Building Support? The Importance of Verbal Rewards for Employee Perceptions of Governance Initiatives

The relationship between managers’ use of rewards and employees’ motivation is controversial, but recent research suggests that employee perceptions of governance initiatives can help us understand the association. Experimental evidence further emphasizes the difference between verbal and material rewards, and this study therefore analyzes real-world public managers’ use of these different rewards and their employees’ perceptions of a governance initiative. This enables us to shed light on a mechanism through which rewards can be connected to motivation. Can rewards contribute to a supportive perception of governance initiatives and potentially crowd-in motivation? This is analyzed in a multi-level dataset with 82 Danish school principals and their 1,273 employees. Managers’ use of contingent verbal rewards is positively associated with employees’ perceptions of the relevant governance initiative, while the corresponding association between material rewards and employee perceptions is weak and statistically insignificant when controlling for other types of managerial behavior. Although the findings need to be tested in an experimental design, they suggest that verbal rewards are a promising tool for public managers.     

The Dynamic Process Tracing Environment (DPTE) as a Tool for Studying Political Communication

The dynamic process tracing environment (DPTE) is a unique and flexible tool permitting researchers to study information search and decision making in various manners. This article describes the rationale behind the system, some history of how it has revolutionized the study of voter decision making in elections, and some of the principles of design within the system.     

US politics and World Bank IDA-lending

Abstract

This paper studies the role of US political factors in the allocation of World Bank concessional lending, where US political interests are proxied by voting similarity in the United Nations General Assembly on issues identified as important by the US Department of State. In contrast to previous studies we find that the US exerted a significant influence on IDA lending during the period 1993–2000. We demonstrate that the influence was both statistically as well as economically significant. Finally, we demonstrate that our result is robust with respect to the omission of the IDA Country Performance Rating index.     

Models of Public Service Provision—When Will Knights and Knaves Be Responsive to Pawns and Queens?

This article extends the framework of Le Grand (2003 Le Grand, J. 2003. Motivation, agency and public policy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 2010 Le Grand, J. 2010. Knights and knaves return: Public service motivation and the delivery of public services. International Public Management Journal, 13(1): 56–71. [Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) to encompass responsiveness, and the main argument is that the combination of employee motivation, user capacity, and models of public service provision potentially has serious implications for responsiveness across service areas. Although research on employee motivation thrives, especially in the public service motivation (PSM) literature, few studies have investigated user capacity empirically, and we know little about the combination of PSM, user capacity and models of service provision. Analyzing four central service areas (day care, schools, hospitals, and universities), we find variations in both user capacity and PSM. Taking this variation as a point of departure we discuss what implications different combinations of employee motivation, user capacity, and models of public service provision may have for responsiveness.     

Does Ownership Matter for Employee Motivation When Occupation Is Controlled for?

The public service motivation literature argues that public employees are more motivated than private employees to deliver public service for the benefit of society. But the reason for this may be that the classical welfare services are predominant in the public sector. This article therefore investigates if ownership matters to employee motivation when occupation is controlled for. The findings show that the employees in both sectors have pro-social motivation, but that public sector employees are more motivated to work for the public interest, whereas private sector employees are more motivated to help individual users of services. The survey data are based on 3,304 Danish employees working in private as well as public organizations.     

Public Service Efficacy

This article develops a measure of user capacity called Public Service Efficacy (PSE), which is applied to four sectors: hospitals, elementary schools, day care, and higher education. Tests of validity and reliability indicate good properties and consistent patterns across three of four sectors. The measure differentiates between users of the same services, and it increases with level of education. This indicates that PSE can enable us to identify individual users with low capacity and sectors with low average user capacity and thus improve our ability to address equity concerns and harvest potential benefits from user involvement in public service provision.     

“We Have Reconquered the Islands”: Figurations in Public Memories of Slavery and Colonialism in Denmark 1948–2012

The fact that Denmark was deeply engaged in the practices of the slave trade and slavery from the seventeenth century to 1848 often goes unnoticed—even in Denmark. For this reason, a number of Danish scholars and artists have characterized Danish ignorance of the colonial past as repression. This article demonstrates that the colonial past has in fact never been repressed, but has instead been subject to figurations, as theorized by Olick (2007). The initial experiences of colonialism have been screened at different points in time rendering the past in versions very far from the actual historical events themselves. Recently, new claims for reparations for slavery and colonialism in the former Danish West Indies have challenged the existing notions of the colonial past in Denmark. These claims have not resulted in an official Danish politics of regret (Olick 2007) as witnessed in other former colonial states. Whereas, a radical break away from the earlier conceptions of the colonial past is demanded, instead new figurations and renarrations have been used to try to incorporate the new challenges to the historical imaginary into the older layers of memory without radically breaking away from it, creating somewhat surprising results that questions the notions of a uniform global memory and understanding of historical injustices.     

Performance Management in the Public Sector: Does It Decrease or Increase Innovation and Performance?

An important discussion in the performance management literature is how performance contingent incentives affect goal attainment. Incentivizing management tools are typically implemented to improve performance, but due to motivation crowding they may decrease innovation and performance. This article focuses on public research institutions and uses both existing performance studies of publications and two new innovation studies of patents to investigate effects of both financial incentives and sanctions within and between universities. Our findings indicate that public managers can create an environment supportive of innovation and performance through the use of performance management tools, but that this is no automatic link.