Nevbahar Ertas

Public Service Motivation Theory and Voluntary Organizations Do Government Employees Volunteer More

Research has shown that individuals with greater public service motivation (PSM) values are more likely to work for government, because government jobs offer more public service opportunities; the question then arises of whether they are also drawn into other activities that offer service opportunities, such as participation in voluntary organizations. This study examined the volunteering behavior of government employees in different domains. Using the Americans’ Changing Lives survey, logistic regression models were estimated to examine the relationship between employment in the government sector and self-reported volunteering in five different types of organization. The results indicated that government employees engage in significantly more volunteering than their private-sector counterparts. When separate models were run for volunteering in each organization type, controlling for several other factors, the results showed that these initial big differences were driven primarily by their volunteering in two specific types of organization: Educational institutions and political groups.

Turnover Intentions and Work Motivations of Millennial Employees in Federal Service

In the face of looming retirements in the federal service, retaining and motivating the next generation of workers has emerged as a critical concern for human resource professionals in federal agencies. While a growing body of work provides advice and strategies on making government work more inviting for the members of the Millennial generation, those born after 1982, not much is known about the turnover intentions of those already in public service. Do Millennial workers in the federal agencies resemble older workers in terms of their work motivations and turnover intentions? This study compares Millennial and older generation workers in U.S. federal agencies, in terms of their turnover intentions and work motivations. The analyses show that they are more likely than their older counterparts to report an intention to leave their jobs, and most work attributes do not matter more for Millennial workers’ decisions to leave.

Charter Schools, Equity, and Student Enrollments The Role of For-profit Educational Management Organizations

For-profit educational management organizations (EMOs) are a growing phenomenon in public education, and they are an integral part of charter school reform in many states. Research suggests that charter schools operated by for-profit entities may take a more entrepreneurial approach when expanding their operations and thus may be more inclined to serve less disadvantaged and less costly students. In this article, we examine empirically whether charter schools are less likely to serve disadvantaged students by comparing the distribution of students across traditional public schools, nonprofit charter schools, and those managed by private companies. We base our analysis on data from the National Center of Education Statistics’ (NCES) Common Core Data (CCD), and we combine this data with information on the types of management organizations operating charter schools. Our results suggest that charter schools managed by EMOs draw students differently to their schools than those charter schools not managed by EMOs. They seem to seek out more Black students but are also focused on selecting fewer poor students than we see among regular public schools. When examining differences in the size of EMOs, we find that these effects appear most likely to occur among schools operated by large-sized EMOs.

Political Voice and Civic Attentiveness of Public and Non-Profit Employees

The scarcity of citizen involvement in the public sphere is an ongoing concern within the literature on democratic citizenship. This study examines two dimensions of engagement—attentiveness and participation—in several political voice activities, looking at citizens working in the public and non-profit sectors in comparison with private-sector employees. Government employees serve the public interest by providing public services in various ways, but they are also individual citizens with varying values, opinions, and attitudes. How does this dual role shape their civic engagement behaviors and habits of political attentiveness? Are they more politically attentive or more likely to engage in political voice activities than individuals working in other sectors? How do non-profit workers fare? Are they more similar to public workers or private workers with regard to participation in these activities? Using the Current Population Survey (CPS) Special Supplement on civic engagement, the analyses here indicate that both government and non-profit employees are significantly more likely to engage in political voice activities than those working in the private sector. By focusing on political voice activities, knowledge, and media use, the study contributes to the literature by providing a more comprehensive profile of individual participation by sector. The findings generate new questions about what such participation might mean for democratic citizenship.

Formal and Informal Social Participation of Public, Non-Profit, and Private Employees

Although existing research has focused on the link between employee sector and formal volunteering, no differentiation is made between formal and informal social participation. This study compares the formal and informal social participation of public-, non-profit-, and private-sector employees using recent data from two sources. The results indicate that both government and non-profit employees report higher levels of formal and informal social participation, as measured in several ways. Findings provide a more complete understanding of the multifaceted ways in which citizens can get involved, and emphasize the importance of motivational differences.

Charter Schools and Student Compositions of Traditional Public Schools

One of the most contentious urban education policy issues in the United States today is the expansion of charter schools and its repercussions. Does the expansion of charter schools affect the racial and socioeconomic composition of traditional public schools in the United States? This study provides empirical evidence on this question by relying on a panel design that uses school-level data from two states that have experimented with charter schools for more than 15 years: Ohio and Texas. Using county-level, spatial, and enrollment-based measures of charter exposure, the changes from pre- to post-charter-legislation stages in the student compositions of public schools that do and do not face competition from charters are examined. The results suggest that charter school presence contributes to aggregate-level changes in the share of non-Hispanic White and free-lunch-eligible students in traditional public schools in both states in different ways.

How Public, Nonprofit, and Private-Sector Employees Access Volunteer Roles

ABSTRACT Research has found that public and nonprofit employees volunteer at a higher rate than their for-profit-sector counterparts, with the disparity typically explained as a behavioral consequence of their higher public service motivation (PSM). This article considers an alternative explanation that public and nonprofit jobs might offer greater formal avenues for participation, and hence that differences in volunteering might simply be an indicator of ease of access to such opportunities, rather than of inherent prosocial orientation. Examining whether individuals in different sectors use different pathways to access volunteer roles may improve our understanding of sectoral differences in prosocial behavior. This study accordingly examines how public, nonprofit, and for-profit private-sector employees access organizational volunteer roles. The results show a few significant differences in access to volunteer roles by occupation sector. The implications of these findings for voluntary management, corporate social responsibility research, and future research are discussed.

Turnover Intentions of Volunteer Resource Managers: The Roles of Work Motivations, Person–Organization Fit, and Emotional Labor

ABSTRACT Volunteer management careers and the influence of workplace factors on volunteer manager turnover intentions have received relatively little attention in the empirical research literature. This study uses original survey data collected from over 400 volunteer managers to examine relationships between turnover intention and work motivation factors, person–organization fit (P-O fit), and emotional labor. Work motivation factors includes perceptions of advancement opportunities, task significance, autonomy, and pay satisfaction. P-O fit reflects the degree of congruence between an individual’s values and goals, and the characteristics of their workplace. Emotional labor reflects the degree to which employees are engaged in the management of emotions to adhere to the emotional expectations of their jobs. Results emphasize a lack of advancement opportunities as the primary driver of turnover, and P-O fit as a main factor for retention. In addition, the ability to regulate emotions was found to result in reduced quit intentions.