Improving Work–Life Balance for Female Civil Servants in Law Enforcement: An Exploratory Analysis of the Federal Employee Paid Leave Act

In late 2019, Congress passed the Federal Employee Paid Leave Act (FEPLA) establishing parental leave for most federal civilian employees. The new law provides up to 12 weeks of paid leave within 12 months after the birth, adoption, or foster placement of a child occurring on or after October 1, 2020. Despite its recent enactment, this study draws on survey data from 224 civil servants across 39 federal law enforcement agencies to examine the implications of FEPLA for improving work–life balance in the federal sector. Findings suggest that FEPLA will likely improve work–life balance for female civil servants. However, women may also be afraid to use FEPLA due to perceived loss of future promotional opportunities or other workplace visibilities.

"REVISITING CROWDING-OUT EFFECT OF PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT: ITS IMPACT ON EXTRINSIC AND INTRINSIC MOTIVATION"

Scholars have believed that motivation crowding out will occur when performance-based personnel management is practiced in the public sector. However, drawing on a more sophisticated typology of human motivation, this study demonstrates that the provision of extrinsic rewards can motivate, rather than demotivate, public employees even if public employees have strong public service motivation. Analyzing the data from the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (USA), this study found that the practice of employee performance management increases work effort and job satisfaction, and that such effects were mediated mainly by the hybrid motivational mechanisms (i.e., via enhanced self-concepts and perceived fairness), rather than by increasing sheer extrinsic motivation. This implies that the practice of employee performance management can be effective in motivating public employees.

The Impact of Predisposed Traits and Organizational Factors on the U.S. Federal Employee Perception of Whistleblowing

Whistleblowers play a critical role in revealing organizational wrongdoing. Even after the passage of the 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act and the 2012 Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, numerous studies find that public employees are still reluctant to report wrongdoing due to various forms of retaliation. Drawing on insights from a framework of predisposition and environmental perspectives, this study examines which type of factors—predisposed characteristics or organizational/environmental factors—are more influential and consistent in increasing the favorable perception of public employees about whistleblowing. To test the model, this study uses multiple waves of data including the 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys to perform agency-level analyses. The findings suggest that organizational/environmental factors increase favorable federal employee perception of whistleblowing over time while predisposed characteristics show inconsistent influence.

The “Levels” Problem in Assessing Organizational Climate: Evidence From the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey

The Federal Employees Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) has gained prominence as the primary vehicle through which agencies assess the work-related attitudes of their employees. Within the discipline, the FEVS results have proven a fertile source of data on the job-related attitudes of public employees. However, concerns have been raised with the instrument and with how the FEVS data has been used by scholars. This article highlights a concern with the use of ambiguous terms which impede interpretation of the FEVS results. An investigation in partnership with officials from the regional office of a federal agency confirmed the divergent meanings respondents assign terms such as “my organization” and brought to the fore the extent to which, in large organizations, employee attitudes are distinctive to the units to which they belong at different hierarchical levels. The literature on organizational climate provides a useful framework within which the phenomenon can be understood and analyzed.

Does Contracting Achieve Better Performance for Democratic-Constitutional, Procedural Tasks? Evidence From the EEO Discrimination Complaint Process

Contracting out has been considered one of the main performance management strategies to reduce costs and bring more expertise to government agencies. However, there is a lack of research assessing the performance of contractors compared with that of in-house agency employees, when both contractors and public employees deliver complex services. This study examines whether or not contracting achieves better performance in democratic-constitutional, procedural (DCP) tasks compared with in-house delivery, by analyzing contracting use in the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) discrimination complaint process. Using agency-level panel data from the Federal EEO Statistical Report of Discrimination Complaints, combined with data from the Federal Procurement Data System and the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, the study offers evidence resolving the competing logics for a relationship between contracting use and performance in DCP tasks. The findings show that an increase in contracting is associated with a decrease in timely completion of case investigations, which is a key measure of DCP task performance.

Association of Employee Engagement Factors and Turnover Intention Among the 2015 U.S. Federal Government Workforce

Employee turnover is a major challenge facing the federal workforce, which has lost more employees to voluntary turnover than any other form of turnover. This study determined the associations between engagement, demographic factors, and voluntary turnover intention by analyzing 2015 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey data. The findings indicate that employees with higher engagement levels are less likely to report an intention to leave their jobs than those with lower engagement levels. All engagement factors—perceptions of supervisors, leaders, and intrinsic work experience—are independently associated with turnover intention. Demographics also influenced turnover intention; being younger, male, and in a supervisory role and having a higher education level and shorter tenure were more likely to indicate turnover intention. Increasing employee engagement can have a positive effect on retaining a productive federal workforce. To retain an effective federal workforce, human capital management practices are needed to optimize factors that reduce turnover intention.

Data Compatibility Issues: How to Prevent Miscoding and Dropped Observations When Using U.S. Office of Personnel Management Data Sets

A critical comparison of the agency identifier codes in the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) and FedScope data sets reveals three distinct types of issues will occur when researchers attempt to merge the data sets: (a) a single agency is assigned different codes across data sets; (b) a single code is assigned to different agencies across data sets; and (c) a single code is assigned to two or more agencies in the FEVS data set and a separate agency in the FedScope data set. Between 2013 and 2016, these issues are present in almost all major federal departments. Compatibility issues between the agency identifiers could cause the user to drop observations unnecessarily or unknowingly combine two different agencies’ data improperly. If uncorrected, these issues will distort the analysis of studies that rely on this combination of data. However, researchers can correct for this issue and still use Office of Personnel Management (OPM) identifiers to combine data across multiple data sets.

Crowdsourcing Job Satisfaction Data: Examining the Construct Validity of Glassdoor.com Ratings

Researchers, practitioners, and job seekers now routinely use crowdsourced data about organizations for both decision-making and research purposes. Despite the popularity of such websites, empirical evidence regarding their validity is generally absent. In this study, we tackled this problem by combining two curated datasets: (a) the results of the 2017 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS), which contains facet-level job satisfaction ratings from 407,789 US federal employees, and which we aggregated to the agency level, and (b) current overall and facet ratings of job satisfaction of the federal agencies contained within FEVS from Glassdoor.com as scraped from the Glassdoor application programming interface (API) within a month of the FEVS survey’s administration. Using these data, we examined convergent validity, discriminant validity, and methods effects for the measurement of both overall and facet-level job satisfaction by analyzing a multitrait-multimethod matrix (MTMM). Most centrally, we provide evidence that overall Glassdoor ratings of satisfaction within US federal agencies correlate moderately with aggregated FEVS overall ratings (r = .516), supporting the validity of the overall Glassdoor rating as a measure of overall job satisfaction aggregated to the organizational level. In contrast, the validity of facet-level measurement was not well-supported. Overall, given varying strengths and weaknesses with both Glassdoor and survey data, we recommend the combined use of both traditional and crowdsourced data on organizational characteristics for both research and practice.

Intersectionality, Leadership, and Inclusion: How Do Racially Underrepresented Women Fare in the Federal Government?

Women continue to be underrepresented in leadership positions, but how does the intersectionality of being both a woman and from a racially underrepresented group influence leadership representation and inclusion in the U.S. federal government? This study answers the call of scholars to examine intersectionality that has received little attention in public administration despite the emphasis on representative bureaucracy and social equity. Drawing upon data from the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, we find that women from racially underrepresented groups are less likely to be supervisors and feel less included in the workplace. However, we find significant variation across dimensions of inclusion, where women from racially underrepresented groups are more likely to feel their workplaces are cooperative and empowering but less likely to view them as fair, open, or supportive. Findings illustrate the importance of examining both intersectionality and different aspects of inclusion to paint a more complete picture of diversity management efforts.