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Sexual harassment in the workplace is commonly portrayed as the male supervisor harassing female subordinates. Within this popular characterization, the unequal distribution of formal, organizational power is believed to be a necessary precondition for sexual harassment. The traditional cultural image of harassers and targets has however not kept pace with changing workplace realities. Research has indeed found that female supervisors may in fact be more likely to be subjects of sexual harassment. This article uses survey data from the Australian Public Service to explore this kind of contrapower harassment. Results indicate that a strong link between gender, workplace authority, and sexual harassment exists, but also that this relationship is strongly influenced by age.

AbstractGovernments across the globe try to rebalance their budgets by rationalizing overhead operations. When overhead‐reducing policies are adopted, it is important to understand why some central government organizations have a higher overhead than others, and why organizational models to produce overhead efficiencies are used to different degrees. This study focuses on the Flemish context to analyse differences between central government organizations in the size and organization of two overhead processes: human resources management (HRM) and finance and control (FIN). Significant effects are found for autonomy, organizational size, spatial dispersion and budgetary stress, yet effects vary according to whether HRM or FIN is considered and whether the focus is on the size or the organization of HRM or FIN. Our findings have practical implications to get a process‐sensitive understanding of the size and organization of overhead, and theoretical implications as they cast light on factors that shape decision‐making in public organizations.

AbstractWhat happens to organizational rigidity when public organizations faced reputational threats over time? Do they take external criticism as incentives to become less rigid and more innovative and flexible through employee involvement and empowerment? Or do reputational threats paradoxically contribute to the very rigidity that is often stereotyped as inherent parts of government? Building on threat‐rigidity theory, we test the temporal relation between reputational threats (both in terms of the direction of reputation and its turbulence) and organizational rigidity. We apply a dynamic panel data approach combining different data sources on 34 US agencies over a period of 13 years. The results show that organizational rigidity increased, both when reputations evolved negatively over time and when reputations evolved more turbulently. No combined effect of negative reputations and reputational turbulence was observed. Both sources of reputational threats independently precluded organizations from creating a climate of employee empowerment, involvement, flexibility, and innovation.

Public sector innovation scholarship has not yet systematically explored how the target context (or output phase) of innovations impacts the early phases of innovation processes. This study theorizes and tests whether innovating organizations are more sensitive to ideas from particular stakeholder groups depending on the target group of said innovation. Using a large-scale dataset from the Australian Public Service, the results show that innovations with external target groups are more likely to be built on ideas from external stakeholders (compared with internal stakeholders) and—within the group of internal stakeholders—on ideas from managers (compared with non-managerial employees). Practical and scholarly implications are discussed.Points for practitioners: Innovations benefit from the inclusion of internal and external stakeholder ideas, both substantively (appropriate knowledge leads to better end products) and symbolically (innovations need to be deemed legitimate, and receive support from the actors that will be primarily impacted by the innovation). Innovating organizations need to be aware of the perceptions of the stakeholders affected by the innovation, and properly sense, capture and translate the ideas of those stakeholders in the innovation process.

AbstractThe extent to which public organizations contribute to crosscutting policy programs is a question of organizational commitment, resource allocation, and monitoring. In this paper, we triangulate survey and interview data to study the explanatory power of organizational factors to understand the extent of organizational adaptation to crosscutting policy programs. In line with the hypotheses, the organizational task, culture, and the portfolio minister's level of control seem to explain the extent of adaptation. Policy development as a task has a positive effect on organizational adaptation. However, this effect disappears if we add cultural variables. The second model indicates that a customer-oriented culture has a negative effect on organizational adaptation, and an innovation-oriented culture has a positive one. The portfolio minister's level of control has a strong positive effect on organizational adaptation. Apparently, incentives are needed to hold organizations accountable and provide them clear direction regarding their contribution to crosscutting objectives.

Why do public sector organisations target different stakeholder audiences in their reputation management? Despite the recognition that reputation management is an audience-based exercise, the field lacks studies that systematically analyse which audiences matter for reputation management by different public service organisations. This article examines reputation management by public service organisation in a multi-audience framework. The relevance of different audiences is surveyed at public service organisations that differ in formal-legal distance from government, task, size and environmental turbulence. The strongest and broadest effects are found for more autonomous organisations, who focus their reputation management more on politicians in general and the media and less on their directly responsible Minister.