The Link Between Job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment: Differences Between Public and Private Sector Employees

ABSTRACT

Employees in the public and private sectors experience different working conditions and employment relationships. Therefore, it can be assumed that their attitudes toward their job and organizations, and relationships between them, are different. The existing literature has identified the relationship between organizational commitment and job satisfaction as interesting in this context. The present field study examines the satisfaction–commitment link with respect to differences between private and public sector employees. A sample of 617 Greek employees (257 from the private sector and 360 from the public sector) completed standardized questionnaires. Results confirmed the hypothesized relationship differences: Extrinsic satisfaction and intrinsic satisfaction are more strongly related to affective commitment and normative commitment for public sector employees than for private sector ones. The results are discussed, limitations are considered, and directions for future research are proposed.     

Better than Raw: A Guide to Measuring Organizational Performance with Adjusted Performance Measures

Like oysters on the half shell, some things are better when they're raw. In evaluating the performance of organizations and providing guidance for improving performance, however, raw performance measures, such as test scores or success rates, are often inferior to performance measures adjusted for client and environmental characteristics, or adjusted performance measures (APMs). Using examples from a variety of public services and data on public schools in Georgia, we compare the performance data generated by raw scores and by APMs. We conclude with guidance for constructing and using adjusted performance measures.     

Ethnic Diversity and Organizational Performance: Assessing Diversity Effects at the Managerial and Street Levels

ABSTRACT

As the public sector workforce becomes more ethnically diverse and as government agencies make attempts to manage that diversity, the importance of understanding how diversity affects workplace interactions and work-related outcomes increases. Little public-sector research has examined the impact of diversity on performance outcomes. This article seeks to fill this gap by studying the effects of the ethnic diversity of managers and street level public officials on work-related outcomes. We use basic in-group/out-group theories from psychology to formulate research questions relating diversity and performance, along with empirical research on the effects of diversity on work-related outcomes. We then use data from schools to test the relationship between ethnic diversity and organizational performance, identifying different impacts for managerial diversity and diversity among teachers. Results are consistent across three different models: manager diversity is routinely non-significant in predicting organizational performance, while teacher diversity has a consistently significant, and negative, impact on performance. These findings suggest that process-oriented problems are causing diverse organizations to experience drawbacks instead of gains, and that any benefit that could be drawn from a diversity of viewpoints is overshadowed by communication and collaboration problems.     

Goal Displacement: Assessing the Motivation for Organizational Cheating

A major problem in assessing bureaucratic performance is the difficulty in judging the final social outcomes stemming from the work of public agencies. As a result, public agencies are frequently evaluated based on the outputs they produce. Agency outputs (such as, criminal cases solved, inspections) are easier to measure than the actual contributions agencies make to social outcomes (such as, preventing workplace discrimination, protecting the environment). When agency performance is evaluated in terms of numerical outputs, bureaucrats have an incentive to maximize outputs, regardless of whether maximizing outputs is the preferred strategy for achieving desired social outcomes (a form of goal displacement). This incentive to maximize outputs may lead to organizational cheating, in which public agencies purposely manipulate output levels to portray their work in the best light possible.
This study examines the problems of goal displacement and organizational cheating in Texas public schools. Specifically, we examine the degree to which school districts cheat to manipulate student pass rates on standardized exams. School districts "cheat" by liberally exempting certain students from these exams in hopes of raising overall district pass rates. Scarce institutional resources and extreme task demands are associated with cheating. From a management perspective, this study demonstrates the problems in implementing performance standards. From an academic perspective, it provides the first theory about when and why organizations cheat.     

Workplace Spirituality and Organizational Performance

This article reviews the literature on workplace spirituality, pointing out emergent theories and examining the links between this phenomenon and organizational dynamics. It also examines workplace spirituality in a historical context and compares it to religious beliefs and to established ethical theories and moral principles. The article also looks at organizations in which an emphasis on spiritual values has had an impact on work productivity. While some corporations have institutionalized spirituality, public agencies are reluctant to follow suit for fear of violating the principle of church-state separation. Finally, the article suggests ways that managers and administrators in both the public and the private sector can use workplace spirituality to increase performance and develop ethical organizations.     

Transformational Leadership and Organizational Processes: Influencing Public Performance

Leaders are essential actors in public performance improvement and organizational change. However, a key question has not been adequately addressed in prior literature on the topic: how do leadership processes make a difference? Using data on New York City public schools, this article explores the organizational mechanisms by which a specific form of principal's leadership—transformational leadership—influences objective organizational outcomes as measured by standardized test scores. The empirical results indicate that a principal's transformational leadership style affects student test scores through the mediating effects of purposeful performance information use and stakeholder engagement.     

Perceived Organizational Red Tape and Organizational Performance in Public Services

The claim that perceived organizational red tape hampers public services has become a central theme in public administration research. Surprisingly, however, few scholars have empirically examined the impact of perceived red tape on organizational performance. This article empirically analyzes how perceived organizational red tape among managers and frontline staff relates to objectively measured performance. The data consist of survey responses from teachers and principals at Danish upper secondary schools combined with grade‐level administrative performance data. Based on theories of red tape and motivation crowding, the authors hypothesize that perceived organizational red tape reduces performance within such organizations. The empirical result is a small negative relationship between staff perception of red tape and performance and no relationship between manager‐perceived red tape and performance.     

Strategy Content and Organizational Performance: An Empirical Analysis

This study presents the first empirical test of the proposition that strategy content is a key determinant of organizational performance in the public sector. Strategy content comprises two dimensions: strategic stance (the extent to which an organization is a prospector, defender, or reactor) and strategic actions (the relative emphasis on changes in markets, services, revenues, external relationships, and internal characteristics). Data were drawn from a multiple-informant survey of 119 English local authorities. Measures of strategy content are included in a multivariate model of interauthority variations in performance. The statistical results show that strategy content matters. Organizational performance is positively associated with a prospector stance and negatively with a reactor stance. Furthermore, local authorities that seek new markets for their services are more likely to perform well. These results suggest that measures of strategy content must be included in valid theoretical and empirical models of organizational performance in the public sector.     

Instruments for Exploring Organizational Culture: A Review of the Literature

Organizational culture is widely considered to be one of the most significant factors in reforming and modernizing public administration and service delivery. This article documents the findings of a literature review of existing qualitative and quantitative instruments for the exploration of organizational culture. Seventy instruments are identified, of which 48 could be submitted to psychometric assessment. The majority of these are at a preliminary stage of development. The study's conclusion is that there is no ideal instrument for cultural exploration. The degree to which any measure is seen as "fit for purpose" depends on the particular reason for which it is to be used and the context within which it is to be applied.     

Review Article: Scandinavian Parties in the Internal and External Arena

Party research lived a relatively quiet life during the 1970s and 1980s in the western world, and to some degree also in Scandinavia, although the central role of parties in the Scandinavian democracies made it impossible for political scientists to completely ignore political parties in their research. However, from the end of 1980s, political party research has been revitalized, and the number of publications has increased substantially. The three books reviewed here are part of the upswing during 1997, which, of course, includes other books and publications from that particular year. Why this renewed interest in studying political parties? For a long period after World War II, Scandinavian political parties were characterized as stable mass organizations. In 1973, the established Danish political system suffered an electoral backlash, and the shock waves gave fuel to speculations of party decline in electoral behavior studies. At the same time, similar trends were visible in Finland and Norway. Much later, interest focused on finding the same signs of decline in the internal party arena. The discussion is still alive, and during this process students of political science have gained new knowledge about parties and their organizations in Scandinavia.     

Penetrating the Performance Predicament: Communication as a Mediator or Moderator of Organizational Culture's Impact on Public Organizational Performance

The role of communication in public administration has been emphasized over time in public administration theory. Nonetheless, communication—with the exception of political communication—has been neglected in scholarship. Garnett's performance predicament posits the difficulty of showing linkages between communication and performance. This paper explores the role that communication plays in achieving organizational performance through a review of research that bears on communication's direct and indirect influences on performance. The primary thrust is communication's indirect role in achieving performance by mediating or moderating the effects of organizational culture on performance, thereby adding another perspective on the culture–performance relationship. Adapting the typology of Zammuto and Krakower, two types of organizational culture—rule-oriented culture and mission-oriented culture—are examined to explore how the relationship between organizational culture and organizational performance is influenced by communication. The analysis supports the claim that communication acts as a meta-mechanism for shaping and imparting culture in mission-oriented organizational cultures, thereby influencing performance. In particular, task orientation, feedback, and upward communication have positive effects on perceived organizational performance in mission-oriented organizations but potentially negative effects on performance in rule-oriented cultures.     

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.     

Reinvention As Reform: Assessing the National Performance Review

The conclusion of the Clinton Administration presents an opportune time to investigate the outcomes of the National Performance Review (NPR). Any such evaluation, however, is complicated by the nature of the objectives sought, many of which relate to subtle and elusive elements of organizational life: empowering employees, inducing a less risk-adverse culture, and enhancing the quality of service delivery. The strategy employed here as a means of gaining insight into such phenomena was to couple a broad review of government-wide survey results with an in-depth investigation into the impact of NPR on a single agency, the Social Security Administration. A conclusion is that many of the NPR's higher-order objectives have not been met on a systemic basis. While a variety of proximate explanations for this finding can be identified, a more fundamental explanation relates to a failure by the sponsors to adjust their strategy to account for basic differences between NPR and past reforms.     

Top Management Turnover and Organizational Performance: A Test of a Contingency Model

A crucial test of whether “management matters” is whether changes in the team at the top of an organization make a difference. Focusing on turnover in the collective senior team rather than successions of individual chief executives, this article argues that the impact of leadership succession is contingent upon prior organizational performance. The evidence on English local government shows that changes in the top management team lead to improvements when initial performance is bad, but result in deterioration when initial performance is good. The results support the view that high‐performing organizations should attempt to retain members of their senior management team, whereas low performers should seek to replace them.     

Using Performance Measures for Federal Budgeting: Proposals and Prospects

The political system, the popular press, and the public have recently been concerned about measuring government performance. This concern for measuring performance should imply a concern for measuring it correctly. With this in mind, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently conducted an analysis of the use of performance measures in the budget process. The study attempts to review the issues raised by performance budgeting in the context of past and current efforts to link performance measures and budgeting. This article focuses on two portions of that study: The status of the current federal performance measurement efforts and specific observations designed to inject a note of caution into the current debate about performance measurement and budgeting.