People Management

The central issue in this chapter is people management in public organizations. That is, managers’ implementation of HR practices and their leadership behavior in supporting the employees they supervise at work. This chapter focuses on five key aspects related to HRM and leadership in a public sector context. First, the historical move from personnel management to HRM and leadership. Second, the distinction between external and internal management and this chapter’s focus on internal management. Third, the role of middle and frontline leaders in the implementation of policies and their responsibility for turning general policies into results. Fourth, the mutual dependency between HRM policies and leadership. Fifth, the distinction between intended, implemented, and perceived HRM and leadership. This chapter systematically draws on both the general HRM and leadership bodies of literature, and specifies these insights to the public sector context whenever possible.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the overall question that is central to this volume: How does management make a meaningful contribution to public service performance? A summary review of our knowledge of the concepts and relationships that feature in this overall question is provided. Describing the gaps in our knowledge, the chapter explains the approach taken by this volume in order to generate fresh insights. Thus, noting that what constitutes performance is dependent on the institutional context, the public values, and different stakeholders that emphasize some rather than other aspects of public service performance, the chapter introduces the institutional perspective. Signaling parallel lines of research with some centering management systems and others managers’ leadership, the chapter explains the multidisciplinary approach which combines the insights from public management, leadership, human resource management, and work and organization psychology to gain a better understanding of what managers do to impact performance. In addition, this multidisciplinary approach provides insight into how public employees’ attitudes and behaviors contribute to job and organization performance. The chapter concludes by presenting the conceptual model underlying the volume and explains the focus of the individual chapters and their contribution to answering the volume’s overall question.

Public Sector Employee Well-Being

This chapter deals with an important issue in every public organization: employees’ well-being, which the academic literature consistently relates to organizational performance. After addressing the definition of well-being, the chapter presents the two main theoretical lenses through which well-being is considered: the job demands–resources (JD–R) and the person–environment (P–E) fit models. With respect to these two theoretical models, the main empirical findings, specifically for public organizations, are described and discussed. Thus, variables are identified that can be considered as levers for or obstacles to well-being in public organizations. This permits an “institutional” reading of the antecedents of well-being, highlighting, among other characteristics, environmental, organizational, and task characteristics that are particularly important to consider when studying public organizations. Finally, the chapter also points out some gaps in the current literature and proposes new avenues of research for the study of well-being in public organizations.

Public Service Motivation and Individual Job Performance

When pressure on human resource departments to make government more efficient is increasing, it is of great relevance to understand employees’ motivation and the fit of an employee with their job, as both contribute strongly to service performance. Therefore, this chapter discusses the role of public employees’ motivation and its relationship to individual performance. More specifically, this relationship is examined by focusing on public service motivation (PSM), a stream of research developed during the last three decades stressing the service orientation of public employees’ identity. Theoretically, how the relationship between PSM and individual performance is dependent on institutions is discussed, and an overview of the existing empirical evidence concerning this relationship is provided. The literature review discusses a variety of aspects such as direct vs. indirect effects, type of performance used, how performance is measured, and effect sizes. Finally, several avenues for future research are proposed, including methodological strategies.

Managing Employees’ Employability

This chapter uses research findings and examples from practice to provide a state-of-the-art overview of public sector workers’ employability and its determinants and outcomes. Employability is attracting growing attention from both public and private sector organizations. However, scarce research attention has been paid to the importance and features of the employability of employees in public organizations. Scholars regard and study employability mostly as an issue for business organizations. This chapter demonstrates, among other things, that both in research and in practice, employability is predominantly treated in a generic, non-sector-specific way. This leads to a call for public sector-specific studies and comparative research across countries and sectors. The chapter ends with proposals for future research and policy agendas.

Public Managers’ Contribution to Public Service Performance

This chapter describes how public managers contribute to public service performance. First, the chapter investigates three critical contextual factors for how public leadership can make a difference to organizational performance: managerial autonomy, capacity, and ability. Second, three leadership strategies are introduced which have been positively related to organizational performance in the public sector: goal-oriented, relational, and non-leader-centered leadership. Third, a new concept with particular relevance for public management is presented—reputation management—and this points to the relevance of considering the nexus between reputation and performance. It is argued that an organization’s reputation and performance may be more or less aligned. However, more importantly, an organization’s reputation per se also provides an important but less studied contextual factor of relevance for public managers’ ability to improve organizational performance. Finally, the chapter discusses how to develop leadership skills that increase public managers’ ability to contribute to public service performance.

Managers as Insiders or Outsiders to Public Organizations

The heart of public management is that the public sector context matters in ways that generic management research typically neglects. Generic management scholarship has found that the degree of match between top managers’ career experience and the characteristics of their current organizations creates managerial fit or misfit. However, public sector management adds the insight of “publicness fit” and the empirical finding that managers appointed from outside of public organizations tend to have shorter tenures, and in some contexts, weaker performance than managers with experience managing inside public organizations. This chapter reviews the current state of research on managerial publicness fit. First, the publicness fit on dimensions of public ownership, funding, and regulation is presented and a systematic review of broader studies of managerial fit for their relevance to the topic is given. Then, review evidence on publicness “insider/outsider” fit and its consequences for the public sector is offered. The third section concludes with an agenda for integrating publicness fit with the other dimensions of managerial fit identified in the review.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter synthesizes the insights and gives a comprehensive answer to the volume’s overall question. It sets directions for future research and discusses implications for public organizations’ practice. There is ample evidence that management contributes to performance, both directly and indirectly, through influencing employees’ (public service) motivation, organizational commitment, and job performance. There is also evidence that management contributes to employee outcomes, both positive, such as their job satisfaction and employability, and negative, such as stress and burnout. The chapter reflects critically on the state of public management research and outlines four key issues for future research: (1) work toward an integrated theoretical framework; (2) develop more comprehensive theoretical models; (3) pay attention to the public sector context; and (4) increase methodological rigor. The chapter contends that public management–performance research remains relevant in the era of inter-organizational networks and co-production, if and when studies pay explicit attention to the public sector context and to the frontline employees involved in service production. The chapter advises public organizations to invest in service provision policies that fit the organizational mission and create the conditions for their implementation by frontline managers who can help public employees create public value.

Stakeholders, Public Value(s), and Public Service Performance

For managers in public service organizations, stakeholders are very important as they have different and sometimes conflicting values. Yet, public administration scholars often neglect the stakeholders despite their vital role in defining good performance in democratic political systems. This chapter combines theoretical perspectives on public values (different understandings of the desirable) with contributions focused on creating public value. The chapter also pays attention to the co-existing and competing governance paradigms that are part of the context in which managing for public service performance occurs. These paradigms provide institutional templates, policies, operational strategies, and desired programs that prescribe how public service provision should be structured and how it should operate. Governance paradigms can be used to understand the links between stakeholders, public values, and public service performance. Giving insight into these links is the key contribution of the chapter. It uses nine illustrative studies to examine how the stakeholder concept and public value(s) are used in the public service performance literature. A key implication is that public administrators can be portrayed as experts who exercise judgment and make consequential decisions in identifying relevant public values, in creating public value, and in generating public service performance.

An Institutional Perspective on Public Services

It is easy to think of public service organizations in generic terms. However, on the basis of a multidimensional institutional perspective of publicness, which includes authority, funding, and values, one can quickly understand that the publicness of organizations comes in various guises. This institutional perspective not only explains the behavior of these various public service organizations themselves but also the behavior of individuals operating within these institutional boundaries. Key to explaining individual institutional behavior is the concept of identities. Depending on the extent of their internalization, identities influence individual behavior more or less strongly. An important level at which these insights can be harnessed to the benefit of the organization is at the level of management, which is the link between the individual and the organization. The mechanisms of management influence are illustrated by analyzing four different organizational systems (work design, reward, human resources flow, and employee participation) to manage human assets in public service organizations.