Transformational Leadership and Public Service Motivation: Driving Individual and Organizational Performance

Despite growing evidence about prosocial motivations and their effects on employee behavior, how can new public service motivation research translate into more effective management practices—which, so far, regrettably remain underdeveloped? Increasingly, public service motivation studies have moved from understanding what motivates public servants to exploring how public service motives influence performance. Similarly, greater attention is now paid to the practices of transformational leadership. Drawing on concepts from transformational leadership, this essay explores how managers can harness the positive aspects of public service motivation to enhance employee and organizational performance and outlines strategies that can help managers incorporate public service motivation values across management systems.     

Can Managerial Turnover Be a Good Thing? The Impact of City Manager Change on Local Fiscal Outcomes

A long line of private sector research outlines the positive and negative impacts of employee and managerial turnover on organizations. However, public administration scholars often treat turnover as a phenomenon to be avoided and focus more on the antecedents of managerial turnover than on its consequences for public organizations. Within the context of local government, the impact of city manager turnover on organizational outcomes is unclear. This article identifies how city manager turnover influenced local fiscal outcomes during the Great Recession. Analysis of 165 council‐manager municipalities in California, more than one‐third of which experienced turnover during the height of the recession, allows for empirical examination of the impact of turnover during the test period of 2008–11 on local fiscal outcomes in 2011 and 2012, specifically the degree and incidence of budget deficit spending. The results demonstrate that managerial turnover may lead to better fiscal outcomes, conditional on how long the new manager has held the position. This suggests that while cities that hired new managers during the recession did better than those that did not, the earlier in the recession a manager was hired, the better.     

The Impacts of Employee Benefits,Procedural Justice,and Managerial Trustworthiness on Work Attitudes: Integrated Understanding Based on Social Exchange Theory

Recent public management literature has emphasized the influence of human resource management (HRM) policies, including traditional benefits, family‐friendly benefits, procedural justice, and managerial trustworthiness, on work attitudes. However, little research in public administration has explored more detailed impacts of each HRM policy. This article provides an integrated understanding of the impacts of HRM policies using social exchange theory. In addition, the moderating impacts of procedural justice and managerial trustworthiness on the relationship between employee benefits and work attitudes are examined. Using the Federal Human Capital Survey 2008 data set, the authors find that two types of employee benefits, procedural justice, and managerial trustworthiness are positively related to job satisfaction, whereas family‐friendly benefits, managerial trustworthiness, and procedural justice are negatively associated with turnover intention. The implications of these findings are thoroughly discussed.     

Motivated to Adapt? The Role of Public Service Motivation as Employees Face Organizational Change

Researchers concerned with organizational change have consistently emphasized the role that the work environment plays in employee acceptance of change. Underexamined in the public management literature, however, is the role that employee values, particularly public service motivation (PSM), may play in employee acceptance of change. Some scholars have noted a positive correlation between employee PSM and organizational change efforts; this article extends this work by attempting to isolate the mechanisms that explain this relationship. Using data from a survey of employees in a city undergoing a reorganization and reduction in workforce, the authors find that only employees who scored high on a single dimension of PSM—self‐sacrifice—were more likely than others to support organizational change. Rather than support changes for their potential to improve public service, this finding suggests that employees with higher PSM may simply be less likely to resist changes that might disadvantage them personally.     

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.     

Public Service Motivation Research: Lessons for Practice

Public service motivation research has proliferated in parallel with concerns about how to improve the performance of public service personnel. However, scholarship does not always inform management and leadership. This article purposefully reviews public service motivation research since 2008 to determine the extent to which researchers have identified lessons for practice. The results of the investigation support several lessons—among them using public service motivation as a selection tool, facilitating public service motivation through cooperation in the workplace, conveying the significance of the job, and building leadership based on public service values. These results are important because they offer evidence that the field is coalescing around tactics that managers and leaders can use to address enduring concerns about employee motivation in the public sector. They also prompt us to articulate ideas that can guide a tighter integration of research and practice moving forward.     

Information Handling Challenges in Complex Systems

ABSTRACT:

Even when leaders exhibit desirable leadership styles, the effectiveness of their behaviors on organizational outcomes may be influenced by the structural distance between them and their followers. Nonetheless, previous empirical research on the relationships between leadership styles and outcomes has largely ignored the role of leader distance in public administration. Using panel data drawn from the US federal government, this study explores how transformational and transactional leadership styles affect employee turnover behavior and how span of control as a proxy for leader distance moderates those relationships. The statistical results indicate that transformational leadership is negatively related to turnover behavior, whereas transactional leadership is positively related to turnover behavior. Further analysis shows that span of control significantly moderates the relationships between the two leadership styles and employee turnover behavior such that organizations benefit more from transformational leaders with a broad span of control than from those with a narrow span of control. Conversely, transactional leaders with a narrow span of control are better at reducing turnover than those with a broad span of control. The implications and contributions of these results for public administration are discussed.     

The Anatomy of Retention in the U.S. Federal Government: Exit,Voice, or Money?

Employee turnover—due to retirement, moving from one work unit to another, or leaving an organization entirely—imposes considerable costs on organizations. While private organizations make use of several high-powered incentives to retain workers, public organizations typically lack comparable incentives. Fortunately, public employees frequently possess stronger intrinsic motives to stay. Our results indicate that employee voice is an especially useful tool in the U.S. federal government. Evidence is also consistent with a substantial “contagion” effect: when others in an agency seek to leave, individual employees in that agency are more likely to report turnover intentions than similar employees in agencies with more “stayers.”     

Tax and Expenditure Limitations,Salary Reductions,and Public Employee Turnover

This study examines the relationship between salary and employee turnover behavior by analyzing a natural experiment created by the New Jersey Superintendent Salary Cap (NJSSC), which caused salary reductions for 25 percent of NJ superintendents in the initial year. I find that an additional $10,000 reduction in base salary due to the NJSSC corresponds to a 16 percent increase in the likelihood of superintendent turnover. This suggests salary expenditures are important public policy levers to retain employees. This study also contributes to prior research on tax and expenditure limitations (TELs) by documenting one of the first TELs placed directly on public employees.     

So Hard to Say Goodbye? Turnover Intention among U.S. Federal Employees

Why do U.S. federal government employees choose to leave the federal service? By focusing on turnover intentions, this article develops propositions about why employees anticipate leaving their jobs along three dimensions: (1) demographic factors, (2) workplace satisfaction factors, and (3) organizational/relational factors. Two distinct measures of turnover intention are advanced that reflect those who intend to leave their agency for another position within the federal government and those who intend to leave the federal government for an outside position. The 2006 Federal Human Capital Survey is used to test the impacts of three clusters of independent variables on these measures of turnover intention. The findings suggest that overall job satisfaction and age affect turnover consistently. Practical recommendations are outlined for public managers seeking to boost employee retention.     

Revisiting the Motivational Bases of Public Service: Twenty Years of Research and an Agenda for the Future

How has research regarding public service motivation evolved since James L. Perry and Lois Recascino Wise published their essay “The Motivational Bases of Public Service” 20 years ago? The authors assess subsequent studies in public administration and in social and behavioral sciences as well as evolving definitions of public service motivation. What have we learned about public service motivation during the last two decades? What gaps in our understanding and knowledge have appeared with respect to the three propositions offered by Perry and Wise? This essay charts new directions for public service motivation scholarship to help clarify current research questions, advance comparative research, and enhance our overall understanding of individuals’ public service motives.     

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.     

Bridging the Public Service Motivation and Calling Literatures

Public administration research suggests there may be disparity in the extent to which public servants experience their work as a calling. The purpose of this article is to better illustrate and integrate calling research, which grows out of the positive organizational scholarship movement, into how we understand public service motives. The calling scholarship offers a productive way to view differences in public servants' orientations toward their work. Integrating calling into the public administration scholarship—particularly the public service motivation scholarship—provides insights to researchers and managers about how to help employees discover a deeper sense of meaningfulness in their work. In presenting the arguments and corresponding conceptual framework, the authors seek to supplement rather than replace the public service motivation construct. The authors articulate a research agenda that they believe will strengthen and enrich research on public servants' experience with their work.     

Activating the Forces of Public Service Motivation: Evidence from a Low‐Intensity Randomized Survey Experiment

Employees with higher public service motivation (PSM) are likely to perform better in public service jobs. However, research on how practitioners may capitalize on this knowledge is sparse. This article expands the understanding of how to activate employee PSM, which is understood as a human resource that is present in the work environment. Using a randomized survey experiment with 528 law students, this article shows how low‐intensity treatments may activate PSM and how the effect of PSM activation efforts compares with efforts to activate another, less self‐determined type of motivation (relating to the need for feelings of self‐importance). The findings are robust and suggest that low‐intensity efforts to activate PSM have a positive effect on an individual's behavioral inclinations. However, efforts toward the activation of motivation relating to feelings of self‐importance appear to engender an effect of similar size.     

Administrative Error Control: The Role of Value-Based HR Practices,I-Deals,and Organizational Politics

Value-based HR practices, which cultivate public values in public employees, may activate employee’s upward negotiations with the employer to go beyond administrative norms and constraints. The primary research aim is to assess the role of value-based HR practices in fostering idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) among public employees, which in turn contribute to the effectiveness of administrative error control. The research also investigates whether organizational politics undermines the momentum of i-deals in public employees. The source of data for the research includes the responses from public employees and their direct supervisors from People’s Committees of Wards—the grassroots level of government—in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The data were then analyzed using structural equation modeling. Through the research findings, the effect chain from value-based HR practices through i-deals to administrative error control was confirmed. The negative effect of organizational politics on i-deals was also grounded in the data analysis.     

Shaping Psychological Contracts in the Public and Private Sectors: A Human Resources Management Perspective

ABSTRACT

Organizational choices shape the way in which individuals experience their employment relationship. Given the multiple differences between the public and the private sectors, this study seeks to identify variations in employee perceptions of their psychological contract depending upon the sector in which they work. The psychological contract is seen as lying at the heart of the employer-employee exchange relationship. The study took place in Greece, and involved 398 employees from the public sector and 747 from the private sector. Participants were asked to evaluate 41 organizational obligations, on the basis of how important they believed them to be in terms of a desirable employment relationship. Factor analyses revealed 10 contract dimensions, while multiple analyses of variance suggested that the sector of employment and organizational tenure had a significant impact—both separately and in combination—on employees' view of their contract. The practical implications for effective human resources management and the limitations of the research are discussed at the end of the article.     

Managing in the Regulatory Thicket: Regulation Legitimacy and Expertise

Although the influence of government regulation on organizations is undeniable, empirical research in this field is scarce. This article investigates how the understanding of and attitudes toward government regulation among public, nonprofit, and for‐profit managers affect organizational performance, using U.S. nursing homes as the empirical setting. Findings suggest that managers’ perceptions of regulation legitimacy—views of regulation fairness, inspectors’ effectiveness, and internal utility of the mandates—positively affect service quality. Subgroup analysis suggests that managers’ views of regulation matter in nonprofit and for‐profit organizations but not in public organizations. In nonprofit homes, performance declines when managers report higher regulatory expertise—better knowledge of the regulatory standards. In for‐profit facilities, frequent communication with regulators lowers quality. These findings suggest that the regulated entities’ views of government regulation are central to their success, which necessitates improvements in the regulatory process.     

Anarchy as a Model for Network Governance

This article centers on two interconnected ideas that have garnered increasing attention in public administration: (1) a shift away from centralized institutional authority structures and (2) the concomitant rise of networks in the public sector. While network theories have been viewed as ushering in a new paradigm for understanding governance, they remain rooted in the language and framework of hierarchical bureaucratic systems. The author suggests that embracing an approach not grounded in a centralized institutional perspective may clarify network theories in public administration. Specifically, the author argues that anarchism has much to add to our understanding of networks and illustrates how an anarchist perspective may advance our understanding of networks in three areas—network formation, network stability, and accountability in networks—in which the hierarchical perspective has generated persistent questions.     

We All Need Help: “Big Data” and the Mismeasure of Public Administration

Rapid advances in our ability to collect, analyze, and disseminate information are transforming public administration. This “big data” revolution presents opportunities for improving the management of public programs, but it also entails some risks. In addition to potentially magnifying well‐known problems with public sector performance management—particularly the problem of goal displacement—the widespread dissemination of administrative data and performance information increasingly enables external political actors to peer into and evaluate the administration of public programs. The latter trend is consequential because external actors may have little sense of the validity of performance metrics and little understanding of the policy priorities they capture. The author illustrates these potential problems using recent research on U.S. primary and secondary education and suggests that public administration scholars could help improve governance in the data‐rich future by informing the development and dissemination of organizational report cards that better capture the value that public agencies deliver.     

Social Media and Value Conflicts: An Explorative Study of the Dutch Police

The use of social media produces new value conflicts in public governance. The police force is a public organization directly confronted with these changes. However, there is no systematic understanding of these conflicts in daily police practice or of the coping strategies used. This article presents an explorative understanding of the value conflicts and coping strategies within the police force by combining the literature on social media use in the public sector and the literature on value conflicts and by conducting a case study within the Dutch police. The empirical findings show, first, a growing emphasis on conflicts related to the values that are strongly embedded in social media use—specifically, conflicts between efficiency and participation and between transparency and lawfulness. Second, although dynamic coping strategies were expected, the research reveals that the police often use a conservative coping strategy to deal with these rapid changes.