Eva Knies

Towards an empirical research agenda for public value theory

ABSTRACT There is considerable scholarly writing about the theory and application of public value concepts, but this article explores why there is, by contrast, so little empirical research on public value. The article then goes on to provide a framework and a research agenda for inspiring and guiding new empirical research, based on three different conceptualizations of public value, with researchers needing to be explicit about which approach they are using in order to avoid confusion. While case studies have been used as a research method, the authors suggest a much wider array of potential research methods (depending on the research question) covering both quantitative and qualitative approaches and with a wider variety of designs, including comparative analysis. It is suggested that empirical research is undertaken with a more diverse range of stakeholders of public value, breaking out of the public manager-centric approach. This is an exciting agenda for research, though the paper warns that public value may fade from view unless empirical research is undertaken to test, challenge and extend the scholarly contributions.

Leadership Behavior in Public Organizations A Study of Supervisory Support by Police and Medical Center Middle Managers

Leadership behavior is recognized as an important variable in the Human Resource Management (HRM)-Performance chain. However, in most studies, leadership behavior is viewed as an independent variable, and one that influences employees’ attitudes and behavior. Because of this premise, claims that public managers’ discretionary room for supervisory support is constrained, and that personal motivation is the most important reason for a manager engaging in supervisory support, have not been systematically examined. This article fills this gap by examining the antecedents of supervisory support by middle managers in the police force and in an academic medical center in the Netherlands. The results show that the extent of the discretionary room that middle managers experience has an effect on supervisory support and that this relationship is mediated by their willingness to support employees. Furthermore, a manager’s supportive ability is an important additional antecedent.

Special issue of International Journal of Human Resource Management: Strategic human resource management and public sector performance

From the 1990s onwards the HRM and performance debate has resulted in hundreds of conceptual and empirical articles. Several studies have demonstrated the added value of HRM for organizational perf...

Public value creation and strategic human resource management: public service motivation as a linking mechanism: A Public Values Perspective

2 Public management contributions for improving social service performance: public values, public service motivation and rule functionality 19 Gene A. Brewer 3 Public value creation and strategic human resource management: public service motivation as a linking mechanism 37 Wouter Vandenabeele, Peter Leisink and Eva Knies 4 Academia: habitat of contesting public values? 55 Henk J. van Rinsum and Arie de Ruijter 5 Public value and localism in the UK 71 Keith Grint and Clare Holt 6 The organization of social issues through sport: youths in public playgrounds 88 Jeroen Vermeulen

Employer's investments in hospital workers' employability and employment opportunities

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between employer’s investments (through job characteristics and managerial support) and employees’ employment opportunities, with employability, conceptualized as perceived up-to-date expertise and willingness to change, as a mediating variable. Design/methodology/approach – Hypotheses are tested using structural equation modeling on survey data collected from 1,626 employees of three Dutch hospitals. Findings – Consistent with the hypotheses, the results indicate that job characteristics and managerial support are indirectly related to employees’ beliefs on employment opportunities, with the relationship mediated by up-to-date expertise and willingness to change. Further, managerial support is directly related to employees’ employment opportunities. Practical implications – This paper shows that employers, by providing an attractive and challenging job in combination with adequate supervisory support, can enhance their employees’ employab...

Validating a scale for citizen trust in government organizations

Citizen trust in government at the macro level has been studied by public administration scholars for many years. To further our understanding, assessing trust at the meso level of government organizations is important to more precisely determine effects and antecedents of trust at the organizational level. The organizational trust literature has shown that organizational trustworthiness is multidimensional, but the extant literature has not validated such measures in a public administration context. The proposed scale builds on and adapts an existing organizational trust scale to a public administration context. The ‘Citizen Trust in Government Organizations’ scale is validated using data from two different samples (total n = 991), resulting in a scale of nine items measuring three dimensions: perceived competence, benevolence, and integrity. This scale can be used by other researchers and is valuable to gain a more specific and multi-dimensional understanding of trust in government organizations. Points for practitioners A major problem for government organizations worldwide is the lack of perceived trustworthiness by the public. To tackle this problem, a way to measure it is needed, but at the moment there are only generic measures to assert perceived trustworthiness in a government organization. This article presents a first validation and incorporates three dimensions: perceived competence, benevolence, and honesty. Practitioners can use this scale and adapt to their relevant local context to identify specific trustworthiness problems.

The Role of Line Managers in Motivation of Older Workers

This chapter sets out to answer the question as to what extent and how line managers support older workers at work and to what extent their support influences the motivation and productivity of older workers. The role of line managers in the implementation of Human Resource (HR) policies has grown over the years. This role is particularly important in the case of older workers as their situations differ greatly and line managers can tailor HR policies to their individual preferences. The support which line managers provide to older workers has a positive effect on their motivation to continue in work and on their productivity. An important issue is whether line managers are able and willing to support older workers. An overview of relevant factors which impact on line manager’s activities shows that negative stereotypes about older workers have become less salient in recent years. Meanwhile, research shows that the opportunities and support for line managers are important determinants of how they provide actual support for older workers. The implications of these findings are discussed in the concluding section of this chapter.

People Management in the Public Sector

This chapter discusses people management in public sector organizations, starting from the idea that it is their mission that makes public organizations different from private organizations. The mission-driven character of public organizations is a key distinctive characteristic that impacts on people management in combination with other distinctive features including the constraints on managerial discretion, perceptions of red tape, and employees’ public service motivation. It is also acknowledged that other specific contextual features should be taken into account as the public sector consists of a variety of organizational settings. This chapter focuses on the generic characteristics that make people management in public organizations distinctive and describes how these impact the effect people management has on societal, organizational, and employee outcomes.

Does Public Service Motivation Matter? A Study of Participation in Various Volunteering Domains

This article examines the extent to which public service motivation (PSM), more specifically the PSM dimension commitment to the public interest (CPI), is related to volunteering. The claims for th...

People management: developing and testing a measurement scale

Abstract The central concept in this study is people management, referring to line managers’ implementation of HR practices and their leadership behaviour oriented at supporting the employees they supervise at work. In this study we conceptualize people management and develop a multidimensional scale to measure it from the perspectives of both employees and line managers. Using a Study 1/Study 2 design, including two-wave multilevel data from employees and line managers of a financial service provider, and cross-sectional data from teachers, educational support staff, and supervisors, we demonstrate the scale’s reliability and multidimensionality across samples and over time. We provide evidence of the convergent validity by showing that employees’ and line managers’ perceptions of people management are significantly related, and that people management is significantly related to transformational and transactional leadership. Also, we demonstrate that people management adds explained variance above and beyond transformational and transactional leadership in predicting team performance. We demonstrate criterion-related validity through people management’s relationship with job satisfaction, commitment, and work engagement. We discuss the implications of our measure for theory and research on people management, its antecedents, and its effects.