An Integrative Model of Empowerment and Individuals' In-Role and Extra-Role Performance in the Korean Public Sector: Moderating Effects of Organizational Individualism and Collectivism

ABSTRACT

While empowerment has emerged as a new management paradigm, virtually no research has combined structural and psychological approaches to develop an integrative approach. Moreover, prior research has not examined the effect of the cultural context on the relationship between empowerment and performance. Drawing on a sample of public employees working in the city of Seoul, the largest local government in Korea, this study examined the effects of structural and psychological empowerment on both in-role and extra-role performance, and the moderating effects of organizational individualism and collectivism. Of the 400 questionnaires, 191 usable respondents, combining employees' and managers' questionnaires, were returned. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM). Results of the analyses indicated that psychological empowerment mediates the relationship between structural empowerment and extra-role performance, and that organizational collectivism moderates the relationship between psychological empowerment and extra-role performance. Based on these results, the implications of the findings are discussed.     

A Review of: “Lessons of Disaster: Policy Change After Catastrophic Events by Thomas A. Birkland”

ABSTRACT

Managers in many public domains have to meet major challenges today, which is why it is essential to focus on their working conditions in order to develop a sustainable situation. In the present study, the aim was to explore different types of managerial situations and how they discriminate in health, motivation, and performance outcomes. Using the job demands-resources model as a framework, four demands and three resources were included in a cluster analysis in order to answer the research question. In total, 548 managers in Sweden participated, including heads of department, middle managers, firstline managers, team leaders, and functional managers. The most important finding was that the eight clusters of managerial situations that were found discriminated in a distinct way against each other regarding health, motivation, and performance. The results can be used as guidance for organizational intervention as both very satisfactory and very unsatisfactory situations are identified.     

(De)Composing Public Value: In Search of Basic Dimensions and Common Ground

ABSTRACT

In re-emphasizing public organizations’ societal and related normative functions, public value (PV) discourse is one way of approaching public sector performance. Although PV research is flourishing, empirical studies are still lacking. We provide evidence of the basic dimensions of PV creation in Germany's Federal Labor Agency. The results suggest a three-part factor structure and a second-order factor, indicating a broad notion of performance across different constituencies. The factors provide a framework to measure any public organization's perceived PV contribution. Our study complements the existing process perspective of PV, as developed by Moore (1995).     

Public Service Motivation,Task, and Non-task Behavior: A Performance Appraisal Experiment with Korean MPA and MBA Students

ABSTRACT

Appraisals of public employees are important for a host of reasons, and particularly so with the increasing emphasis on pay-for-performance systems and performance-based management in the public sector. However, managerial appraisals of employees can be somewhat subjective and our understanding of the appraisal process in the public sector is largely U.S.-centric. In this study, we explore whether characteristics of managers, like a rater's public service motivation (PSM), affect appraisal outcomes for their subordinates. Using a mixed experimental design, we analyze these dynamics in a non-U.S. context with MBA and MPA students enrolled in one of Korea's top universities. We find that rater PSM moderates the influence of both task and non-task behavior on an employee's performance appraisal.     

Mayoral Public Sector Work Experience and Tax Collection Performance in Colombian Local Governments

ABSTRACT

Local governments in Latin America tend to have limited capacity to collect taxes. Existing theory explains tax collection performance as a function of political, socio-economic, and cultural factors. Yet across Latin America, tax collection performance varies greatly between localities that are similar along these dimensions. We suggest that organizational capacity, represented by managers' human capital, explains variation in local tax collection performance. We test this theoretical idea against panel data on most Colombian local governments, where elected mayors are the top managers determining the local tax collection strategy. We examine two indicators of tax collection performance: (1) the per-capita amount of property tax collected and (2) property tax collected as a percentage of total property valuation. Controlling for important confounders, the length of the mayor's prior public sector work experience is positively associated with the per-capita amount of property tax collected but not the percentage of total property valuation collected in property tax. Our results suggest that Colombian mayors gain relevant skills over their career. Our study has implications for other developing countries with a similar property tax collection system.     

The Impact of Customer Orientation on Government Employee Performance

ABSTRACT

This article explores the impact of “customer service” orientation on government employee performance. Although public organizations have been encouraged to become customer-centered organizations, concerns exist about the application of such market orientations to the management of government organizations. This article joins in the customer orientation debate by exploring the impact of customer orientation on employee motivation and performance. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis of data from civilian employees at a Department of Defense installation, this study explores the impact of customer orientation on employee performance and motivation, across time and work roles.

Consistent with previous research that suggests that customer orientation is positively associated with public and private employee performance and work attitudes, the results of this study suggest that customer service orientation has a strong positive impact on employee performance and motivation. Employee customer orientation provides a connection to the organization's goals consistent with employees' affective and normative values of public service, and feedback necessarily to improve service delivery. The impact of formal management systems may be enhanced by their ability to strengthen an employee's customer orientation. Ultimately, however, efforts to create a more “market”-based orientation focused on institutional customers who purchase services may have limited impact, or even a deleterious effect on, employee performance and motivation, unless also accompanied by formal linkages to service beneficiaries.     

Collaborative Behavior and the Performance of Government Agencies

ABSTRACT

While collaboration among individuals, work groups, and organizations is central for understanding the performance of public agencies, most studies have focused on collaboration between organizations or sectors. We develop a model that focuses on two types of collaborative behavior: between persons (both horizontal and vertical) and between work units. We empirically test our hypotheses using data on work collaboration and perceptions of public agency performance from the United States federal government. We introduce a method for estimating the impact of different types of collaborative behavior that also accounts for nonlinear effects and a dependent variable that takes ordered values. We find that intra-organizational collaborative behavior has a large impact on organizational performance and that horizontal collaborative behavior between workers has the greatest impact among the specific types.     

Does Public Service Motivation Lead to Budget Maximization? Evidence from an Experiment

ABSTRACT

One of the most enduring theories in public management is Niskanen's model of the budget-maximizing bureaucrat. While popular, the image of bureaucrats relentlessly advocating for larger budgets has been frequently attacked. A chief criticism is that the assumption of self-interest does not align with budget maximization, since bureaucrats have little direct way to benefit from larger budgets. A more plausible assumption that offers a stronger causal logic for maximization behavior is that bureaucrats are motivated to help others. If they believe that spending on public goods is beneficial to society, public employees may be likely to advocate for larger budgets. Using vignette-experiment methodology, this article finds that individuals with higher levels of public service motivation do not advocate for significantly higher budgets. The results undercut an alternative theoretical means to support Niskanen's original theory, thereby further undermining the budget maximization model.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of International Public Management Journal for the following free supplemental resource: Survey Text with Vignettes.]     

Housing,Welfare Reform,and Self‐Sufficiency: An Assessment of the Family Self‐Sufficiency Program

Abstract

Recently passed welfare reform legislation may have adverse impacts on the incomes of public and assisted housing residents and hence on the rental income of housing authorities. One way to dampen these impacts is to help welfare‐reliant tenants find jobs. The Family Self‐Sufficiency (FSS) programs sponsored by many housing authorities may be an important means of doing this. This article presents the findings of an early study of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's FSS program and explores the program's potential for dampening the impacts of welfare reform. The study involved a mail survey of the coordinators of 564 FSS programs.

The survey results indicate a surprising lack of interest in the early FSS program among potential participants. The results also indicate that these programs are inadequately staffed, and that the programs’ potential to dampen the effects of welfare reform are limited by the relatively small percentage of welfare‐reliant residents enrolled.     

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.     

Why Performance Information Use Varies Among Public Managers: Testing Manager-Related Explanations

ABSTRACT

This article examines the use of performance information by public managers. It begins with a systematic review of the literature which concludes that we know relatively little about the individual characteristics of managers who report a frequent use of these data. Studies that have focused on people-related explanations have mostly tested socio-demographic variables but have only found inconclusive evidence. This article suggests theorizing more complex individual explanations. Drawing from other fields' middle-range theories, the article speculates about the effects of thus far disregarded manager-related factors. An empirical test based on survey data from German cities reveals the following preliminary findings: performance information use is explained by a high level of data ownership, creative cognitive learning preferences, the absence of cynicism, and a distinct public service motivation. Identity and emotional intelligence were found to be insignificant along with the managers' socio-demographic characteristics.     

Risk Misallocation in Public–Private Partnership Projects in China

ABSTRACT

This article attempts to compare the preferred and actual risk allocation and then to evaluate the impact of risk misallocation (if any) on project performance. The results show a significantly negative relationship between project performance and risk misallocation. The smaller the degree of risk misallocation was, the more successful the project would be. One group of three risks (including “Corruption,” “Government's intervention,” and “Government's reliability”) and the other group of three risks (including “Approval and permit,” “Immature juristic system,” and “Land acquisition”) were found to contribute considerably to the prediction of project performance. This article provides information on the impact of risk misallocation on project performance in China's public–private partnership (PPP) projects. To enter and perform well in China's PPP market, private firms should pay particular attention to the identified risks.     

Knights and Knaves Return: Public Service Motivation and the Delivery of Public Services

ABSTRACT

There are several models for delivering public services such as health care or education, most of which can be summarised under the headings of trust, mistrust, voice, and choice. Each contains assumptions concerning the motivation of the professionals and others who provide the service concerned: that is, the extent to which they are “knaves,” motivated primarily by self-interest, or “knights,” motivated by altruism and the desire to provide a public service. This article highlights the assumptions concerning motivation implicit in each of the delivery models, illustrating the points made by reference to the author's experience as a senior policy adviser to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and to some evidence on the performance of public services under the different models.     

The Public Eye and the Citizen-Voyeur: Photography as a Performance of Power

This paper argues that photography is best grasped not as a medium of visual communication, but as a manifest performance of the power to make visible. As such, photographic practices are central to the experience and demarcation of private/public boundaries in advanced media cultures. In the private domain, photography is both a ritualized domestic activity and provides conventional and definitive representations of the domestic. These functions are ostensibly opposed to photography's role in the public realm: the same visual technology becomes, in the mass media, both the index and agent of publicness itself, with the paparazzi?especially in the aftermath of Princess Diana's death?symbolizing the violation of the private. The paper explores the ways in which photographic performance at the public/private boundary dramatizes power relations through forms of social transparency, voyeurism and memoralization. It also asks whether momentary crises in the dominant scopic regime can provide the basis for alternative ‘uncanny’ visual practices that are tenable and empowering.     

Monitoring across Sectors: Examining the Effect of Nonprofit and For‐Profit Contractor Ownership on Performance Monitoring in State and Local Contracts

What is the effect of contractors' nonprofit and for‐profit ownership on the scope and nature of performance measurement used by government agencies? Quantitative and qualitative data were generated through semistructured interviews administered to a sample of state and local public agencies and private contractors across five jurisdictions. The findings of this study suggest that monitoring officers working with nonprofit rather than for‐profit contractors are more likely to rely on qualitative performance data and examine equitable access to services, contractors' reputation, and compliance with industry rules and regulations. Although organizational ownership may not be well understood by practitioners, performance appears to be conceptualized differently across sectors. The author calls for a better understanding of the impact of the identified differences in performance measurement on the effectiveness of contract monitoring.     

Evaluating Urban Public Schools: Parents,Teachers, and State Assessments

Among the most contentious questions in public administration is how the performance of public organizations should be evaluated, and nowhere is this issue more salient than in urban public schools. While significant attention has been devoted to studying administrative measures of public organizations, the views of citizens concerning performance have been widely criticized and are not frequently gathered by schools. How these assessments relate to each other is central to many questions in education policy (e.g., choice, equity) and has important implications for democracy, bureaucratic professionalism, and public performance. This debate can be viewed as focusing on the distinction between convergent validity and discriminant validity. Using data from New York City's public school system with a cross‐sectional time‐series approach, parent and teacher evaluations are compared to government records of schools’ characteristics and performance. The findings suggest that parents and teachers are able to conduct intelligent, meaningful evaluations of school quality.     

Size Matters: Toward a Contingency Theory of Diversity Effects on Performance

Abstract

This study examines the diversity-performance link by focusing on two types of diversity—gender and functional—in the context of governing boards of 24 quasi-government agencies in Korea over 16?years (2000–2015). Although public management scholarship contains evidence regarding the importance of diversity in public organizations, there is little consensus on what constitutes diversity and how it affects public sector performance. This study expands the scope of dialogues by highlighting multidimensional characteristics of diversity and the contingent nature of diversity effects. Multiplicative interaction models confirm that there are distinctive effects of different types of diversity on performance, and the relationship is moderated by the size of the group to which minorities belong. While the effect of board gender diversity is limited in our data, the effect of having a female chief executive is positively significant with decreasing marginal effect as the number of board members increases. On the other hand, the relationship of functional diversity in the boardroom to agency performance is negative, while the negative marginal effect decreases and becomes positive when board size rises above a critical number.     

Trade Winds: NAFTA and the Rational Public

The sharp increase in suppport for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) poses a challenge to many of our conceptions of public opinion. Most large shifts in public opinion follow major events. Based on models estimated from the September to November NBC News/ Wall Street Journal surveys, I show this was not the case with respect to public opinion on NAFTA. Instead, the increase in support for the pact reflected a slower response to a public debate over the merits of free trade versus protectionism. As the debate proceeded, large segments of the public— including the least interested—developed more highly constrained belief systems. By the end of the public discourse, the most and least interested citizens both linked attitudes on the merits of trade to their positions on NAFTA and to their evaluations of the elites on each side of the issue. People made up their minds on NAFTA on the basis of arguments about trade, not about their own self-interest. The NAFTA case suggests that there may be a rational public at the individual level after all, even among people who may not usually be interested in public affairs.     

Comment on Roberto G. Quercia and George C. Galster's “The challenges facing public housing authorities in a brave new world”

Abstract

We find Quercia and Galster's article on reforming public housing an intriguing academic exercise that contains some key insights useful to practitioners. However, the article fails to consider several key elements in the provision of assisted housing that make their “constrained quadrilemma” much less problematic than they assume.

The article ignores the tenant‐based certificate/voucher approach to meeting the housing needs of low‐income and very low income persons and households. This is a significant oversight, in that many public housing authorities (PHAs) manage a larger portfolio of certificates than of PHA‐owned housing. If the litmus test of the success of public housing's “reinvention” is the extent to which it is able to maximize both the number of low‐income households served and their social and geographic integration, then public housing's extensive use of certificate/voucher programs demonstrates a road out of the quadrilemma.     

The Impact of Political Debate on Government Trust: Reminding the Public What the Federal Government Does

Americans' confidence in government is low by historical standards. We fielded a national telephone survey to examine influences on government confidence and whether public discontent was affected by altering the salience of specific government operations. We used a question order experiment where we alternated between first asking a general question about confidence in government and first asking about confidence in specific government operations. We found that posing the specific policy questions first elevated general confidence more than the reverse. The largest and most noticeable effects were observed for Republicans and those most knowledgeable and attentive to politics. Findings of context effects and the partisan subgroup differences are consistent with existing theories on public opinion change as well as with previous question order experiments. But, evidence that the cognitive elite was especially influenced by question order challenges previous theories that presumed that its sophistication made it immune to influence. We suggest that education and political knowledge expand rather than contract the opportunities for priming.