Review of Public Personnel Administration

Many studies on cutback management have suggested that cutbacks may have negative consequences for employee well-being in the public sector. However, the relationship between cutbacks and the work-related attitudes of top-level managers has received little attention. In this study, we assess the relationships between five commonly used cutback measures and the job satisfaction of top-level public managers in 12 European countries. We propose and test a model in which autonomy serves as an explanatory variable for the relationship between cutbacks and job satisfaction. The results indicate that cutback measures have little direct effect on the job satisfaction of managers. However, as cutback measures are related negatively to the perceived managerial autonomy of public managers and positively to the degree in which politicians interfere in the affairs of managers, autonomy may function as a mechanism to explain decreased job satisfaction as a result of cutback implementation.

Public service motivation (PSM) has a documented, positive effect on job satisfaction—especially in the public sector. However, organizational characteristics such as red tape, hierarchical authority, and the absence of organizational goal specificity, which are often more present in public sector organizations, may have negative influences on the PSM–job satisfaction relationship. This study explores the impact of these organizational characteristics on sector differences in the PSM–job satisfaction relationship in a “hard case” setting. Using survey data with low-level, white-collar employees, we confirm a positive PSM–job satisfaction association in the public sector compared with the private sector, where we see a negative association. Furthermore, perceived red tape and the absence of organizational goal specificity have negative influences on job satisfaction; nevertheless, sector differences remain in the PSM–job satisfaction relationship when controlled for these organizational characteristics. This suggests that public or private sector status is more important for the PSM–job satisfaction relationship than other organizational characteristics.

The swelling wave of federal retirements heightens the importance of understanding the factors that influence retirement decisions. We examine both behavior and intentions to retire using two large data sets on federal white-collar employees aged 50 and above. Analysis of personnel records for 1979-2009 shows that several of the usual factors—in particular, age, federal experience, and pension design—have strong effects on when employees retire. Perhaps more revealing is our analysis of the 2012 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS), which indicates that satisfaction with agency leadership and with one’s own job appear to encourage postponing retirement plans, whereas satisfaction with supervisors and with recognition received on the job do not. These relationships—especially those for pension design, satisfaction with leadership, and satisfaction with one’s job—produce interesting implications for both theory and practice.

Collaborative leadership has been widely discussed in the theory of public-sector leadership and public collaborative governance studies. Based on the survey data of a public service agency in Taipei City Government, Taiwan, this study used path analysis to test the effect of four dimensions of collaborative leadership on the perceived organizational performance, and applied multidimensional scaling (MDS) method to estimate the dimensions of collaborative leadership and their structural relations. Findings of the empirical analyses support our hypotheses about the dimensions and influence of collaborative leadership and contribute to the theories of public-sector leadership. Public employees’ collaborative leadership skills facilitate their acceptance of organizational rules and their perceived organizational performance. Implications of these findings are presented in the discussion and conclusion.

In the past decades, scholarship has recognized the potential of human resource management (HRM) to contribute to organizational performance in the public sector. Even so, the issue of how HRM activities are organized to achieve superior performance is still in largely unknown territory. De-centering and re-centering dynamics for the organization of HRM have been recognized, but insufficiently analyzed in terms of theoretical and analytical integration. This study investigates the specifics of how the public sector organizes a variety of HRM activities, including the questions of where and why. We find that a complementary use of a rational design perspective and a constraining drift perspective is crucial in order to fully understand the complexities of organizing HRM activities in the public sector. Public organizations generally intend to seek the most optimal arrangement but are sometimes constrained from doing so. Institutional constraints sometimes result in more optimal arrangements, but they can also lead to unintended side-effects. This calls for more research on how design and drift factors intertwine.