Review of Public Personnel Administration

Public service motivation (PSM) is a needs-based approach to motivation. People may sate this need in different ways, including direct government service. This article investigates the relationship between individuals’ PSM and their work sector (pubic, nonprofit, or for-profit) preferences. It asks, “Does PSM affect an individual’s preference for the sector of the economy in which they would ideally be employed?” Our findings indicate that PSM, measured in dimensional form, is a moderate indicator of an individual’s sector preference: as PSM increases (particularly, the Self-Sacrifice dimension), the attractiveness of working in the public and nonprofit sector, relative to the for-profit sector, also increases. Focusing on a preservice sample of undergraduate students allows us to conclude that PSM is a need people have prior to entering the workplace, and it may indeed drive whether an individual works in the government, nonprofit, or for-profit sector.

This article investigates the effect of performance management and explores one factor—trust in one’s supervisor—as a critical facilitator of it. Although improving performance is a prominent issue in public management and the term, performance management, is in heavy use in the public sector, systematic investigations on the subject are relatively rare. Defining performance management as a human resource management tool, this research empirically tests the associations between performance management and two outcomes: perceived work-unit performance and perceived agency performance. In addition, it examines the role of trust as a facilitator of the successful implementation of performance management. Using the Merit Principles Survey 2005, we test the ideas. Ordered logit regression analyses confirm that performance management promotes perceived performance of both work-unit and agency, and the leverages are further increased under a high level of trust in supervisors.

This study explores the experience of disputant–disputant interpersonal justice in workplace mediation in a public organization. The results show that there are significant differences between employees’ and supervisors’ experiences of disputant–disputant interpersonal justice. Moreover, the results indicate that the quality of participants’ interactions in mediation is significantly related to the quality of the mediated outcome in terms of settlement or case resolution. When disputants experience interpersonal justice with each other during mediation, they are more likely to reach a full resolution to the dispute. When disputants corroborate each other’s reports of their own behaviors during mediation, they are also more likely to achieve settlement of the mediation. Disputants who received an apology from the other party were more likely to report a settlement to the dispute. In sum, this field test supports the theory of disputant–disputant interpersonal justice and provides evidence that it is an important element in the mediated resolution of a workplace dispute.

Job satisfaction is frequent studied, yet few studies are concerned with how the organizational decision structure influences job satisfaction. This is despite the major trend of employing more decentralized organizational decision structures, for example, because of New Public Management (NPM). We investigate how the organizational decision structure influences the job context (role clarity and job complexity) and which influence this then has on job satisfaction. We propose a hypothesized theoretical model which we investigate by estimating a structural equation model (using LISREL) on questionnaire data from 400 Danish managers. Based on the results, we had to modify our model. The results indicate that decentralized organizational decision structures influence role clarity which in turn influences job satisfaction positively, although an alternative model indicates a direct relationship from decentralized organizational decision structure to job satisfaction. Moreover, an important factor is work pressure which influences the relationship from job complexity to job satisfaction negatively.