Donald P. Moynihan

Finding Workable Levers Over Work Motivation: Comparing Job Satisfaction, Job Involvement and Organizational Commitment

This article draws on a sample of state government health and human service managers to develop and test a model of work motivation. The authors examine the effect of individual attributes, job characteristics, and organizational variables on three aspects of work motivation: job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and job involvement. They find that managers have varying degrees of influence over these different aspects of work motivation, with greatest influence over job satisfaction and least influence over job involvement. A number of variables are important for work motivation, including public service motivation, advancement opportunities, role clarity, job routineness, and group culture.

Public Service Motivation and Interpersonal Citizenship Behavior in Public Organizations: Testing a Preliminary Model

ABSTRACT A good deal of research has demonstrated how public service motivation (PSM) facilitates desirable organizational attitudes and behaviors such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and work effort. Other research has demonstrated that PSM predicts higher levels of social capital and altruistic behavior in society. Between these two strands of PSM research, there is a gap in knowledge about whether PSM matters to citizenship behavior internal to the organization. This article tests the direct and indirect relationship between individual levels of PSM and interpersonal citizenship behavior using a structural equation model. We also account for the effect of organizational environment by incorporating a measure of co-worker support. We find that PSM has a direct and positive effect on interpersonal citizenship behavior in public organizations, even when accounting for the significant role of co-worker support.

Integrative Leadership in the Public Sector A Model of Performance-Information Use

This article proposes a new model for understanding leadership in the public sector. The integrative approach to leadership focuses on how leaders choose, promote, institutionalize, and use public management systems, and reform those in time. Using data from a 50-state survey, this article explores the role of integrative leadership in one of the most popular reforms of government in recent years, managing for results. The findings suggest that leadership does indeed matter to the use of performance information in decision making and offer insights into how and when leadership matters.

Explaining Turnover Intention in State Government: Examining the Roles of Gender, Life Cycle, and Loyalty

This article tests a model of turnover intention on a large sample of Texas state employees focusing on four issues. First, the findings support a life cycle stability hypothesis, which suggests that age, experience, and geographic preferences reduce turnover intention, an effect compounded by economic/familial constraints for primary wage earners and members of large households. Second, contrary to previous research, the results show that females are significantly less likely to state an intention to quit. This finding reflects changing patterns of labor force participation, as well as the particular advantages that the public sector offers female employees. Third, the results distinguish between the relative contributions of three overlapping concepts: organizational loyalty, voice, and empowerment. Organizational loyalty and empowerment reduce turnover intention, but voice is not a significant factor. Finally, the article provides a detailed test of different personnel policies, providing particular support for diversity policies.

Normative and Instrumental Perspectives on Public Participation Citizen Summits in Washington, D.C.

A normative literature in political science and public administration calls for enhanced citizen participation in public decisions. However, this approach overlooks the environment that shapes administrative behavior, an oversight likely to hamper reform efforts targeted at achieving the normative goals of participation. The administrative perspective is important because public managers shape participation forums and determine whether public input has an impact on decisions. In organizing participation, administrators are likely to be guided by an instrumental view of relative costs and benefits. Washington, D.C.’s Citizen Summit illustrates the primacy of the instrumental perspective but demonstrates conditions of compatibility with normative goals. In this case, public managers perceived administrative costs to be low relative to instrumental benefits, such as the quality of public input and a need to increase governmental legitimacy. They also applied innovative participation technologies to reduce administrative costs and raise instrumental benefits, reinvigorating the frequently criticized public hearing.

A Model of Voluntary Turnover in State Government

While many researchers have examined turnover in private sector firms, only a few studies have focused on quit rates in the public sector organization This article develops and tests a conceptual model of voluntary turnover in state government. The most significant finding is that state employees are less likely to quit in states with on-site childcare State governments that allow greater internal opportunity for movement are also more successful at retaining employ ees. In addition, state employees who are represented by unions and are better paid are less likely to quit.

What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Performance? Dialogue Theory and Performance Budgeting

This paper examines the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) in the federal budgeting process. The early evidence on PART prompts the search for a theory of budgeting that accepts that performance information will influence decisions, but will not be used in the same way from decision to decision, as the espoused theory of performance budgeting suggests. Dialogue theory emphasizes the ambiguity of performance information and related resource allocation choices. An exploratory test of dialogue theory is undertaken through an experiment involving graduate students assessing PART evaluations. The results illustrate a variety of ways in which different individuals can examine the same program and, using logical warrants, come to different conclusions about performance and future funding requirements.

Organizational Effectiveness and Bureaucratic Red Tape: A Multimethod Study

Although many efforts to improve the effectiveness of government agencies target bureaucratic red tape, little academic work has evaluated the implications of red tape for organizational performance. This article proposes and tests a model of organizational effectiveness that explicitly accounts for red tape and the mitigating effect of organizational culture. This multimethod study uses both quantitative data from questionnaires and qualitative data from in-depth interviews. Findings suggest that red tape in human resource systems and information systems has a negative effect on organizational effectiveness. However, a dimension of organizational culture, namely developmental, mitigates the negative effects of bureaucratic red tape.

Performance Regimes Amidst Governance Complexity

Much of the appeal of performance measurement is explained by its image as a simple and value-neutral way to monitor and improve government. But contemporary governance is characterized by complexity. Few public officials have the luxury of directly providing relatively simple services, the context in which performance regimes work best. Instead, they must work in the context of a disarticulated state, with policy problems that cross national boundaries and demand a multi-actor response. At the same time, traditional democratic values must be honored. This article examines the tensions between performance regimes and the complexity of modern governance, identifying implications and questions for research and practice.

A Workforce of Cynics? The Effects of Contemporary Reforms on Public Service Motivation

ABSTRACT This article examines how norms and intrinsic forms of motivation can inform agency-theory assumptions about how to manage bureaucratic misbehavior. In particular, the potential for public service motivation to mediate self-interested moral hazard is examined. Recent decades have seen the public sector move toward a market model, which has increased the opportunities for moral hazard by tying high-powered incentives to incomplete contracts. At the same time, the market model may crowd out intrinsic values that provide the best protection against exploitation of those situations.