Review of Public Personnel Administration

Innovation is crucial for public organizations to adapt to changing circumstances. While successful innovation requires employees both to explore new ideas and to exploit current processes, such innovative work behavior is often bounded by constraints, both situational and personal. This study examines individual-level constraints on innovation by focusing on cognitive uncertainty as a personal state that may affect innovative work behavior. Using a quantitative daily diary study among public professionals in the Netherlands (n = 88 respondents and 369 diary entries), the analysis identifies a positive relationship between daily cognitive uncertainty experiences and daily employee innovative work behavior. However, this relationship is only present when employees perceive substantial support from their team leader. This support takes the form of ambidextrous leadership, which mirrors the duality of the innovation process and is shown to be most effective in stimulating innovative work behavior and in managing cognitive uncertainty in stimulating innovation.

Occupational stigma is pervasive, encompassing street-level bureaucrats as well; however, limited knowledge exists regarding the extent and impact on this particular group. This study employs the conservation of resources theory with a chain mediation model to expose how occupational stigma affects street-level bureaucrats’ job withdrawal behavior from an emotional perspective. Based on four-wave data from 1,333 public employees across 316 grassroots communities, we identified a chain mediating the roles of emotional labor and emotional exhaustion in the negative relationship between occupational stigma and job withdrawal behavior. Research has shown that occupational stigma leads to more surface acting and less deep acting. Increased surface acting worsens employees’ emotional exhaustion and increases job withdrawal behavior, whereas deep acting alleviates employees’ emotional exhaustion and reduces job withdrawal behavior. This study extensively discusses the importance of public organizations valuing the emotional labor of street-level bureaucrats to help them resist the threat of occupational stigma.

Religious symbols, such as the hijab, are often deemed undesirable or banned in public employment. We test if clients’ perceptions and their performance are influenced by a hijab-wearing public servant, and further test if clients’ reflections on empathy or professionalism about the public servant mitigate potential negative effects. We preregistered and conducted a two-step 2 × 3 between-subjects experiment (n = 2,680; representative sample in Austria). We find no evidence that the wearing of a hijab by a public servant negatively influences clients’ perceptions, nor their performance during a public service process. The reflection answer with respect to professionalism or empathy, however, is related to clients’ performance: Clients’ positive reflection on public servants’ empathy or professionalism—independent of whether the public servant wears a hijab or not—positively relates to their performance in terms of task correctness. We discuss the relevance of these results regarding religious stereotyping and public employment policies.

This research examines differences in the compensation of male and female executive directors and chief financial officers in nonprofit organizations. We utilize executive transition periods within organizations as an empirical strategy for isolating how gender impacts the salaries of two people who occupy the same role in the same organization. Two waves of IRS 990 compensation data are used to assess compensation practices over the past two decades. The good news includes an overall increase in the number of women holding executive positions and indications that the discriminatory component of pay (discrepancies for two people holding the same position within the same organization) is relatively small and may be decreasing. This good news, however, is accompanied by bad news: large cross-sectional gaps in pay that result from an over-representation of male executives in the largest nonprofits and those in industries with the highest executive pay.

Public agencies often use contractors to facilitate Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) discrimination complaint cases, but we know relatively little about which factors influence contracting performance of the complaint process. Drawing on contracting theories, this study examines two factors—incentive structure and contractor ownership (i.e., women-owned and small disadvantaged-owned)—that moderate the link between agency contracting use and agency performance in the discrimination complaint process. Using the agency-level panel data from multiple sources, this study finds agency contracting use facilitates the discrimination complaint process when agencies use a performance-based incentive structure. When it comes to the moderating effect of contractor ownership focused on the socially/economically underrepresented, the findings show that using small disadvantaged-owned contractors positively moderates the relationship between contracting use and performance at the agency level.

Flexible work arrangement policies provide employees the flexibility to manage their work and personal lives. Despite various efforts of public organizations, struggles to simplify or integrate work and private life demands continue, resulting in employees’ lower satisfaction, higher stress, higher turnover, and lower productivity. Our study focuses on the social environments of individual employees by investigating how social networks affect individuals’ efforts to balance work and life in a higher education setting. Using a 2011 NSF-funded national survey of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) faculty in US universities, we examine the impact of multiplexity in social networks on work-life balance (WLB) and how the impact varies by gender. Our regression results suggest that the impact of relational multiplexity on WLB follows an inverse U-shape pattern and varies by gender. In particular, multiplex ties that individuals socialize outside their work can affect their WLB and the impact varies by gender.

This study investigates the relationship between performance appraisal (PA) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) among Korean government employees, integrating social exchange theory, prosocial values, and impression management perspectives. It analyzes how employees respond to PA’s perceived effectiveness, focusing on both direct and indirect effects of PA components alongside traditional OCB antecedents. Surveying 3,336 employees, the findings indicate positive correlations between performance feedback adequacy, PA fairness, and OCB, but a negative link with PA leniency. Organizational commitment emerged as a key mediator, especially between PA leniency, performance feedback frequency, and OCB. The study emphasizes the importance of a well-structured PA system to foster employee engagement in OCB.

Representative bureaucracy is used to understand original data, shedding light on the administrative side of the politico-administrative axis in one part of one of the world’s most contentious and divisive conflicts: the Palestinian Israeli conflict. We theorize and test six different theoretically existent roles of elite level bureaucrat (ELB) role conceptions in the West Bank. Using Q Methodology in 22 ELB interviews, we identify two empirically existent bureaucrat role conceptions associated with serving the public: one traditional Wilsonian/Weberian; the other a coproducer of public policy. Bureaucrats serve the entire population, as in public service motivation, not a sub-section. They believe that politics and bureaucracy should be separate and share concerns that bureaucratic independence is in jeopardy. The discovery of these profiles suggests that both pro-social and active representations on behalf of primary identities are notably absent, suggesting further investigation is required into bureaucrat role conceptions in the fragile or developing society.