Incentives in Organizations

Other researchers have analyzed incentives in organizations as a fundamental aspect of organized human activity. As described in Chapter Two, some very prominent theories about organizations have depicted them as “economies of incentives.” Organizational leaders must constantly maintain a flow of resources into their organization to cover the incentives that must be paid out to induce people to contribute to the organization (Barnard, 1938; March and Simon, 1958; Simon, 1948). In analyzing these processes, these theorists developed the typologies of incentives outlined in Table 10.2, which provides about as thorough an inventory as anyone has produced (although Barnard used some very awkward terms). The typologies reflect the development across the twentieth century of an increasing emphasis in management theory on incentives besides material ones, such as personal growth and interest and pride in one's work and one's organization. Barnard, March, and Simon implied that all executives, in both public and private organizations, face these challenges of attaining resources and providing incentives.

Clark and Wilson (1961) and Wilson (1973) followed this lead in developing a typology of organizations based on the primary incentive offered to participants: material, solidary (defined as “involving community responsibilities or interests”), or purposive (see Table 10.2). Differences in primary incentives force differences in leadership behaviors and organizational processes. Leaders in solidary organizations, such as voluntary service associations, face more pressure than leaders in other organizations to develop worthy service projects to induce volunteers to participate. Leaders in purposive organizations, such as reform and social protest organizations, must show accomplishments in relation to the organization's goals, such as passage of reform legislation.

Subsequent research on this typology of primary organizational incentives has concentrated on why people join political parties and groups; it has not specifically addressed public agencies. The concept of purposive incentives has great relevance for government, however. For many public managers, a sense of valuable social purpose can serve as a source of motivation. In addition to the Crewson (1995b, 1997), DiIulio (1994), and Goodsell (2010) examples described earlier, large surveys of federal employees have found that high percentages of them agree that the opportunity to have an impact on public affairs provides a good reason to join and stay in government service, especially at higher managerial and professional levels, and especially in certain agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency.

Extrinsic and Intrinsic Incentives. The distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic incentives described in Table 10.2 figures importantly in research and practice related to motivation in organizations. Since the days of Frederick Taylor's pay-them-by-the-shovelful approach to rewarding workers (see Chapter Two), management experts have increasingly emphasized the importance of intrinsic incentives in work.

The “Most Important” Incentives. The variety of incentives presented in Table 10.2 shows why we can expect no conclusive rank-ordered list of the most important needs, values, and incentives of organizational members. There are too many ways of expressing these incentives, and employees' preferences vary according to many factors, such as age, occupation, and organizational level. Herzberg, Mausner, Peterson, and Capwell (1957) compiled the importance ratings shown in Table 10.2 from sixteen studies covering eleven thousand employees. Other studies have come to different conclusions, however. Lawler (1971), e.g., disagreed with the Herzberg ratings, indicating that a wider review of research suggested that people rate pay much higher (averaging about third in importance in most studies). He argued that management scholars have often underestimated the importance of pay because they object to managerial approaches that rely excessively on pay as a motivator. He pointed out that pay often serves as a proxy for other incentives, because it can indicate achievement, recognition by one's organization, and other valued outcomes. Pay can serve as an effective motivating incentive in organizations, if pay systems are designed strategically (Lawler, 1990).

Anyone interested in public management and public organizations should be aware of theories and research results about the importance of certain motives and incentives in public organizations. Downs (1967) and Niskanen (1971), two economists who developed theories about public bureaucracies, proposed the inventories of public managers' motives listed in Table 10.2. They made the point that for public managers, political power, serving the public interest, and serving a particular government bureau or program become important potential motives.

Downs developed a typology of public administrators on the basis of such motives. Some administrators, he argued, pursue their own self-interest. Some of these people are climbers, who seek to rise to higher, more influential positions. Conservers seek to defend their current positions and resources. Other administrative officials have mixed motives, combining concern with their own self-interest with concerns for larger values, such as public policies and the public interest. They fall into three groups of managers who pursue increasingly broad conceptions of the public interest. Zealots seek to advance a specific policy or program. Advocates promote and defend an agency or a more comprehensive policy domain. Statesmen pursue a more general public interest. As public agencies grow larger and older, they fill up with conservers and become rigid (because the climbers and zealots leave for other opportunities or turn into conservers). Among the mixed-motive officials, few can maintain the role of statesmen, and most become advocates. In the absence of economic markets for outputs, the administrators must obtain resources through budget allocation, and they have to develop constituencies and political supports for their agency. This pushes them toward the advocate role and discourages statesmanship.

For years, Downs's book (1967) was a widely cited work on government bureaucracy, but researchers have seldom tested his theory in empirical studies. Its accuracy remains uncertain, then, but it does make the important point that public managers' commitments to their agencies, programs, and the public interest become important motives for them.

Niskanen (1971) also was interested in how bureaucrats “maximize utility,” as economists put it. He theorized that, in the absence of economic markets, bureaucrats pursuing any of the incentives listed in Table 10.2 do so by trying to obtain larger budgets. Even those motivated primarily by public service and altruism have the incentive to ask for more staff and resources and hence larger budgets. Government bureaucracies therefore tend to grow inefficiently. Public managers clearly do defend their budgets and usually try to increase them. Yet many exceptions occur, such as when agency budgets increase because of legislative adjustments to formulas and entitlements that agency administrators have not requested. Some agencies also initiate their own cuts in funding or personnel or accept such reductions fairly readily (Golden, 2000; Rubin, 1985). In the 1980s, the Social Security Administration launched a project to reduce its workforce by 17,000, about 21% of its staff (US General Accounting Office, 1986). As part of the National Performance Review, the major federal government reform initiative during the Clinton administration, federal agencies eliminated over 324,000 jobs in the federal civilian workforce (Thompson, 2000). For reasons such as this, Niskanen's more recent work focused on discretionary budgets: those parts of the organizational budget over which administrators have some discretion (see Blais and Dion, 1991). An increasing body of research finds mixed support for many of Niskanen's basic assumptions about the motives and capacities of bureaucrats to engage in budget maximization (Bendor and Moe, 1985; Blais and Dion, 1991; Dolan, 2002).

Both of these theories reflect some theorists' tendency to argue that public bureaucracies incline toward dysfunction because of the absence of economic markets for their outputs (see, e.g., Barton, 1980; Tullock, 1965). The theories may accurately depict problems to which public organizations are prone. Later chapters discuss the ongoing controversy over the performance of public organizations and point out that in fact they often perform very well.

Attitudes Toward Money, Security and Benefits, and Challenging Work. Government does not offer the large financial gains that some people make in business, although civil service systems have traditionally offered job security and well-developed benefits programs. One might expect these differences to be reflected in public employees' attitudes about such incentives. We have increasing evidence that they do. Numerous surveys have found that government employees place less value than employees in business on money as an ultimate goal in work and in life (Houston, 2000; Jurkiewicz, Massey, and Brown, 1998; Karl and Sutton, 1998; Khojasteh, 1993; Kilpatrick, Cummings, and Jennings, 1964; Lawler, 1971; Porter and Lawler, 1968; Rainey, 1983; Rawls, Ullrich, and Nelson, 1975; Siegel, 1983; Wittmer, 1991). Some studies have found no difference between public and private employees in the value they attach to pay (Gabris and Simo, 1995). Such variations in research results probably reflect the way such attitudes vary by time period, organizational level, geographical area, occupation, and type of organization. Gabris and Simo used a sample containing only two public and two private organizations, so the sample may not be representative of the two sectors. Yet this possibility reminds us that we have to be careful, in designing research and drawing general conclusions, to take into account such factors as the organizational and professional level of the individuals.

Organizational level figures importantly in comparisons of attitudes about pay because, obviously, for executives and professionals, public sector salaries are usually well below those in the private sector. Below the highest organizational levels, however, pay levels are often fairly comparable in the public and private sectors (Donahue, 2008). Studies have sometimes found that federal white-collar salaries were lower than private sector salaries for similar jobs, by about 22% according to one study (US General Accounting Office, 1990).

For such reasons, analyzing the comparability of pay between the two sectors can be complicated. Public employee unions often emphasize studies showing lower levels of pay in the public sector, but other analysts respond by pointing out that superior benefits in the public sector, such as greater job security and security of health and retirement benefits, eliminate the difference in total compensation. When all forms of compensation are taken into account, public sector compensation levels often appear comparable or superior to those in the private sector at lower organizational levels (Donahue, 2002). Gold and Ritchie (1993), e.g., pointed out that average salaries for state and local government employees tend to be higher than average salaries for private sector employees in the same state. Yet public sector workers with higher skill levels and those at higher levels make less than comparable private sector employees. Differences between public and private sectors are due to a different skill mix in the two sectors. The private sector has a higher proportion of blue-collar workers, and the public sector has a higher proportion of technical and professional workers, who tend to get higher pay than blue-collar workers. So the higher average in the public sector is apparently due to the employment of a larger proportion of higher-paid technical and professional employees, although these same employees may make less than comparable employees in the private sector (Gold and Ritchie, 1993).

Langbein and Lewis (1998) analyzed results of a survey of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and compared the engineers in the public sector and in defense contractor firms to those in the nondefense-related private firms. They found evidence that the engineers in the public and defense contractor organizations had lower levels of productivity than the engineers in the nondefense-related firms, but the public and defense contractor engineers were significantly underpaid compared with the private sector engineers, even after controlling for productivity.

As this suggests, at the highest executive levels and for professions such as law, engineering, and medicine, the private sector offers vastly higher financial rewards, and the differences in these areas have been increasing (Donahue, 2008). Studies of high-level officials who entered public service have found that most of them took salary cuts to do so. Compensation did not influence their decision, however; challenge and the desire to perform public service were the main attractions (Crewson, 1995b; Hartman and Weber, 1980). In sum, many people who choose to work for government do not emphasize making a lot of money as a goal in life, even though at lower organizational levels many public employees do not work at markedly lower pay than people in similar private sector jobs.

Research also indicates that security and benefits serve as important incentives for many government employees, although the research results are mixed. Decades ago, a major survey by Kilpatrick, Cummings, and Jennings (1964) found that vast majorities of all categories of public employees, including federal employees, cited job and benefit security (retirement, other protective benefits) as their motives for becoming a civil servant. A survey of about seventeen thousand federal employees by the US Merit Systems Protection Board (1987) found that 81% considered annual leave and sick leave benefits as reasons to stay in government, and 70% saw job security as a good reason to stay. Houston (2000) and Jurkiewicz, Massey, and Brown (1998) also reported surveys in which public employees placed higher value on job security than did private sector respondents to the surveys.

As described earlier, however, a version of the Maslow needs hierarchy tends to apply. Compared to employees at lower salary levels, smaller percentages of the public sector executives, managers, and professionalized employees (such as scientists and engineers) responding to surveys attached a high level of importance to benefits and job security (Crewson, 1995b), and at least one study found that they placed lower value on job security than private sector respondents did (Crewson, 1997). It appears that job security and other forms of security such as stable health and retirement benefits have served as significant incentives for many public sector employees, although employees at higher salary, managerial, and professional levels attach less value to them.

As compared with employees at lower salary levels, managers and executives generally attach more value to intrinsic incentives; they report more attraction to opportunities for challenge and significant work (Hartman and Weber, 1980). The large Federal Employee Attitude Surveys of the late 1970s and early 1980s asked newly hired employees to rate the importance of various factors in their decision to work for the federal government. Virtually all of the executive-level employees (97% of GS 16 and above) rated challenging work as the most important factor. Employees at lower GS levels rated job security and fringe benefits more highly than did the executives, but about 60% of them also rated challenging work as the most important factor. Rawls, Ullrich, and Nelson (1975) found that students headed for the nonprofit sector – mainly government – showed higher “dominance,” “flexibility,” and “capacity for status” ratings in psychological tests and a lower valuation of economic wealth than did students headed for the for-profit sector. The nonprofit-oriented students also played more active roles in their schools. Guyot (1960) found that a sample of federal middle managers scored higher than their business counterparts on a need-for-achievement scale and about the same on a measure of their need for power. We have some evidence, then, that government managers express as much concern with achievement and challenge as private managers do – or express even more concern.

Khojasteh (1993) found that intrinsic rewards such as recognition had higher motivating potential for a sample of public managers than for a sample of private managers. Crewson (1997) analyzed two large surveys that indicated that public sector employees placed more importance than private employees on intrinsic incentives such as helping others, being useful to society, and achieving accomplishments in work. Gabris and Simo (1995) found no differences between public and private employees on perceived importance of a number of extrinsic and intrinsic motivators, but they did find that the public sector employees placed more importance on service to the community. Karl and Sutton (1998) reported survey results showing that workers in both the public and the private sectors appear to be placing more importance on job security than in the past, but public sector workers report that they value interesting work more than private sector workers do, whereas the private sector workers place more importance than public sector respondents do on good wages. Jurkiewicz, Massey, and Brown (1998) reported that public sector employees gave higher ratings than private employees to having the chance to learn new things and the chance to use their special abilities. Comparing a large sample of federal executives to a large sample of business executives, Posner and Schmidt (1996) found that the federal executives placed greater importance on such organizational goals as quality, effectiveness, public service, and value to the community. The business executives, however, attached more importance to morale, productivity, stability, efficiency, and growth than did the federal executives.

These studies suggest that challenging, significant work and the opportunity to provide a public service are often the main attractions for public managers. Perceptions of public service vary over time, however, with changes in the political climate, the economy, and generational differences. Surveys of career preferences among top students at leading universities have found that these students place a high priority on challenging work and personal growth. They see government positions as less likely than positions in private industry, however, to provide challenging work and personal growth (Partnership for Public Service, 2002; Sanders, 1989).

On the other hand, researchers have found that younger workers in the public sector express higher levels of general job satisfaction than younger workers in the private sector (Steel and Warner, 1990). Employees entering the public sector show higher levels on measures of skill and quality than do those entering the private sector (Crewson, 1995a). These findings indicate that, overall, government does provide working conditions that are generally superior to those in the private sector, because private employers can more readily fire, lay off, and otherwise impose difficulties on workers. The differences may not hold, however, for highly talented young people considering the public service as a career. If the public sector can indeed attract high-quality employees, the challenge of providing them with challenging work becomes all the more important.

The Motive for Public Service: In Search of the Service Ethic

The motives for pursuing work in public service, and for performing well, raise the question of a special form of motivation: the service ethic, the desire to serve the public. An international survey, described earlier, found that in dozens of nations, government employees give higher importance ratings than private sector employees to work that benefits society and that helps others (Bullock, et al., 2015). In the past several decades, scholars have analyzed this topic, calling it public service motivation (PSM).

The topic is centuries old. People in public service have often expressed motivation to serve the public or the public good, as shown by Sikula's survey (1973a), described earlier. Kilpatrick, Cummings, and Jennings (1964) asked federal executives, scientists, and engineers to identify their main sources of occupational satisfaction. The respondents, compared to their counterparts in business, gave higher ratings to the importance of work that is worthwhile to society and that helps others. Surveys have found that managers and executives entering the federal government rated public service and having an impact on public affairs as the most important reasons for entering federal service. Very low percentages rated salary and job security as important attractions (Crewson, 1995b). These and other findings suggest that persons motivated by public service place a high value on work that helps others and benefits society, that involves self-sacrifice, and that provides a sense of responsibility and integrity (Crewson, 1997; Hartman and Weber, 1980; Houston, 2000; Kelman, 1989; Lasko, 1980; Sandeep, 1989; Wittmer, 1991).

As indicated in Tables 10.1 and 10.2, many analyses of values, motives, and incentives in organizational research do not focus on public service motivation (PSM). This suggests the need for a distinct concept of PSM. While it is by no means restricted to government employees, PSM should play a major part in theories of public management and public organizations. The surveys and findings mentioned earlier use general questions about benefiting society and helping others. This leaves questions about what we mean by PSM. Can we define such motivation clearly? Can we measure and assess how much a person has? Earlier chapters and sections have cited examples of how such motives can energize people in their work. Such motivation can serve as an incentive alternative to pay and other rewards that are often constrained in government.

For these reasons, researchers began to pursue the meaning and measurement of PSM. Perry and Wise (1990) suggested that public service motives can fall into three categories: instrumental motives, including participation in policy formulation and commitment to a public program; norm-based motives, including desire to serve the public interest, loyalty to duty and to government, and devotion to social equity; and affective motives, including commitment to a program based on convictions about its social importance and the “patriotism of benevolence.” They drew the term patriotism of benevolence from Frederickson and Hart (1985), who defined it as an affection for all the people in the nation and a devotion to defending the basic rights granted by enabling documents such as the Constitution. Drawing on these ideas, Perry (1996) proposed dimensions of a general public service motive and ways of assessing it. He analyzed survey responses from managers and employees in government and business organizations, and graduate and undergraduate students, to develop the survey questions in Table 10.3. Perry's dimensions and questions present a conception of public service motivation that has led to a vast amount of research by researchers from many different nations.

Researchers have found evidence that links PSM to other important factors. Brewer and Selden (1998) analyzed federal employees' survey responses about whistle blowing (exposing wrongdoing). They found more public-service-related motives among employees who engaged in whistle blowing than among those who did not. Naff and Crum (1999) found that the respondents to another large survey, who expressed higher levels of PSM, also expressed higher job satisfaction and had higher performance ratings from their supervisors. Alonso and Lewis (2001), analyzing the results of two surveys of very large samples of federal employees, also found that one of the surveys indicated that employees with higher levels of PSM received higher performance ratings from their supervisors. Complicating matters, however, the other survey showed a negative relationship between the supervisor's performance ratings and the respondent's expression of PSM.

Much of the research has used questionnaire surveys of government employees and social service volunteers, such as Perry's PSM questionnaire or similar questions. Researchers have assessed the Perry questionnaires' reliability and conceptual structure, and have developed shorter or alternative versions of it (e.g., Coursey and Pandey, 2007; Vandenabeele, 2008). Research has identified factors that relate positively to PSM, including a strong religious orientation, a family background that encourages altruistic service to others, gender, positive leadership, and low levels of red tape (DeHart-Davis, Marlowe, and Pandey, 2006; Pandey and Stazyk, 2008; Park and Rainey, 2008). Wright (2007), e.g., finds that when government employees express higher levels of “mission valence,” they report higher levels of PSM; that is, when they consider their organization's goals important and when their job goals are specific and difficult, they report higher service motivation. Studies also show that PSM shows positive relations to organizational commitment, work satisfaction, self-reported performance, intent to turn over (that is, to leave the organization), citizenship behavior (helpful and supportive behaviors toward other employees), perceptions of leadership and organizational mission, and charitable activities (Bright, 2007; 2011; Leisink and Steijin, 2009; Frank and Lewis, 2004; Houston, 2006; Pandy and Stazyk, 2008; Pandey, Wright, and Moynihan, 2008; Park and Rainey, 2008; Vandenabeele, 2007, 2009; Wright, Moynihan and Pandey, 2012). Francois (2000) proposed a formal model that postulates that public sector organizational activities can operate as efficiently and effectively as private business organizations, when PSM acts as a basic incentive.

Perry's index of PSM implies that it is a general motive on which people are higher or lower. What if people vary in the way they perceive and approach public service? Brewer, Selden, and Facer (2000) analyzed the responses concerning PSM from about seventy government employees and public administration students and concluded that the respondents fell into four categories of conceptions of public service: Samaritans express a strong motivation to help other people, communitarians are motivated to perform civic duties, patriots work for causes related to the public good, and humanitarians express a strong motivation to pursue social justice. This differentiation of conceptions of PSM makes the important point that PSM is likely to vary among individuals and organizations.

Researchers have also found evidence that the beneficial effects of high levels of PSM depend on the fit between the person and the job and work environment. The environment and job need to have characteristics that fit the person's needs and skills (Stijn, 2008; Vigoda and Cohen, 2003). Persons with high levels of PSM tend to attain jobs in the public sector, but those jobs must provide conditions that will fulfill public service motives. Research has also shown that people involved in work that serves others show higher productivity when they receive information from the people whom they serve about the benefits those people experience (Grant, 2008; Bellé, 2013).

Analysis of PSM has raised an important issue in the “motivation crowding” hypothesis, which proposes that pay can diminish intrinsic motives such as PSM under certain conditions. Chapter Nine discusses self-determination theory and explains the conditions under which extrinsic rewards such as money can diminish intrinsic motives such as enjoyment of the work itself (Ryan and Deci, 2000a, 2000b). The crowding-out of intrinsic motivation depends on a person's perceived self-determination. If a person feels under the control of another person, intrinsic motivation diminishes. Frey and Reto (2001) suggest that a person's PSM can go down when pay or salary is administered to the person in a way that reduces self-determination. Andersen and Pallesen (2008) provide an analysis of Danish research institutions implementing new financial incentives for research productivity. Researchers received pay supplements for academic publication. Andersen and Pallesen report that the more the researchers perceived the incentives as supportive, as opposed to reducing self-determination, the more the incentives encouraged researchers to publish.

One important aspect of research on PSM is the international attention to the concept that includes analysis of data from many nations. These studies indicate that measures of PSM generally show relations to other important variables, and thus indicate an international significance of PSM. Vandenabeele and Steven Van de Walle (2008) employ an international survey to study differences in public service motivation across nations. They find that public service motivation has a universal character, but that patterns of public service motivation vary around the world. For example, because the Perry scale was developed for use with American respondents, Vandenabeele (2008) conducted a survey of Flemish civil servants with a scale developed with an orientation toward European society. The new scale confirmed the dimensional structure of the Perry scale, except that the Flemish results include an additional dimension of “democratic governance.”

Addressing the international character of this research, Kim, Vandenabeele, Wright, Anderson, and eleven other authors (2012) developed a questionnaire about PSM to survey local government employees in twelve nations. The results indicated that there were similarities among nations that have similar political cultures, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The evidence indicates, however, that while PSM plays an important role in the motivation of public employees in many nations, it can have different meanings and requires different measures in different cultures.

Research on PSM accelerated rapidly. By 2016, Ritz, Brewer, and Neumann (2016) reviewed 323 studies of PSM, published in refereed professional journals, The research came from all continents, with most coming from Europe (43% of the studies) and the U.S. (31%), with additional studies based on research in Asia, Africa, and South America. Ritz and others found that the research had found positive relationships between PSM and work satisfaction (16% of the studies), choosing to work in a public sector job (14%), individual and organizational performance (11%), organizational commitment, person–organization fit (the congruence between a person's values and an organization's values, e.g., Wright and Pandey 2008), and lower turnover intentions.

The research included analyses of antecedents of PSM – factors that precede and may cause it. The research often found that, age, education, gender (with females showing higher PSM), management level, job tenure, and good employee–leader relations showed positive relations to PSM. The results are generally mixed, however, because some studies have not supported these findings. The large set of studies showed limitations, such as the frequent reliance on “survey results representing one point in time.” This weakens researchers' ability to draw conclusions about cause-and-effect relations. Ritz and others also conclude that the PSM research has not identified PSM's practical applications for management in government and other settings. They call for such practices as identifying job applicants' PSM levels and developing practices that encourage and reward PSM. Such complications are common in social and organizational research, as Pinder (2008; see also Yukl, 2015) illustrates in his comprehensive review of motivation theory and research. Ultimately, Ritz and colleagues show that the PSM topic stimulated a valuable, very active stream of research, involving an international movement of significance for public sector management and organizations.

In another review, Brewer (2019) notes the impressive volume of research on PSM. Also, however, as with other major concepts in social and administrative research, questions remain. Authors still raise issues about the meaning and validity of the concept. They note that authors tend to treat PSM as very positive, when there are potential “dark sides.” Excessive PSM might lead some persons to adhere to their own sense of service needs, possibly failing to be accountable to elected officials, or cause employees to experience stress because of their intense concern with serving others. In addition, researchers debate a “public sector” idea of PSM, as opposed to a “public service” perspective; that is, must PSM involve government employment? Or does it refer to more general public service, which people can provide from many different organizational settings?

Another important topic concerns the practical value of PSM. Can PSM be used to motivate people in government and other settings? Perry (2020) discusses in depth the procedures for involving PSM in motivating people. He describes prospects for leaders to use PSM as an incentive through applying ideas from transformational leadership theory (discussed in Chapter 11), which involve emphasizing an organization's service mission and showing employees evidence of their role in achieving it and serving beneficiaries. Compensation systems can be designed to recognize and reward PSM, and organizations can emphasize PSM in recruiting, hiring, and developing individuals.

Researchers continue to publish research on PSM (e.g., Boyd, 2020), analyzing its relationship to other important variables in multiple studies in multiple countries. Among many examples, Pedersen, Andersen, and Thomsen (2020) report evidence of relations between PSM and community values, such as a sense of responsibility to the community. Piatak and Holt (2019) report evidence that PSM shows a stronger relationship to prosocial behaviors than does a measure of altruism. Vogel and Homberg (2020) report evidence that PSM relates to measures of individual performance in multiple studies, after eliminating factors that might make the findings seem more significant than they actually are (“p-hacking”). Piatak, Sowa, Jacobson, and Johnson (2020) consider how PSM can be integrated into human resource management processes such as job design and recruiting and selection (see also Christensen, Paarlberg, and Perry 2017). These and many other studies make Public Service Motivation currently the most actively studied topic in public management research. Work also continues on using Public Service Motivation as a motivator for government employees and other people in service-oriented organizations (Perry, 2020).

Motives, Values, and Incentives in Public Management

In spite of the complexities in analyzing all the possible motives, values, and incentives in organizations, the research has produced evidence of their patterns among public sector employees and the differences between public sector and private sector employees. The evidence in turn suggests challenges for leaders and managers in the public sector. Even though many public employees may value intrinsic rewards and a sense of public service, often more highly than private sector employees value them, other chapters in this book describe some experts' concerns that the characteristics of the public sector context can impede leaders' efforts to provide such rewards. Yet other chapters also present examples and evidence of how public organizations and their leaders can and do provide rewarding experiences for employees and enhance their motivation.

In addition, while motivation is obviously very important, motives, values, and incentives also influence other work attitudes and behaviors that are related to motivation, but not the same as motivation. The rest of this chapter describes and discusses important work-related attitudes.

Job Satisfaction

Thousands of studies and dozens of different questionnaire measures have made job satisfaction one of the most intensively studied variables in organizational research, if not the most studied. Job satisfaction concerns how an individual feels about his or her job and various aspects of it (Gruneberg, 1979), usually in the sense of how favorable – how positive or negative – those feelings are. Job satisfaction is often related to other important attitudes and behaviors, such as absenteeism, the intention to quit, and actually quitting.

Years ago, Locke (1983) pointed out that researchers had published about 3,500 studies of job satisfaction without coming to any clear agreement on its meaning. Job satisfaction nevertheless continues to play an important role in recent research. The different ways of measuring job satisfaction illustrate different ways of defining it. Some studies use only two or three summary items, such as the following:

• In general, I like working here.
• In the next year I intend to look for another job outside this organization.

General or global measures ask questions about enjoyment, interest, and enthusiasm to tap general feelings in much more depth. They often employ multiple-item scales, with the responses to be summed up or averaged, such as the following from the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (Weiss, Dawis, England, and Lofquist, 1967):

• I definitely dislike my work [reversed scoring].
• I find real enjoyment in my work.
• Most days I am enthusiastic about my work.

Specific, or facet, satisfaction measures ask about particular facets of the job. The following examples are from Smith's “Index of Organizational Reactions” (1976):

• Supervision: “Do you have the feeling you would be better off working under different supervision?”
• Company identification: “From my experience, I feel this organization probably treats its employees ______________” [five possible responses, from “poorly” to “extremely well”].

This index also includes scales for kind of work, amount of work, coworkers, physical work conditions, financial rewards, and career future. The Porter Needs Satisfaction Questionnaire (Porter, 1962) asks respondents to rate thirteen factors concerned with fulfillment of a particular need, rating how much of each factor there is now and how much there should be. The degree to which the “should be” rating exceeds the “is now” rating measures need dissatisfaction, or the inverse of satisfaction. The need categories are based on Maslow's need hierarchy, including, e.g., security needs, social needs, and self-actualization. This method has been used in some of the research on public sector work satisfaction described later.

Different measures of job satisfaction are based on different definitions of it. Studies using different measures – and hence different definitions – often come to conflicting conclusions about how job satisfaction relates to other variables. Partly because of these variations, researchers do not agree on a coherent theory or framework of what determines job satisfaction. Research generally finds higher job satisfaction associated with better pay and benefits; adequate training; sufficient opportunities for promotion; consideration from supervisors; recognition; safe working conditions; perceived fairness in the workplace; utilization of skills and abilities; and more skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback during task performance (Spector 1997). Focusing on personal characteristics as antecedents, Judge and Bono's (2001) meta-analysis, which aggregates the results of multiple empirical studies, identified the four personal traits of generalized self-efficacy, internal locus of control, self-esteem, and emotional stability as among the best dispositional predictors of job satisfaction.

It is obviously unrealistic to try to generalize about how much any single factor affects a worker's satisfaction. Any particular factor in a given setting contends with other factors in that setting. Various studies suggest the importance of individual differences between workers: level of aspiration, level of comparison to alternatives (whether the person looks for or sees better opportunities elsewhere), level of acclimation (what a person is accustomed to), educational level, level in the organization and occupation, professionalism, age, tenure, race, gender, national and cultural background, and personality (values, self-esteem, and so on). The influence of any one of these elements, however, depends on other factors. For example, tenure and organizational level usually correlate with satisfaction. Those who have been in an organization longer and are at a higher level report higher satisfaction. This makes sense. Unhappy people leave; happy people stay. People who get to higher levels should be happier than those who do not. Yet some studies find the opposite. In some organizations, longer-term employees feel undercompensated for their long service. Some people at higher levels may feel the same way or may feel that they have hit a ceiling on their opportunities. Career civil servants sometimes face this problem.

Researchers also look at job characteristics and job design as determinants of job satisfaction. The most prominent approach, by Hackman and Oldham (1980), also draws on Maslow's need-fulfillment theory. These researchers report higher job satisfaction for jobs higher on the dimensions measured by their Job Diagnostic Survey, which includes the following sub-scales: skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, feedback from the job. Measures of these dimensions are then combined into a “motivating potential score” that indicates the potential of the job to motivate the person holding it. Hackman and Oldham's findings conformed to a typical position among management experts: more interesting, self-controlled, significant work, with feedback from others, improves satisfaction. The US Merit Systems Protection Board (2012) used questions representing these job dimensions in their survey of over 42,000 federal employees. They used the results to draw conclusions about the motivating potential of federal jobs and to make recommendations about ways of improving the way jobs are designed to enhance their motivating potential.

Job satisfaction has received a lot of attention for years because of its very serious consequences. Authors have regularly pointed out that job satisfaction showed no consistent relationship to individual performance (Pinder, 2008). They typically cited Porter's and Lawler's (1868) interpretation of the evidence, which pointed out that the relationship between satisfaction and performance depends on whether rewards are contingent on performance. A good performer who receives better rewards as a result of his or her good performance experiences heightened satisfaction. Yet a good performer who does not get better rewards experiences dissatisfaction, thus dissolving any positive link between satisfaction and performance. The link between performance and rewards, they concluded, plays a key role in determining the performance-satisfaction relationship. However, the meta-analysis of Petty, McGee, and Cavender (1984) revealed a positive relationship between individual-level job satisfaction and performance that was stronger than previous studies suggested. In 2001, another widely cited meta-analysis by Judge, Thoresen, Bono, and Patton (2001) showed that job satisfaction and performance were correlated at about 0.30, and that the correlation was closer to 0.50 for highly complex jobs. They concluded that job satisfaction could very well have a causal effect on performance that is moderated (i.e., strengthened or weakened) by various factors, including job complexity, personality, autonomy, and norms.

Researchers have also pointed out that satisfaction shows fairly consistent relationships with absenteeism, turnover, and burnout. Job satisfaction is also positively related to another important work-related attitude, organizational commitment, particularly affective commitment (Meyer, Stanley, Herscovitch, and Topolnytsky 2002). Some studies have also found job satisfaction to be related to life satisfaction, general stress levels, and physical health (Gruneberg, 1979). These behaviors and conditions cost organizations a lot of money, and they obviously can impose hardship on individuals. Job satisfaction thus figures very importantly in organizations. Distinct from motivation and performance, it can nevertheless influence them, as well as other important behaviors and conditions in organizations.

Role Conflict and Ambiguity

In an influential book, Kahn and his colleagues (1964) argued that characteristics of an individual's role in an organization determine the stress that the person experiences in his or her work. These ideas about organizational role characteristics are meaningful for anyone working in an organization or profession. A number of “role senders” seek to impose expectations and requirements on the person through both formal and informal processes. These role senders might include bosses, subordinates, coworkers, family members, or anyone else who seeks to influence the person's role. If these expectations are ambiguous and conflicting, the stress level increases. Researchers developed questionnaire items to measure role conflict and role ambiguity (House and Rizzo, 1972; Rizzo, House, and Lirtzman, 1970). Role ambiguity refers to a lack of clear and sufficient information about how to carry out one's responsibilities in the organization. The role ambiguity questionnaire asks about clarity of objectives and responsibilities, adequacy of a person's authority to do his or her job, and clarity about time allocation in the job.

Role conflict refers to the incompatibility of different role requirements. A person's role might conflict with his or her values and standards or with his or her time, resources, and capabilities. Conflict might exist between two or more roles that the same person is expected to play. There might be conflict among organizational demands or expectations, or conflicting expectations from different role senders. The survey items about role conflict ask whether there are adequate resources to carry out assignments, and whether others impose incompatible expectations.

The two role variables consistently show relationships to job satisfaction and similar measures, such as job-related tension (Miles, 1976; Miles and Petty, 1975). They also relate to other organizational factors, such as participation in decision making, leader behaviors, and formalization. Individual characteristics such as need for clarity and perceived locus of control (whether the individual sees events as being under his or her control or as being controlled externally) also influence how much role conflict and ambiguity a person experiences. These concepts are important by themselves, because managers increasingly concern themselves with stress management and time management. Managing one's role can play a central part in these processes.

Organizational Commitment

The concept of organizational commitment has also figured in research on public and private managers (discussed later in this chapter). Individuals vary in their loyalty and commitment to the organizations in which they work. Certain people may consider the organization itself to be of immense importance to them, as an institution worthy of service, as a location of friends, or as a source of security and other benefits. Others may see the organization only as a place to earn money. Professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and scientists often have loyalties external to the organization – to the profession itself and to their professional colleagues.

Scales for measuring organizational commitment ask whether the respondent sees the organization's problems as his or her own, whether he or she feels a sense of pride in working for the organization, and similar questions (Mowday, Porter, and Steers, 1982). Studies also show the multidimensional nature of commitment. For example, Angle and Perry (1981) showed the importance of the distinction between calculative commitment and normative commitment to organizations. Calculative commitment is based on the perceived material rewards the organization offers. In normative commitment, the individual is committed to the organization because he or she sees it as a mechanism for enacting personal ideals and values. Meyer and Allen's analysis also revealed a third unique dimension of organizational commitment, affective commitment, referring to an emotional attachment, identification, and involvement with an organization.

Balfour and Wechsler (1996) further elaborated the concept of organizational commitment in a model for the public sector based on a study of public employees. Their evidence suggested three forms of commitment. Identification commitment is based on the employee's degree of pride in working for the organization and on the sense that the organization does something important and does it competently. Affiliation commitment derives from a sense of belonging to the organization and of the other members of the organization as “family” who care about one another. Exchange commitment is based on the belief that the organization recognizes and appreciates the efforts and accomplishments of its members.

Meyer, Stanley, Herscovitch, and Topolnytsky (2002) undertook a comprehensive meta-analysis of the antecedents and consequences of organizational commitment. Their findings indicate that among the antecedents of commitment, role ambiguity and role conflict were negatively related to affective and normative commitment; age, tenure, organizational support, perceptions of justice in the workplace, and transformational leadership were all positively related to affective and/or normative commitment. In addition, job satisfaction and job involvement were positively related to both affective and normative commitment. Finally, in regards to the consequences of commitment, their analysis suggests affective commitment negatively impacts turnover, absences from work, stress, and work–family conflict and positively affects performance and organizational citizenship behavior; normative commitment negatively impacts turnover and family–work conflict and has a positive effect on overall job performance and organizational citizenship behavior.

Professionalism

Technological, educational, and other advances have made many occupations increasingly complex and difficult to learn, especially occupations that we consider professions. For many decades, the nature of government work has required the employment of many professionals and many types of professionals (Mosher, 1982). Specialists in these areas must have advanced training and need to maintain high standards. Professionals have the qualifications to establish and govern the standards, and professionals often prefer to be governed and assessed by members of their profession. This raises issues about how those outside the profession hold them accountable, to avoid excessive self-interest and other problems that can arise. Government and business organizations also face challenges in managing the work and careers of highly trained professionals. The Covid-19 crisis of 2020 illustrated the crucial roles that professionals play in society and in all types of organizations. Political leaders called upon scientists, medical doctors, public health officials, and many other professionals in government, nonprofit, and business positions to advise the leaders and the public, to develop policies and procedures, and ultimately to seek a vaccine to cure the virus.

Because the professions and professionals figure so importantly in society, social scientists and other experts have offered many definitions of profession. They have often distinguished among occupations that are highly professionalized and other occupations where professionalization may be an important topic, but is not as advanced. One way of characterizing the highly professionalized occupations involves these conditions:

• Application of a skill based on theoretical knowledge
• Requirement for advanced education and training
• Testing of competence through examinations or other methods
• Organization into a professional association
• Existence of a code of conduct and emphasis on adherence to it
• Espousal of altruistic service

Occupational specializations that rate relatively highly on most or all of these dimensions are highly “professionalized.” Medicinal doctors, lawyers, and highly trained scientists are usually considered members of advanced professions. Scholars usually place college professors, engineers, and accountants in the professional category. They often define less-developed specializations, such as library science, computer programming, police officers, social workers, and teachers as semiprofessions, emerging professions, or less professionalized occupations. In public administration, professionalism has figured importantly in a general sense of whether those in occupations often associated with government – police officers, fire fighters, military officers and personnel, public health officials, city managers, public administrators, and others – adhere to ethical standards and display expert knowledge and commitment to the effective performance of their special roles (Perry, Gaus lecture; Piatak, Douglas, and Raudia, 2020).

In turn, management researchers analyze the characteristics of individual professionals because of their important roles in organizations. As a result of their selection and training, professionals, especially those in more highly professionalized occupations, tend to have certain beliefs and values (Filley, House, and Kerr, 1976):

• Belief in the need to be expert in the body of abstract knowledge applicable to the profession
• Belief that they and fellow professionals should have autonomy in their work activities and decision making
• Identification with the profession and with fellow professionals
• Commitment to the work of the profession as a calling, or life's work
• A feeling of ethical obligation to render service to clients without self-interest and with emotional neutrality
• A belief in self-regulation and collegial maintenance of standards (that is, a belief that fellow professionals are best qualified to judge and police one another)

Members of a profession vary on these dimensions. Those relatively high on most or all are highly professional by this definition.

The characteristics of professions and professionals may conflict with the characteristics of large bureaucratic organizations. Belief in autonomy may conflict with organizational rules and hierarchical authority. The situation at the Brookhaven National Laboratory described at the beginning of Chapter Eight is an example of such conflict. The scientists chafed under the rules imposed on them by administrators seeking to enhance safety and public accountability. Conflicts can occur in other settings because altruistic service to clients can conflict with organizational emphases on standardized treatment of clients. Identification with the profession and desire for recognition from fellow professionals may dilute the impact of organizational rewards, such as financial incentives. Professionals might prefer an enhanced professional reputation to salary increases, and they might prefer their professional work to moving “up” into management. Without moving up, however, they hit ceilings that limit pay, promotion, and prestige. Some studies in the past have found higher organizational formalization associated with higher alienation among professionals (Hall and Tolbert, 2004).

Conflicts between professionals and organizations do not appear to be as inevitable as once supposed, however. Organizational priorities, such as emphasis on the technical qualifications, are compatible with professional values (Hall and Tolbert, 2004). Professionals may work in subunits such as laboratories, where they are relatively free to carry out their work (Bozeman and Loveless, 1987; Crow and Bozeman, 1987; Larson, 1977; Schott, 1978). Golden (2000) describes how professionals in certain federal agencies during the Reagan administration disagreed with policies of the Reagan appointees who headed their agency, but regarded it as their professional obligation to discharge those policies effectively. Brehm and Gates (1997) found evidence that professionalism can be an important motivating factor in the public sector.

People in organizations have developed useful approaches to dealing with professionals' needs and values. Since professionals may want to stay with their professional work rather than moving into management, organizations can offer dual career ladders, in which professionals can stay in their specialty (such as research) but move up to higher levels of pay and responsibility. This alleviates the conflict over deciding whether one must give up one's profession and go into management. Some government agencies rotate professionals in and out of management positions. For example, they rotate scientists in administrative positions back into professional research positions after several years. Some organizations also allow professionals to take credit for their accomplishments. For example, they allow them to claim authorship of professional research reports rather than requiring that they publish them anonymously in the name of the agency or company. Organizations can also pay for travel to professional conferences and in other ways support professionals in their desire to remain excellent in their field.

Employee Empowerment

As discussed in Chapter Seven, the idea of employee empowerment as sharing information, resources, and authority with frontline employees has its origins in the human relations movement of the 1940s. The concept of employee empowerment as a psychological state, or a work-related attitude, is a more recent development in the field of management. Conger and Kanungo (1988) described employee empowerment as enabling employees to act by removing constraints that foster powerlessness and by creating conditions that promote self-efficacy, effort, and persistence. Thomas and Velthouse (1990) further developed the concept of employee empowerment by describing four cognitions that cause employees to experience empowerment. Impact refers to a person feeling they make a difference through their actions. Competence concerns a person's ability to perform a task skillfully. Meaningfulness refers to how much value a person attaches to task accomplishment. Finally, choice is when a person feels their behavior is self-determined. When a person makes positive assessments of these four aspects of work, he or she will feel higher intrinsic task motivation and more empowered. Spreitzer (1995, 1996), drawing on Conger and Kanungo (1988) and Thomas and Velthouse (1990), developed and validated a measure of psychological empowerment. She characterized psychological empowerment as a motivational construct evident in four cognitions: meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact. Her analysis revealed that psychological empowerment is positively related to employee effectiveness and innovativeness.

Seibert, Wang, and Courtright (2011) undertook a comprehensive meta-analysis of the antecedents, or causes, of psychological empowerment and of its attitudinal and behavioral consequences, including task performance. They found that psychological empowerment can be enhanced by high performance management practices (e.g., training, rewards and recognition, goal setting, and information sharing); support from the organization (psychological support, access to resources, positive organizational culture, procedural and distributive fairness, political support, and interpersonal trust); positive leadership (e.g., an empowering leadership style, autonomy supportive leadership, charismatic and transformational leadership, high leader–member exchange, interpersonal trust, clear expectations, and supervisory support); and work design characteristics (e.g., job enrichment, role clarity, task impact and meaningfulness, autonomy, and feedback). The study also indicated that psychological empowerment is positively related to job satisfaction and organizational commitment and negatively related to turnover intention and job-related strain. Moreover, psychological empowerment is positively related to task performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and innovativeness. These findings were largely consistent with those from another meta-analysis of psychological empowerment at the team level (Maynard, Mathieu, Gilson, O'Boyle, and Cigularov, 2012).

Employee Engagement

During the last two decades, employee engagement has emerged as a prominent work-related attitude that is related to job involvement, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and employee empowerment but has a distinct meaning (Macey and Schneider 2008; Christian, Garza, and Slaughter, 2011). Promoting employee engagement has become a focus of recent public management reforms in many countries. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2017) reports that a majority of member states have launched initiatives to promote employee engagement within the public service and use surveys to measure and track levels of engagement. In the US, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and Merit System Protection Board (MSPB) have launched their own initiatives to measure and raise levels of engagement throughout the federal workforce.

Various definitions of employee engagement have been proposed, most inspired by Kahn's (1990) seminal work on personal engagement. Kahn defined personal engagement as harnessing oneself to work by becoming fully invested physically, emotionally, and cognitively in a task. According to Khan, engagement requires three psychological conditions during task performance: safety, meaningfulness, and availability. Safety means feeling safe to express oneself. Meaningfulness refers to feeling worthwhile, useful, and valuable due to being physically, emotionally, and cognitively invested in work. Availability means having emotional, physical, and cognitive energies available for task performance.

Building on Kahn's (1990) ideas, Schaufeli, Salanova, Gonzalez-Roma, and Bakker (2002) defined employee engagement as a positive and fulfilling state of mind involving vigor, dedication, and absorption in work. Vigor signifies a willingness to invest in a task, high energy, and resilience and persistence in the face of adversity. Dedication means a sense of significance and challenge that generates enthusiasm, inspiration, and pride. Finally, absorption refers to being fully concentrated and engrossed in work and becoming detached from other thoughts and activities. Bakker, Albrecht, and Leiter (2011) noted these and other conceptualizations of employee engagement converge on the notion that energy, involvement, and a willingness to contribute are core elements or dimensions of the employee engagement construct.

Meta-analyses show that employee engagement enhances work-related attitudes and behavior, as well as performance. Cole, Walter, Bedeian, and O'Boyle (2011) found that employee engagement relates positively to job satisfaction and organizational commitment and negatively to burnout and health complaints. Halbesleben's (2010) meta-analysis revealed that employee engagement is negatively related to turnover intention. Christian, Garza, and Slaughter (2011) found that employee engagement is positively related to task performance (or performance of official duties) and contextual performance (or engaging in discretionary activities outside one's formal job that contribute to organizational success and wellbeing) (see also Halbesleben's, 2010). Hence, engaged employees strive toward ambitious goals but also appear to step outside their formal work duties to engage in extra-role behaviors that benefit their organizations by helping others perform their jobs, reducing conflict, and offering suggestions for improvement.

Since employee engagement benefits employees and organizations, researchers seek to understand its causes. Research points to a range of antecedents or causes of employee engagement. The meta-analysis of Christian, Garza, and Slaughter (2011) revealed that task variety and significance enhance employee engagement. Their findings also suggest that a transformational leadership style and high exchange relationships between leaders and followers characterized by mutual trust and reciprocity also promote employee engagement. Crawford, LePine, and Rich (2010) performed a meta-analysis of the relationship between job demands and resources and employee engagement. Job demands are conditions at work that require continuous physical and mental effort, such as time constraints, pressure to perform, and stressful interpersonal relationships. They hinder employees and cause mental and physical strain and exhaustion. At times, however, job demands like deadlines, high workloads, and increased responsibility can spark eagerness and excitement and challenge people to grow and achieve at higher levels. On the other hand, job resources like control, emotional support, and opportunities to learn reduce job demands and enable people to succeed. Crawford, LePine, and Rich (2010) found that job resources are positively related to engagement. Job demands that are perceived to be a hindrance reduce engagement, while those that challenge people to increase their effort and grow promote employee engagement.

Based on a meticulous review of the literature, Albrecht, Bakker, Gruman, Macey, and Saks (2015) propose human resource management practices to increase employee engagement through recruitment and selection, socialization, training and development, and performance management practices. Managers should develop a selection process that combines personality assessments, interviews, and other screening methods to identify prospective employees who score high on the general personality traits of conscientiousness, extroversion, emotional stability, and extroversion. New employees need job resources that provide safety (e.g., social support), enable them to experience meaningfulness (e.g., enriched jobs, autonomy, performance feedback, and job clarity), and help them become psychologically available (e.g., orientation, training, and mentoring activities). Through performance management, managers should provide clear goals that employees are committed to; timely and constructive feedback; coaching and other forms of social support; and ample training and development. Finally, managers should develop challenging jobs that allow employees to tap abundant job resources and grant discretion to modify jobs to make them more challenging and meaningful.

Employee engagement has not only become a focus of research, it has garnered interest from policymakers and public managers interested in making government more effective. In 2010, the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) developed the Employee Engagement Index (EEI) as part of its Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS), a large annual survey representative of the federal civilian workforce. Initially, OPM officials defined employee engagement as a psychological state characterized by dedication, persistence, and effort at work, similar to the concept of engagement found in Kahn (1990) and Schaufeli, Salanova, Gonzalez-Roma, and Bakker (2002). When developing the EEI, however, they measured observable behavior and working conditions that should promote psychological engagement; that is, they set out to capture managerial and organizational factors that should increase psychological engagement rather than psychological engagement itself. The Gallup Organization established a precedent for such an approach when they developed a twelve-item scale, the Q¹², to measure satisfaction with and enthusiasm for work and managers' efforts to create a positive work environment (Gallup, 2020). The meta-analysis of Harter, Hayes, and Schmidt (2002) found that this twelve-item engagement scale is positively related to business-unit outcomes, including customer satisfaction, productivity, and profitability, and negatively related to employee turnover.

The EEI is designed to measure leadership and supervisory practices aimed at fostering a positive organizational climate conducive to high levels of employee engagement (Office of Personnel Management, 2015a, 2015b). From 2010 to 2014, the government-wide average score on the index dropped from 66% to 63% (Office of Personnel Management, 2015b). The OPM then issued a memorandum to federal agencies that stressed the need to strengthen efforts to foster an organizational culture of employee engagement and establishing the goal of improving the government-wide EEI average score from 63% to 67% by 2016 (Donovan et al., 2014). The memorandum makes improvements on the EEI a senior management responsibility. It also required agencies to establish their own target for improvement on the EEI; to make improvements on the EEI an integral part of their Government Performance and Results Act (GRPA) annual performance plan; and to carry out periodic monitoring of progress toward creating a culture of engagement (Hameduddin and Fernandez, 2019). In addition, OPM provides online resources for agencies to track and improve their EEI scores and has created a repository of practices that should promote employee engagement (Hochmuth, 2016). A recent study of the federal bureaucracy by Hameduddin and Fernandez (2019) indicates that an increase in OPM's EEI is positively related to performance as perceived by federal employees.

The US Merit Systems Protection Board (2008) initially set out to measure employee engagement using a six-dimensional scale. The survey items ask about pride in one's work, satisfaction with leadership, opportunity to perform well at work, satisfaction with recognition received, prospects for future personal and professional growth, and a positive work environment with a focus on teamwork. These items resemble those in OPM's EEI in that they represent aspects of organizations and management that should lead to psychological engagement (see MSPB, 2008, 2016a); they also appear to be in line with the Gallup Organization's approach to measuring engagement (see also Harter, Hayes, and Schmidt, 2002). MSPB officials have touted employee engagement as a way to improve organizational performance, promote the well-being of federal employees, and reduce turnover. Their own research findings indicate that employee engagement relates positively to performance as measured by the program results/accountability portion on the Program Performance Rating Tool (PART) and negatively to turnover intention, sick leave, Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) complaints, and work-related injury or illness. Interestingly, MSPB (2016b) more recently developed additional survey items to measure psychological engagement and included them in the 2016 Merit Principles Survey.

Positive Organizational Behavior: Self-Efficacy, Hope, Optimism, and Resilience

A growing Positive Organizational Behavior (POB) movement has begun to shift research away from employee weaknesses toward strength-building attitudes and capacities. This perspective brings a breath of fresh air to the field of management that expands the analysis of work-related attitudes and psychological states (Luthans, 2002; Luthans and Youssef, 2007; Luthans and Avolio, 2009). POB draws on the positive psychology movement that moves beyond the study of what is wrong with people by identifying and nurturing people's best qualities (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Research on POB has coalesced around the study of four work-related attitudes: self-efficacy, hope, optimism, and resilience (Luthans and Youssef, 2007; Youssef and Luthans, 2007). These positive capacities, unlike highly stable traits, are malleable and can be developed (Luthans and Youssef, 2007; Youssef and Luthans, 2007). Research indicates that these attitudes interact as elements of a higher-order construct, positive psychological capital (PsyCap) (Luthans and Youssef, 2004; Luthans, Avolio, Avey, and Norman, 2007; Avey, Reichard, Luthans, and Mhatre, 2011). PsyCap is defined as “an individual's positive psychological state of development that is characterized by: (1) having confidence (self-efficacy) to take on and put in the necessary effort to succeed at challenging tasks; (2) making positive attribution (optimism) about succeeding now and in the future; (3) persevering toward goals and, when necessary, redirecting paths to goals (hope) in order to succeed; and (4) when beset by problems and adversity, sustaining and bouncing back and even beyond (resiliency) to attain success” (Luthans, Youssef, and Avolio, 2007, p. 3). Self-efficacy, hope, optimism, and resilience are important work-related attitudes in their own right, so each will be examined first, along with their antecedents and consequences, before addressing PsyCap.

Building on Bandura's work on social cognitive theory discussed in Chapter 9, Stajkovic and Luthans (1998) define self-efficacy as a work-related attitude characterized by conviction, or confidence, in one's ability to use their motivation and cognitive resources to accomplish a task in a given situation. People with a high level of self-efficacy choose challenging goals, use foresight to develop pathways to achieving their goals, exert effort to achieve success, and persevere in the face of adversity (Luthans, Youssef, and Avolio, 2007). Meta-analytic findings indicate that self-efficacy is strongly related to performance at work (Bandura and Locke, 2003; see also Stajkovic and Luthans, 1998). Self-efficacy appears to have a direct positive impact on job satisfaction; through its influence on job satisfaction, it also has indirect positive and negative effects on organizational commitment and turnover intention, respectively (Luthan, Zhu, and Avolio, 2006). Self-efficacy can be developed by allowing people to experience success and mastery of a task, as well as through vicarious learning that allows people to observe others performing the task successfully. Positive feedback and encouragement also promote self-efficacy (Luthans, Youssef, and Avolio, 2007).

Hope is defined as a positive motivational state that combines determination to achieve one's goals, or “willpower,” and developing specific means for attaining those goals, or “waypower” (Snyder, Irving, and Anderson, 1991). It involves self-initiated actions a person takes to create a desirable future (Arnau, Rosen, Finch, Rhudy, and Fortunato, 2007; Alarcon, Bowling, and Khazon, 2013). Studies show that hope improves well-being. The meta-analysis of Alarcon, Bowling, and Khazon (2013) revealed a positive relationship between hope and happiness and negative relationship between hope and both depression and stress. In addition, hope leads to higher performance and greater satisfaction and the ability to cope (see Luthans and Youssef, 2007). While hope appears to have a dispositional baseline, measures can be taken to develop it further. These include setting measurable and challenging goals; “stepping” or breaking down goals into a series of sub-goals, each one a means for achieving a subsequent one; engaging in mental rehearsals; doing contingency planning to identify potential obstacles and devise alternative pathways; “regoaling” or revising goals after receiving feedback to avoid unrealistic expectations and prevent false hope; and empowering people with resources, information, skills, and authority (Luthans, Avey, Avolio, Norman, and Combs, 2006; Luthans, Youssef, and Avolio, 2007; Luthans and Youssef, 2007).

Optimism is a generalized expectation that attributes positive events to personal (or internal), permanent, and pervasive causes and negative events to external, temporary, and situation-specific causes (Seligman, 1998). The optimistic person expects success or fulfillment, through fortune, personal effort, or the actions of others (Alarcon, Bowling, and Khazon, 2013). Compared to hope, optimism places more emphasis on successes and failures as the result of external factors (Luthans and Youssef, 2007), thus representing more of a passive state than hope (Alarcon, Bowling, and Khazon, 2013). Optimism can enhance performance in a range of situations, including the workplace (see Luthans and Youseff, 2007). Alarcon, Bowling, and Khazon (2013) perform a meta-analysis that points to the benefits of optimism, showing that it is positively related to life satisfaction, happiness, psychological well-being, and physical health, and negatively related to anxiety and depression. As with hope, there are ways to develop or increase optimism, including Schneider's (2001) three-step process of leniency for the past, appreciation for the present, and opportunity seeking for the future. Leniency for the past entails evaluating past events in a manner that focuses more on reasonable positive aspects of the situation and giving oneself or others the benefit of the doubt for misfortunes to arrive at a more positive conclusion. Appreciation for the present means acknowledging the importance of current circumstances and how they positively contribute to one's experience. Finally, opportunity seeking for the future involves viewing tasks as opportunities for beneficial change and success rather than as chores or problems to solve. Luthans, Avey, Avolio, Norman, and Combs (2006) recommend analyzing a situation, anticipating potential obstacles to success (including worst-case scenarios), and creating alternative pathways to reduce the likelihood of a bad event and to counteract pessimism.

Resilience is defined as the learned capacity to bounce back or rebound from adversity, failure, and conflict (Luthans and Youssef, 2007). Resilient people recognize the destructive effects that failure and setbacks can have. They dedicate time, effort, and resources to recovering and rebounding, using setbacks as “springboards” for improvement and growth (Youssef and Luthans, 2007). Resilient people also accept risk and can adapt to it by managing resources to achieve a successful future (Masten and Reed, 2002). The meta-analysis of Hu, Zhang, and Wang shows that resilience is positively related to positive mental health, including life satisfaction and positive affect, and negatively related to negative mental health, including depression, anxiety, and negative affect. While resilience is perhaps the least frequently analyzed of the four positive work-related attitudes, a growing number of studies suggest it is positively related to performance at work (Meneghel, Salanova, and Martinez, 2016; Zehir and Narcıkara, 2016), organizational commitment (Youssef and Luthans, 2007), and commitment to change (Shin, Taylor, and Seo, 2012). Masten (2001; Masten and Reed, 2002) have proposed three sets of strategies for developing resilience. Asset-focused strategies involve accumulating assets in the workplace that increase the odds of success, such as financial and material resources, information, knowledge, skills, abilities, experience, social relationships, and interpersonal support. Risk-focused strategies minimize factors that make people vulnerable and prone to failure, including stress and conflict. Finally, process-focused strategies entail taking calculated risks to create opportunities for improvement and growth (Luthans, Youssef, and Avolio, 2007).

As mentioned above, research indicates that the four state-like capacities of self-efficacy, optimism, hope, and resilience are strongly related to each other and interact to form the higher-order construct known as positive psychological capital (PsyCap) (Luthans and Youssef, 2004; Luthans, Avolio, Avey, and Norman, 2007; Avey, Reichard, Luthans, and Mhatre, 2011). Thus, in addition to studies that examine each of these capabilities, researchers have also analyzed the effects of PsyCap on work-related attitudes, behaviors, and performance. The meta-analysis of Avey, Reichard, Luthans, and Mhatre (2011) points to benefits derived from high PsyCap. They find that PsyCap is positively related to job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and psychological well-being at work, and negatively correlated with cynicism, stress, anxiety, and turnover intention. They find that PsyCap is positively related to organizational citizenship behavior, negatively related to undesirable behaviors in the workplace, and importantly, positively related to performance.

POB has interesting implications for public organizations and their members. As reviewed in Chapters Three to Five and discussed throughout the book, research points to unique features of public organizations, including greater external oversight, more political intrusions into decision making, more formalization in the form of administrative rules and procedures, less flexibility in how human resources are managed, conflicting performance expectations, and greater goal ambiguity and goal conflict compared to private organizations (see Jin and Rainey, 2020). The work environment that many public managers face places a premium on people who have high levels of self-efficacy, resilience, hope, and optimism. It also underscores the importance for public managers to recognize the value of POB and to foster it in government. Jin and Rainey (2020), although not directly examining POB, found that compared to private sector employees, people working in government often hold more positive attitudes toward their jobs and organizations even in the face of constraints and frustration that they encounter working in the public sector. Moreover, given constraints on the ability to financially reward and empower public sector employees, research on self-efficacy, resilience, hope, and optimism points to other avenues by which public managers can increase employee motivation and performance, using many of the same managerial practices and approaches they would use to improve job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and employee empowerment and engagement.

Role Ambiguity, Role Conflict, and Organizational Goal Clarity

For some work-related attitudes, researchers have found few differences between managers in public and private organizations. This has been the case with the most frequent observation in all the literature on the distinctive character of public management: public managers confront greater multiplicity, vagueness, and conflict of goals and performance criteria than managers in private organizations do. There is a fascinating divergence between political economists and organization theorists on the validity of this observation. Political scientists and economists tend to regard this goal complexity as an obvious consequence or determinant of governmental (nonmarket) controls, whereas many organization theorists tend to regard it as a generic problem facing all organizations.

Little comparative research directly addresses this issue, however. Rainey (1983) compared middle managers in government and business organizations about the role conflict and role ambiguity items described earlier, asking questions about the clarity of the respondents' goals in work, conflicting demands, and related matters. The government and business managers showed no differences on these questions nor on questions about whether they regarded the goals of their organization as clear and easy to measure. More recent surveys have confirmed these results (Bozeman and Rainey, 1998; Rainey, Pandey, and Bozeman, 1995). One explanation may be that public managers clarify their roles and objectives by reference to standard operating procedures, whether or not the overall goals of the organization are clear and consistent.

These findings point to important challenges for both researchers and practitioners in further analyzing such issues as how managers in various settings (such as public, private, and hybrid organizations) perceive objectives and performance criteria; how these objectives and criteria are communicated and validated, if they are; and whether these objectives and criteria do in fact coincide with the sorts of distinctions between public and private settings that are assumed to exist in our political economy. Wright (2004) reports evidence that state government employees who perceive greater clarity of work and organizational goals also report higher levels of work motivation, so the frequent generalizations about vague goals in public organizations do not mean that leaders and managers in government cannot and should not continue efforts to clarify goals for organizational units and employees.

Work Satisfaction

Many studies have found differences between respondents from the public and private sectors concerning other work-related attitudes and perceptions. In the United States and other nations where such studies have been conducted, public employees and managers express high levels of general work satisfaction and other general attitudes about work, such as having a sense of worthwhile work, usually comparable to that reported by their private sector counterparts (Bozeman and Rainey, 1998; Cho and Lee, 2001; Davis and Ward, 1995; Gabris and Simo, 1995; Kilpatrick, Cummings, and Jennings, 1964; Light, 2002a; US Office of Personnel Management, 1979, 2007a, 2013). Some of these studies have found that public sector respondents express higher levels of satisfaction with certain facets of work, such as health care benefits and job security. Large-scale surveys have shown that younger members of the public sector workforce show higher levels of general work satisfaction than younger private sector workers do (Steel and Warner, 1990) and that persons entering the public sector workforce are higher on certain measures of quality than entry-level private sector employees (Crewson, 1995a).

However, numerous studies across several decades that compared the work satisfaction of public and private sector employees, especially at managerial levels, have reported somewhat lower satisfaction among public sector employees in various specific facets of work (Buchanan, 1974; Bogg and Cooper, 1995; Bordia and Blau, 1998; Hayward, 1978; Kovach and Patrick, 1989; Lachman, 1985; Light, 2002a; Paine, Carroll, and Leete, 1966; Porter and Lawler, 1968; Rhinehart and others, 1969; Rainey, 1983; Solomon, 1986; US Office of Personnel Management, 2013).

These studies used different measures of satisfaction and varied samples, which makes it hard to generalize about them. For example, Paine, Carroll, and Leete (1966) and Rhinehart and his colleagues (1969) found that groups of federal managers showed lower satisfaction than business managers on all categories of the Porter Needs Satisfaction Questionnaire (Porter, 1962), described earlier. Conversely, Smith and Nock (1980), analyzing results of a large social survey, found that public sector blue-collar workers show more satisfaction with most aspects of their work than their private sector counterparts, but public sector white-collar workers show less satisfaction with coworkers, supervisors, and intrinsic aspects of their work.

Hayward (1978) compared employees and managers in a diverse group of public and private organizations and found that satisfaction ratings were generally high among both groups. The public sector respondents, however, gave somewhat less favorable ratings concerning their job overall, their ability to make necessary decisions, the adequacy of the supplies in their organization, the amount of duplication with which they have to contend, and the amount of work they are expected to do. Rainey (1983) found that state agency managers scored lower than business managers on their satisfaction with promotion opportunities and with coworkers. Light (2002a) found that federal employees express higher satisfaction than private sector employees with job security and benefits and with the ability to accomplish something worthwhile, but the federal employees were lower on satisfaction with the public's respect for their work, with the extent to which their jobs were dead-end jobs, and with the degree to which they can trust their organizations. Cho and Lee (2001) reported that in their Korean sample the public managers perceived higher levels of prestige in their jobs than did the private sector managers.

The findings of these studies vary a great deal and are not easily summarized. The public and private responses often did not differ greatly, yet it is hard to dismiss as accidental the consistent tendency of the public managers and employees to score lower on various satisfaction scales. Taken together, these studies reveal comparable levels of general or global satisfaction among respondents from the public and private sectors. The studies also indicate lower satisfaction with various intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of work in many public organizations as compared to private ones. Some of the findings appear to reflect the administrative constraints described earlier: personnel system constraints (promotion and pay) and purchasing constraints (supplies). Others appear to reflect related frustrations with administrative complexities and complex political and policymaking processes, which are public sector realities that diminish some intrinsic rewards. The findings suggest that many public sector employees show high levels of satisfaction in their work, comparable to those of employees in the private and nonprofit sectors, and comparable or higher levels of satisfaction with certain facets of work, such as benefits and security, and sometimes with a sense that their work is important and socially valuable. Those public employees who express lower satisfaction with facets of work tend to be concerned over frustrating administrative and political constraints and complexities, and over certain extrinsic factors, such as constraints on pay and promotion.

Organizational Commitment and Job Involvement

Research has provided evidence about organizational commitment and job involvement in public organizations, much of it based on comparisons of public and private managers and employees. The research has produced some indications of particular frustrations in the public service. As with other topics, such as motivation and work satisfaction, however, the evidence is sometimes conflicting, but leads to the conclusion that public organizations and managers may face particular challenges, but the situation in the public sector is not necessarily worse than in other settings, such as the private and nonprofit sectors. The research further provides suggestions for public managers and indicates how public organizations and managers can apply them effectively.

The stream of research began with studies by Buchanan (1974, 1975), who found that groups of federal executives expressed lower organizational commitment and job involvement than executives from private firms. He concluded that the public managers felt less commitment for several reasons. They did not feel as strong a sense of having a personal impact on the organization; the organization did not expect as much commitment; and their work groups were less of a source of attachment to the organization. Buchanan also suggested that the lower involvement scores indicated a frustrated service ethic, and he expressed concern that it reflected weak public service motivation on the part of the public managers. His evidence showed that the public managers' weaker involvement responses resulted from a sense of holding a less challenging job, of working in less cohesive groups, and of having more disappointing experiences in the organization than the managers had expected when they joined it. These disappointments, he thought, might arise when idealistic, service-oriented entrants confront the realities of large government agencies, in which they feel they have little impact.

Flynn and Tannenbaum (1993) also reported a study in which a sample of public managers expressed lower organizational commitment than a sample of private sector managers. The public managers were lower on their ratings of the clarity, autonomy, and challenge of their jobs. Their lower scores on clarity and autonomy appeared to be the strongest influences on their lower commitment scores. Brown (1996) conducted a meta-analysis of job involvement studies and found a modest relationship between employment in the public or private sector and job involvement. For public sector respondents, several determinants of job involvement – such as the job's motivating potential, pay satisfaction, and participative decision making – were weaker. Moon (2000) reported survey results in which a sample of public managers expressed lower organizational commitment than a sample of managers in private business.

Though they have not measured organizational commitment directly, other studies and observations have indicated similar general characteristics of the public sector work context. Boyatzis (1982) drew a conclusion similar to Buchanan's from his comparisons of public and private managers. Chubb and Moe (1990) found a generally lower perceived sense of control and commitment among staff members and teachers in public schools than among their private school counterparts. Michelson (1980) described examples of hardworking bureaucrats in “nonworking” bureaucracies. They work hard, he observed, but the diffuse goals and haphazard designs of some programs make their efforts futile. Cherniss (1980) observed that many public service professionals experience stress and burnout as a result of their frustrated motivation to help their clients and because of the bureaucratic systems that aggravate their frustrations.

Other studies, however, have found that public employees were not necessarily lower on organizational commitment (Balfour and Wechsler, 1990, 1996). Steinhaus and Perry (1996) analyzed data from a major national survey, the 1991 General Social Survey, and found that public sector employees showed no significant difference from private sector employees on a measure of organizational commitment. They found that the industry in which a person was employed predicted organizational commitment better than whether the person worked in the public or private sector. They concluded that a public-versus-private dichotomy is too simple a distinction for analyzing organizational commitment. The International Social Survey, described earlier, found that levels of organizational commitment among public and private employees differed in a number of nations, but not in all of the thirty nations studied, and not in a consistent pattern (Bullock, Stritch, and Rainey, 2015).

These mixed results raise some important challenges for public sector managers and researchers alike. First, they emphasize the question of whether all the assertions about the context of public organizations reviewed in earlier chapters influence organizational commitment. The studies that found a public–private difference concentrated on managers, whereas those that did not, such as the Steinhaus and Perry study (1996), looked at all levels together, or mostly at nonmanagerial employees. This pattern suggests that the constraints and interventions that impinge on public organizations may have their greatest influence at managerial levels.

The evidence also raises doubts about Buchanan's concerns about weakened motivation and commitment in government agencies. Public managers and employees may show lower scores on organizational commitment because they feel strongly committed to serving clients or to more general societal values and missions and do not regard the organization itself as the most important object of pride and loyalty (Romzek and Hendricks, 1982). In addition, other chapters in this book describe the substantial body of evidence showing highly committed administrative leaders and professionals in government.

The studies of organizational commitment in the public and private sectors provide suggestions for both managers and researchers. Balfour and Wechsler (1996) found that four factors appeared to increase all three dimensions of commitment: more participation in decision making, lower political penetration (less external political influence on hiring, promotion, and treatment of clients), more respectful and supportive supervision, and more opportunity for advancement. In a similar vein, on the basis of her own research and that of others, Romzek (1990) concluded that highly committed employees in government feel that their jobs are compatible with their ethics, values, and professional standards. They also feel that their families and friends support their affiliation with the organization for which they work. Although the studies reviewed here indicate difficulties in bringing about such conditions in some public organizations – probably in very complex, controversial, and highly politicized ones with diffuse mandates – public managers can often overcome these problems. As the research also shows, the problems in the public sector may not be more severe than those in the private sector, but rather simply different.