-Country Study

This article addresses the relevance of public sector motivation (PSM) among unemployed workers. Despite the growing research interest among many public management and human resource management (HRM) scholars in employment choice, efforts to understand the “working minds” and motivational factors among the unemployed in their pursuit of a future career choice have been almost non-existent in HR scholarship in the public sector, which is critical considering the growing number of unemployed workers both domestically and internationally. Using data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) on Work Orientation modules in 1997 and 2005, this article examines the effects of public service motivation and rewards-based motivation on career decisions among the unemployed in seven countries. Findings indicate that while PSM and extrinsic rewards are positive and significant predictors of choosing to work in the public sector, intrinsic rewards were shown to be in a reversed relationship. Results also indicated that respondents whose previous jobs ended either in dismissal or due to family responsibilities were less likely to choose employment in the public sector compared to those whose previous job ended primarily due to retirement. Implications are discussed.     

Local elected administrators’ career characteristics and revenue diversification as a managerial strategy

Local governments have endeavoured to be fiscally better prepared against adverse economic downturns, and revenue diversification (RD) is considered one of such efforts. This study examines how Korean local governments have utilised diversification as a managerial strategy between 2007 and 2010. Focusing on local elected administrators’ (LEAs’) previous career, it reports that local governments with administrators with business experiences diversify revenues more than those with politics-turned administrators. It further finds that the effects of socio-economic and institutional factors are moderated by administrators’ career characteristics. Based on such evidence, theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Patterns of Enterpreneurship: A Study of Gender Training Frameworks for Officers of the Indian Administrative Service

Abstract

The awareness of women as a category of development promoted the establishment of Women in Development (WID) organizations but these remain on the peripheries of mainstream development concerns. This research examines the entrepreneurial roles of Indian Administrative officers for gender aware planning and implementation of gender aware development planning. The Indian Administrative Service (IAS) is a critical stakeholder in the innovation process for gender aware development planning. This article reviews the introductory training program of all IAS candidates to establish the institutional culture and organizational procedures describing the audience of the IAS organization. The institutional culture and procedures of the IAS perpetuate a gender bias for WID and not Gender and Development (GAD) programs. Bureaucratic advocates for this type of development planning hold conflicting roles within government agencies as system maintainers and policy advocates. This study reviews the content and implications of three different gender-training frameworks dominate in the field: gender analysis, gender-planning, and social relations. Comparing these frameworks provides insights into the positioning of IAS officers and departments as possible agents of innovation for gender aware planning and policy. The range of innovations vary from acquiring skills for job performance, or creating separate agencies and new institutions to assessment of entrenched attitudes and procedures reinforcing gender inequity within the agency. Implicit in each framework are different views about IAS officers as planners and administrators.     

ADJUNCT TO WHAT? A NON-TRADITIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON TEACHING THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

ABSTRACT

The assumption of adjunct faculty as both behind and beneath fulltime and/or tenured faculty is becoming a point of increasing conflict and controversy in the world of academia. Regardless of the setting (community college, four year college, or university), adjuncts occupy next to the lowest position in the faculty hierarchy. Ironically, while unflatteringly positioned, the economic, operational, and boundary-spanning contributions of this unheralded cadre of professors are substantial. Additional mining of adjunct faculty potential in several venues can unearth possibilities such as: (1) having university administration leverage adjunct influence in the community; and/or (2) having employers enhance organizational performance by utilizing employees who serve as adjuncts to broker applied theory; and/or (3) have adjunct faculty members capitalize on the uniqueness of their “praxis” orientation thereby benefiting students, employers, the university, and themselves.

The teaching profession is one to be held in high regard. The ability to understand complex academic principles and meaningfully convey them to students is a gift. Reality is that, through the lens of the student, there is no distinction between tenured and adjunct faculty. To this end, adjunct professors are encouraged to master the craft of teaching, treat it as a gift, and hold it gently.     

CAN TEACHING BE SAVED?

ABSTRACT

Future generations of professors may be harder to recruit and to retain compared to the current generation of nearly-retired senior faculty. This is especially the case in public colleges and universities. The condition of academic life in public higher education at the beginning of the twenty-first century was not enviable. Decades of sacking and pillaging by external and internal forces have left the professoriat stranded in purgatory, overrun by larger numbers of under prepared students and evaluated by pseudo processes. The professoriat has also contributed to the demise of liberal learning by substituting escapism for scholarship and by rolling over for various forms of coercion and financial seduction.

This essay discusses one person's teaching experience in the context of evolving cultural norms about learning, of professional standards pertinent to teaching, and of the psycho-social consequences for college teachers of the secular anti-intellectual drift in post-literate society. Public college and university teaching in the last decade of the twentieth century, for most workaday faculty not heavily endowed with external research funds or not capable of manipulating endless leaves of absence, has been a voyage of uncertainty. The combined effects of triumphant managerialism, techno-idolatry, political correctness and bureaucratic rationalization have subverted public higher education, and the subversion has occurred with the willing collusion of many “insiders” in the academic establishment. Worse: so engrained is the system of incentives for self-preservation (on the part of administrators and faculty) and evasion of accountability (on the part of students) that the system is unable and unwilling to correct its own dysfunctions. The absence of complaint from the “consumers” of higher education, students and their parents, is not the result of good institutional performance. It is, unhappily, the result of tacit collusion in the willingness to certify mediocrity and call it excellence.

Many volumes would be required to diagnose and prescribe remedies for the entire matrix in which public higher education now finds itself. Space does not permit comprehensiveness here. Instead, I offer admittedly selective perceptions of my own teaching experiences of more than two decades, as related to the problems cited in the preceding paragraph. However, I doubt that it is a singular view. More than a personal cri de coeur, it represents the frustration of a generation of educators who have seen public higher education seduced and sacked by some of the same forces that might have been expected to nourish and protect it: including the educators themselves.

Of course, the cynical saying of one of my colleagues remains true: “Institutions never lose: individuals always do.” And he is right–higher education will endure and prosper, even if those who still remember what education is forare marginalized or driven into another line of work. No one can doubt that American colleges and universities have succeeded as organizationsand in the pursuit of organizational values over the past two or three decades: many are richer, larger, and as marketing savvy as the most endowed Fortune 500 corporation. Whether American higher education still has anything useful to say about American society and culture is another, and more arguable, matter. There is significant risk that institutional value distortion has pushed the critical faculties of students and teachers into a Phantom Zone of indifference or even hostility, relative to what “really” matters to the governing boards and administrations of many institutions of higher learning. The commingling of academic institutional and organizational–corporatist values has another side: it has betrayed many students by asking of them as little as possible, and many professors by rewarding them for their entertainment value.     

Black administrators and racial road blocks in public organizations: problems and recourse

Discussions in the representative bureaucracy literature have tacitly assigned the responsibility of representing the interests of blacks to individual black administrators. Relying on black employee groups (or solidarity groups) to represent the interests of blacks is ignored. The possibility that black members of organizations have a group interest to be represented is not considered in the literature.

Assigning there presentation responsibility to individual black administrators is rejected be cause of barriers that can be created by racial road blocks (to kenism and different perceptions of race relations). It is argued that solidarity groups are a more effective means of representing the interests of blacks. Assigning the responsibility to solidarity groups should: (1) neutralize the effects of racial road blocks; (2) limit individual representation activities and thus permit each black administrator to concentrate on job performance; and (3) shift the focus in there presentative bureaucracy literature away from the individual and start concentrating on the representation activities of solidarity groups.     

Integration or Building Resilience: What Should the Goal Be in Refugee Resettlement?

The article presents a qualitative study of 110 providers and administrators of refugee services from four countries: United States, Switzerland, Germany, and Iceland. Of the total participants, 28 were male and 82 were female. The sample consisted of 83 social workers who provided direct services to refugees and 27 administrators who managed the programs. The interviews occurred over a period of 3 years from January 2014 to January 2017. The participants described what they perceived to be the goals of resettlement and the successful outcomes of their work with refugees. Findings show that providers and administrators varied in what they believed to be the goals and outcomes, with three main differences emerging: (1) lessening the transition burden; (2) acquisition of language and securing self-sufficient employment; and (3) enhancing the integration of resilience within the refugee. These differences are discussed in terms of how they differ in resources required and in outcomes. The implications of these differences are addressed.     

THE CARTE SCOLAIRE IN FRENCH EDUCATION: A STUDY OF DECISION- MAKING IN A CENTRALIZED SYSTEM

The carte scolaire (school map) has been developed since 1963 as a device for planning long term development of educational provision at the secondary school level, down to prescribing what specialist provision should be made in individual establishments. The carte scolaire is approved by the Ministry of Education on the proposition of the Rector of the Académie (the regional authority for secondary education) and after consultation with representatives of local communities and specialist interests.
Information gained from official documents and interviews with practitioners is used to develop a detailed picture of this neglected area, and to assess the criticisms made by administrators and commentators. Particular stress is placed on examining the dominance of the technocrats, the boundaries within which the devisers of the carte scolaire operate, and the effectiveness (or otherwise) of long-term educational planning.     

Job Satisfaction Among Swedish Mental Health Nursing Staff: A Cross-Sectional Survey

There is limited amount of empirical studies concerning job satisfaction in inpatient psychiatric care. However, job satisfaction has several implications on public administration and management. The objective of this study is to identify factors having positive impact on job satisfaction among Swedish psychiatric nursing staff in an inpatient psychiatric clinic. The cross-sectional study is based on Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory. The survey was distributed among nursing staff at a psychiatric university hospital clinic in Western Sweden. Overall, job satisfaction was rated relatively high, and salary was rated the lowest of all factors investigated. Unlike the premises in Herzberg’s theory, salary showed a positive correlation with job satisfaction and not only in preventing dissatisfaction. Hospital managers must be attentive to salary levels and staff turnover. Psychiatric nursing personnel in Sweden lack competitive salaries, and hospital administrators should encourage nursing staff to improve relationships between staff and managers and establish good relationships among colleagues.     

SITUATING ADMINISTRATIVE RESPONSIBILITY: A COMPARISON OF MEDIEVAL CHRISTIAN AND MEDIEVAL ISLAMIC ADMINISTRATIVE THOUGHT

Contemporary studies of administrative thought allow only a limited range of viability for medieval and non‐Western thought on the subject of public administration. This tendency belies the wealth of thought embedded within this broad literature. This paper investigates the matter of administrative accountability and responsibility through the lens of a comparative theorist of historical administrative thought. In order to assess the explanatory potential of early and non‐Western administrative studies, two texts have been chosen, both previously unanalysed in conjunction (to the best of my knowledge) from the perspective of the administrative theorist – John of Salisbury’s Policraticus and Abu al‐Hassan Al‐Mawardi’s Al‐Akham al‐Sultaniyya w’al‐Wilayat al Diniyya (The Ordinances of Government). Through an analysis of ideas of delegation and responsibility within these texts, the paper seeks to develop a critique of the place of revealed religious authority in the solution to the questions ‘who are administrators responsible to?’ and ‘what are administrators responsible for?’     

Electoral theocracy and hybrid sovereignty in Iran

Post-revolution Iran is uniquely based upon the contradictory principles of divine and popular sovereignty but with ultimate authority delegated to jurists. At the same time, the theocratic basis of clerical dominance is rooted within a pluralistic and decentralised theological tradition peculiar to the Shiite establishment. Despite the tutelary institutional arrangements engineered by the ruling clergy, elections have generated unexpected outcomes and unleashed power and policy shifts. Emphasising the political dynamic generated by elections, this paper examines the uncertainties stemming from electoral processes that have been constructed by conflicting electoral and theocratic principles. In developing the concept of electoral theocracy, the paper highlights the paradoxes underpinning the hybridity of Iran’s clerical and electoral authoritarian system of governance. These hybrid features have remained largely neglected in the literature on electoral authoritarian regimes.     

THE IMPACT OF FORMAL ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE ON POLITICO‐ADMINISTRATIVE INTERACTION: EVIDENCE FROM A NATURAL EXPERIMENT

The effects of different organizational structures are often assumed, expected or promised but seldom well documented through systematic studies ( Christensen et al. 2007, p. 144 ). Using evidence from a natural experiment including organizational data from 65 Danish municipalities and survey responses from 1014 politicians and 403 administrators, the article analyses whether and how two different organizational leadership models affect the interaction between politicians and administrators. The analyses show the expected differences in the patterns of interaction between politicians and administrators when comparing municipalities using a traditional sector‐based model and municipalities using a more recent executive board approach. Compared to the sector‐based model, the new model has the intended effects of cutting ties between politicians sitting on specialized committees and administrative leaders of single service departments, and strengthening the relations between the political and administrative leadership.     

Training Public Administrators in Africa: A Case Study of Civil Service Employees in Ghana

Abstract

Much of the dialogue on public administration training in Africa is about how to prepare administrators to cope with pressures global forces exert without considering how to educate individuals to meet also the unique demands of public service. This essay examines the nature of training in Africa, drawing on Ghana's experience with management training programs. It first describes and critiques training based on bureaucratic and managerial perspectives, which emphasize the acquisition of rational, technical, and managerial skills comparable to international and global standards, and argues that such training does not necessarily provide career professionals with a broad work ethic suitable for the local context. It then concludes by suggesting the possibility of developing a composite training program that takes account also of the need to provide non-traditional skills and experience-based knowledge professionals need to be able to operate in the unique historical, social, and political conditions of Africa.     

Understanding employee commitment in the public organization: a study of the juvenile detention center

This study examined the relationship between organizational commitment and several personal, role, professional, job and organizational factors among juvenile detention workers. The study revealed that (1) commitment is significantly correlated to role ambiguity, supervisor trust, rile matment-oriented attitude toward the detainee, job satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational trust, and (2) organizational trust, the treatment attitude. role ambiguity, and job involvement are major predictors of employee commitment to the detention center. Implications concerning the results of this study are discussed.     

In Search of the Holy Grail in Public Service: A Study on the Mediating Effect of Public Service Motivation on Organizational Politics and Outcomes

ABSTRACT

There appears to be a research gap in terms of examining whether PSM will hold fast even in the midst of a politically charged work environment. This article investigates how highly motivated government employees would react to the potentially adverse effects of political perception (POP) on organizational commitment, job satisfaction and workplace stress. The findings indicated that PSM exists among the respondent municipal social workers in the Philippines and that this motivation directly translates to positive outcomes. However, PSM did not have the expected mediating effect which is a departure from the commonly held view about its buffering power and mitigating role.     

AM I A PUBLIC SERVANT OR AM I A PATHOGEN? PUBLIC MANAGERS' SECTOR COMPARISON OF WORKER ABILITIES

Political rhetoric in the United States is rife with condemnations of public sector workers. The assertion that public sector workers are less creative, talented, or autonomous than those working in businesses pervades in both academic studies and public opinions. Facing constant criticisms, do public managers also perceive that government workers are less able than their private sector peers? If so, and more importantly, does the perceived inferiority of worker abilities shake their confidence, thereby undermining their work attitudes? The present study employs social comparison theory to answer these questions. Based on state government managers' responses in the United States, the results indicate that a clear majority of public managers perceive public sector inferiority with respect to worker creativity, talent, and autonomy. The findings also show that perceived inferiority is related to lower job satisfaction, job involvement, and pride in working for the current organization. Based on the findings, we provide suggestions to both researchers and practitioners.     

Comparing Employed and Unemployed Workers' Job Motivations for Sector Choice in East Asia: Does Employment Status Matter?

This article seeks to extend the understanding of the varying nature of job motivations on choosing public sector employment by comparing the two different groups of people—the employed and the unemployed—in the context of East Asia. Utilizing a subset of data from the International Social Survey Program on Work Orientation module in 2005, this article examines how eight job motivational aspects correlate with the choice between public and private sector employment. Major findings indicate that there are significant differences in job motivations between people of different employment status. Moreover, public service motivation was a not a significant factor of sector choice for the unemployed workers, compared to the employed workers who cited job usefulness to society as a reason to join the public sector employment. Practical implications are presented at the end of the article.     

The determinants of earnings among low‐income workers in Bombay: An analysis of panel data

This article estimates the determinants of earnings among workers in low income settlements of Bombay. It uses panel data on workers in two homeless (pavement‐dwelling) communities and two slum communities. The estimated earnings functions, adjusted for community‐ and time‐specific fixed effects, show a good fit. Age and education are significant in all the regressions; however, some of the job‐related variables appear to be more important than the standard human capital variables in determining earnings. In conclusion, while a complex set of factors seem to determine earnings of workers in low‐income communities, institutional factors play an important role.     

Public administrators and policy implementation--a social work perspective

Professional social workers in both macro and micro settings are vitally concerned with public policy, particularly that of social welfare policy, and its implementation. They are keenly aware of the quality and quantity of services and other end products of policy implementation. Social workers serve as public administrators and staff many public and private agencies that form the delivery system network. They are also concerned with social problem-solving as is the public administrator, and see themselves as behavior change agents. Their generalized value perspective addresses the political conflicts arising from the nature and causes of poverty and inequality, the role of government in society, and the nature and methodology of the decision-making process. Organization and administration become means to ends, not ends in themselves.

The conclusions arise that public administrators will have to assume more governmental responsibility, rather than less. This is seen as a natural evolutionary outgrowth of the need to regulate increased conflict fueled by growing interdependence and rapid societal change. While public agencies are continuing results of governmental intervention, they are condemned to operate in the midst of paradox.     

National development policy and external dependence in Latin America

Many of Latin America's Roman Catholic leaders—clerical and lay—have moved away from previously dominant conservative political positions, as a result both of doctrinal changes decreed by Rome (Pope John and the Council) and of the widespread failure of meaningful development in their, societies. But in most places the position of the hierarchy is only marginally different from that of the government in power (save on issues of basic human rights where these are systematically denied) and the impact of the radical minority is small. Though the church wishes its voice to be heard, it is doubtful whether its views will make much difference: secularization has gone far among decision‐makers, and those who still listen to the clergy are mostly conservative middle‐class women and an uneducated peasantry, still caught up in traditional folk beliefs.