Public Personnel Management

In the current context of public-sector workplaces, there is a more concerted effort to address identity and equity through greater inclusion. The aim of the special issue is to present emergent empirical research assessing organizational attributes, policy, and practice for achieving improved workplace inclusion and individual perceptions of inclusive public-sector workplaces. This special issue highlights studies that advance innovative methodologies to address emergent research questions related to understanding, implementing, and assessing inclusive cultures and perceptions of inclusion. The collection of articles advances the understanding and theories of inclusive practices, policies, and organizational attributes. The authors go beyond the rhetoric of inclusion to parse out how inclusion is defined and operationalized in organizations, the impact of inclusive initiatives, and areas of identity that need to be explicitly included. This research provides a pathway for intentionally making the case for inclusion, not just acknowledgment of diversity.

This article examines the influence of bureaucratic structure on a public employee’s sense of inclusion. We argue that bureaucratic structure influences inclusion by accentuating or minimizing status differences. To test this argument, we investigate three types of bureaucratic structure: centralization, hierarchy, and span of control, all expected to lower inclusion, and “green tape,” or effective organizational rules, expected to increase inclusion. To test these expectations, we use quantitative and qualitative survey data, as well as administrative data collected from the employees of 31 departments in a county government in the Southeastern United States. Findings indicate that higher centralization and wider span of control reduce inclusion, whereas green tape increases inclusion. Hierarchy shows no statistically significant inclusion effect. The article concludes with the implications of these results of public sector organizational design.

Routine, manual, or blue-collar workers play a substantial role in delivering public services, especially at the local level. Despite their prevalence, scholars know little about the specifics of managing these human resources. This contribution challenges common stereotypes about blue-collar workers and argue a truly inclusive knowledge base on public-sector human resource management (HRM) must include these workers. Building upon the job characteristics model and the Ability–Motivation–Opportunity (AMO) model of HRM that links ability-, motivation-, and opportunity- HRM practices to job performance, a research agenda is put forward aiming to better understand blue-collar workers in government. Researchers are challenged to study blue-collar workers in government to truly construct both inclusive workplaces and an inclusive knowledge base in public personnel or public HRM research.

Public organizations have long sought to increase workforce diversity and employee inclusion, a goal that has only increased in recent years. The study examines a racially diverse state government agency to explore how employee perceptions of diversity and inclusion relate to workplace happiness, employee engagement, and job satisfaction. Using original survey data of over 1,800 workers, this study explores how employees perceive diversity and inclusion, how these perceptions relate to overall workplace happiness, and examines the factors that may lead to more positive perceptions of diversity and inclusion. The analysis employs principal component analysis and multilevel regression modeling. The findings underscore the connections between overall workplace happiness and positive perceptions of diversity and inclusion. The key takeaways for public organizations include the importance of senior leadership when it comes to cultivating a diverse and inclusive environment. Finally, a notable finding is the statistically significant increase in positive feelings around inclusion and diversity for historically underrepresented racial groups and that low pay for long-term employees decreases these feelings.

Public sector employers increasingly promote inclusive workplaces, but the impact of such policies on employees’ perceptions of employer attractiveness has rarely been studied. A deeper understanding of how inclusive workplaces relate to employer attractiveness, and how this relationship differs between employment sectors, may inform recruitment policies and retention management. This study tackles this issue and provides a large-scale analysis of an online employer review platform, covering more than 16,000 Germany-based organizations as rated and recommended (or not) by more than 715,000 current and former employees. More specifically, it builds on person–organization fit theory and analyzes how employee referrals are associated with ratings in three dimensions of inclusive workplaces (i.e., inclusion of women, elderly, and disabled). The results show that inclusive workplaces are positively and significantly related to employer attractiveness, both on aggregate and across the three dimensions. The overall relationship is stronger in the case of public employers when compared with private employers, while there are no sector differences in the relationship when comparing public and nonprofit employers. The findings suggest that inclusive workplaces are advantageous in terms of employer attractiveness, not just for the beneficiaries of such policies, but even more so in the public sector.

Inclusion remains a very real and legitimate concern in contemporary workplaces. This research examines how executive orders from the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations influenced Biden era Federal Executive Departments’ strategic plans. This study analyzed the interpretation and understanding of departments’ prioritization and articulation of inclusion across seven core functional areas: (a) leadership; (b) policies, practices, and procedures; (c) human resource management; (d) culture, climate, and norms; (e) emotion, engagement, and perceptions; (f) training and professional development; and (g) accountability and sustainability. The findings reveal that inclusion cannot be mandated or rubberstamped. Inclusion is a subjective endeavor that can result in multiple realities as different employees can experience/observe the same event differently, sometimes infinitely so. The seven core functional areas offer a pathway to embedding inclusive practices and initiatives in the workplace. They create a common approach the federal government can undertake, prioritizing broader knowledge and fundamental awareness of the intertwined nature of experiences, perceptions, emotions, and reasons to foster a sense of belonging.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion—values that target structural inequities in communities and workplaces—have taken on greater urgency in the aftermath of the racial and societal tensions of the past several years. This article examines how selected local governmental jurisdictions are responding to the call for greater equity and inclusion in their organizations. Experiences of selected “best in class” cities are reviewed in their efforts to advance a transformative approach to human resource policies and processes. Strategies for implementation and pitfalls to avoid are identified. The article concludes by acknowledging that this work—work which interrupts the existing patterns that tend to maintain the status quo of structural disadvantages around issues such as hiring, pay equity, and advancement and that limit a culture of inclusion—is hard, is ongoing, and is overdue but is critical and calls for immediate action.

The aim of this article is to unravel the determinants of inclusive leadership by combining mixed methods in two phases to explore and test theoretically grounded personal and organizational antecedents of inclusive leadership. The first qualitative phase used semi-structured interviews with public managers, while the second quantitative phase tested assumptions using survey data from employees working in the Dutch public sector. The findings support the hypothesized positive association of leader humility as well as a flexible culture on inclusive leadership. Public managers also tend to have, both social justice and business case arguments for diversity, affecting their inclusive leadership. Motivation and discretionary room enable public managers to cope with structural constrains. Top management support is important to change organizational culture and norms, motivating and stimulating lower level managers to actively show inclusive leadership. Overall, the findings contribute to a better understanding of inclusive leadership in a public sector context.