The Reformer's Spirit: How Public Administrators Fuel Training in the Skills of Good Governance

The public administration literature has long identified public administrators as key players in achieving government reform. Public managers may be motivated to provide employee access to training in governance skills by several factors, including the need to fulfill the current functions of government, to expand employee responsibilities, or to reform administrative processes and/or programs. The authors examine the impact of public managers on the availability of governance skills training by observing how the desire to achieve reform influences their training decisions in light of other motivating factors. They find that training in citizen input, client relations, and performance indicators are significantly and substantively more prevalent in organizations when public managers believe that such training is necessary for reform, and that the more “democratic” a skill, the more likely a reform motivation will outweigh other factors.     

Letter from the Editor

ABSTRACT

Organizational theory and research suggests that organizational performance may be affected by environmental circumstances. However, the available evidence on this important issue for public organizations relies primarily on “objective” archival measures of the environment drawn from secondary data sources. Perceptual measures gauging managerial “subjective” views on the nature of the task environment are also likely to be important determinants of organizational outcomes. In this paper, a comprehensive model of the impact of “objective” and “subjective” task environments on the performance of local government service departments is formalized and tested. The results suggest that both objective and subjective environmental munificence are positively related to performance, and that objective and subjective environmental dynamism are negatively related to service achievements. In addition, objective task complexity is negatively related to performance. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.     

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.     

Downsizing,competition, and organizational change in government: Is necessity the mother of invention?

One answer to the question of why government organizations don't perform better—common in academic “public choice” literature but also in folk wisdom—is that resources come too easily, independent of performance. Some businessmanagement literature suggests that a crisis in resource flows can force successful change—”necessity is the mother of invention.” However, the literature also presents an alternative view: that crisis promotes rigid preprogrammed responses, not new ways of behaving. This paper examines the impact of crisis on organizational change in government by examining an organizational change effort in the U.S. federal government (procurement reform during the 1990s) that occurred simultaneously with an organizational crisis involving workforce downsizing and introduction of competition for some buying offices. Using a dataset consisting of a survey of approximately 1,600 frontline government contracting officials, the impact of variation in crisis at different buying offices on variation in behavior change is examined. Necessity was found to be the mother of invention, not rigidity. However, these effects were counteracted by two negative effects of crisis on organizational change: 1) employee resentment over violation of a “social contract at work” reduced behavior change, 2) employee association of the change effort with downsizing reduced attitudinal support for the change, which translated into reduced behavior change. On balance, crisis inhibited organizational change, rather than promoting it. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Market Orientation and Public Service Performance: New Public Management Gone Mad?

The backbone of theory of the market‐based approach New Public Management is that market orientation improves public service performance. In this article, market orientation is operationalized through the dominant theoretical framework in the business literature: competitor orientation, customer orientation, and interfunctional coordination. Market orientation is examined from the vantage point of three stakeholder groups in English local government: citizens, public servants, and the central government’s agent, the Audit Commission. Findings show that market orientation works best for enhancing citizen satisfaction with local services, but its impacts on the performance judgments of local managers or the Audit Commission are negligible. The conclusion discusses important implications of these findings for research, policy, and practice.     

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.     

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.     

Show Who the Money? Teacher Sorting Patterns and Performance Pay across U.S. School Districts

Pay for performance (PFP) remains one of the most controversial policy debates in the New Public Management reform era. Skepticism about PFP in the public sector is often grounded in theories of public service motivation that suggest a misalignment between PFP's focus on extrinsic market‐based pay incentives and intrinsically motivated government workers. Frequently missing from this analysis, however, is any consideration for whether PFP leads to positive “sorting” effects on the composition of a government agency's workforce through attraction, selection, and attrition processes. Using data from two waves of the Schools and Staffing Survey, the authors examine whether PFP influences the sorting patterns of K–12 public schoolteachers across U.S. school districts. Findings show that, on average, school districts that adopted PFP secured new teacher hires who had graduated from colleges and universities with average SAT scores that were about 30 points higher than the new teacher cohorts hired by districts that did not adopt PFP.     

Benefiting from Public Sector Innovation: The Moderating Role of Customer and Learning Orientation

This article examines whether the payoff from engaging in innovation‐generating activities is contingent on an organization's level of customer and learning orientation. The authors suggest that innovative activity is associated with higher public service quality when the level of customer and learning orientation within the focal organization is high. They test this hypothesis by drawing on a novel panel data set covering all public nonspecialist hospital organizations in England. Using dynamic panel data estimation techniques, the authors find strong support for a direct relationship between innovative activity and public service quality and for a moderating role of both customer and learning orientation. These findings call for a contingency perspective on public sector innovation and highlight some of the boundary conditions that need to be in place if public service organizations are to benefit fully from their innovative activities.     

Responsibility to Be Enthusiastic? Public Servants and the Public Face of “Promiscuous Partisanship”

Contemporary public service leaders are no longer the anonymous mandarins of Westminster folklore. Whether giving public speeches to outside organizations or communicating directly with the media, senior public servants are emerging from anonymity to become public actors in their own right. This article undertakes a comparative study across four Westminster jurisdictions—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom—to examine the formal rules and guidelines that apply to public servants when making public statements in their official capacity. Drawing on the late Peter Aucoin's notion of “promiscuous partisanship,” the article argues that public servants are expected to demonstrate a new level of enthusiasm when explaining or justifying government policy to the public. This has implications for the extent to which nonpartisanship can continue to effectively function within Westminster systems.     

Attracting future civil servants with public values? An experimental study on employer branding

Abstract

A frequently cited recommendation of public service motivation (PSM) research is to use PSM in the context of HR marketing. However, empirical evidence demonstrating the usefulness of addressing PSM in the recruitment process is limited. Moreover, we know little about the relative importance of PSM for public employers’ attractiveness. We address this gap using an experimental research design to investigate whether public service motivated individuals differ from extrinsically motivated individuals in terms of their attraction to organizations that emphasize either “traditional” public or private values in their employer branding. Our findings indicate that public service motivated individuals are attracted neither to public nor to private values in employer branding. Furthermore, individuals with very high levels of extrinsic motivation are more attracted to private values employer branding than to public values employer branding and to the control group.     

Motivation Crowding and the Federal Civil Servant: Evidence from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service

ABSTRACT

Pay-for-performance reforms create “high-powered” incentives for civil servants to meet or exceed specified performance objectives as measured by such things as customer satisfaction. Economists and social psychologists have advanced the claim that high-powered incentives for performance may empirically lessen the effect of civil servants' intrinsic motivation toward achieving agency goals (motivation can be “crowded out”). Nonetheless, well-designed pay-for-performance incentives may “crowd in” intrinsic motivation. A number of federal agencies and subagencies have undergone personnel management reforms that raise the specter of this pattern of “motivation crowding.” Does it happen? Is intrinsic motivation crowded in or crowded out? This paper employs item response theory to create measurement models for the estimation a latent trait of intrinsic motivation for employees of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) using data from the 2002 Federal Human Capital Survey. The IRS, but not the OCC, implemented a paybanding system that imposed high-powered performance incentives on supervisors, but not on non-supervisory personnel. Results suggest that the IRS reward structure crowded in intrinsic motivation at the lowest levels, but that at the highest levels of motivation intrinsic motivation is crowded out, a pattern not seen in the OCC data.     

Job Choice and Performance: Revisiting Core Assumptions about Public Service Motivation

Although there has been considerable enthusiasm for public service motivation (PSM) research in recent years, two of PSM's fundamental assumptions have been relatively untested: its impacts on job choice and on job performance. Using panel data from two different studies, we offer stronger observational tests of these core assumptions. The findings provide mixed evidence. When testing PSM's effect on employment choice, we find that PSM measured during a law student's first year predicts the sector in which they are employed after graduation three years later. In a separate study investigating PSM's effect on job performance, we find that government employee PSM does not predict employee absenteeism or supervisor assessments of their in-role and extra-role performance. Our findings support recent calls for a more nuanced theory and analyses of PSM to help better understand its implications for recruiting, retaining, and motivating the workforce used to provide public goods and services.     

Managing Employee Motivation: Exploring the Connections Between Managers’ Enforcement Actions,Employee Perceptions,and Employee Intrinsic Motivation

A number of studies show that the use of external interventions such as command systems and economic incentives can decrease employee intrinsic motivation. Our knowledge of why the size of “the hidden cost of rewards” differs among organizations is, however, still sparse. In this article, we analyze whether local managers—the primary enforcers of external interventions—affect how employees perceive a command system and thereby affect employee intrinsic motivation. Using a multilevel dataset of 1,190 teachers and 32 school principals, we test whether principals’ use of “hard,” “mixed,” or “soft” actions to enforce a command system (obligatory teacher-produced student plans) is associated with teacher intrinsic motivation. Results show that teachers experiencing “hard” enforcement actions have lower intrinsic motivation than teachers experiencing “soft” enforcement actions. As expected by motivation crowding theory, part of this association is mediated by teachers’ student plan requirement perception. These findings support the motivation crowding argument that employee intrinsic motivation depend on the employees’ need for self-determination.     

“Modernizing Government”: Mapping Global Public Policy Networks

Public sector reform is a key policy area, driven by global public policy networks. Research on these networks has been inductive, highlighting organizations like the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD). This article examines “virtual policy networks” (VPNs) on the Web. Using IssueCrawler, we conduct a hyperlink analysis that permits us to map seven VPNs. The first network mapped the hyperlinks of 91 organizations identified through inductive methods. The hypothesis that the virtual network would include all actors identified in the inductive approach was refuted. The other six networks focused on: market mechanisms, open government, performance, public employment, reform, and restructuring. Among the findings, the U.S. government is prominent in the first three, while international organizations dominate the others. VPN rankings show that the World Bank dominates the OECD. When the inductive research is blended with the VPN research, the OECD's prominence increases, and we see the importance of market mechanisms and reform VPNs as pillars of globalization.     

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.”     

What Services are Public? What Aspects of Performance are to be Ranked? The Case of “Services of General Interest”

ABSTRACT

In this article, we focus on the difficulties in evaluating the performance of so-called services of general interest. These services generally include such services as water and electricity supply, telephony, postal services, and public transport, where providers are subjected to certain universal service obligations. Because of the tensions between European internal market requirements and these universal service obligations, there exists considerable debate on the criteria to be used to evaluate the performance of these services. In addition, the status of these public services as “public” or “essential” services is disputed. Rankings of the performance of these services will always reflect a certain dominant definition of performance. Ranking schemes as a result both reflect and create performance.     

Public Service Motivation: A Test of the Job Attraction–Selection–Attrition Model

ABSTRACT

Public service motivation (PSM) research suggests that PSM influences employee sector choice, yet relatively little research examines how time moderates this relationship. In this research we examine public service motivation among private and public sector lawyers. Using survey data that measure sector of employment at multiple time periods, we investigate the stability of the relationship between individual reward orientations and sector employment choice over time. Our findings suggest that while PSM may not clearly predict the employment sector of a respondent's first job, it does increase the likelihood that a respondent's subsequent job is in the public sector.     

THE IDEA OF A PROMOTIONS APPEAL SYSTEM

“The Public Utility did not have a formal Appeals Board system in the form which had been adopted by a number of other government organisations in Australia. Over the years, however, the procedure had been established that senior employees who had been superseded could appeal to the Executive Committee.” “A striking feature of civil service mores is an apparently widely-held belief that special protection must be provided in public service not only against political influence in appointments, but also against what is called ‘internal patronage’. By this is meant protection against arbitrariness, nepotism, and favouritism, all alleged in some quarters to be inherently characteristic of the managerial and supervisory ranks of the public service. The present role of the Civil Service Commission as protector of the individual employee in questions of transfer, promotion and salary increments derives from this fear, and from the belief that intervention of an independent authority is necessary to ensure preferment on the basis of merit. “No convincing evidence has been found that any special factors distinguish the public service from other employment in this respect. Consequently, it cannot be concluded that civil servants need special protective machinery which employees outside the public service do not have. Moreover, there is an impressive array of evidence that the procedures and machinery created to prevent internal patronage have imposed upon the public service a very high cost in terms of delay, unfilled positions, poor selection of personnel, and generai frustration of responsible supervisors.”     

Zone of Acceptance under Performance Measurement: Does Performance Information Affect Employee Acceptance of Management Authority?

Public sector employees have traditionally enjoyed substantial influence and bargaining power in organizational decision making, but few studies have investigated the formation of employee acceptance of management authority. Drawing on the “romance of leadership” perspective, the authors argue that performance information shapes employee attributions of leader quality and perceptions of a need for change in ways that affect their acceptance of management authority, conceptualized using Simon's notion of a “zone of acceptance.” A survey experiment was conducted among 1,740 teachers, randomly assigning true performance information about each respondent's own school. When employees were exposed to signals showing low or high performance, their acceptance of management authority increased, whereas average performance signals reduced employee acceptance of management authority. The findings suggest that performance measurement can alter public sector authority relations and have implications regarding how public managers can use performance information strategically to gain acceptance of management authority and organizational change.