Suchergebnisse

Family-friendly policies and culture are important components of creating a healthy work environment and are positively related to work outcomes for public employees and organizations. Furthermore, family-friendly policies and culture are critical mechanisms for supporting the careers and advancement of women in public service and enhancing gender equity in public sector employment. While both policies and culture can facilitate women's participation in the public sector workforce, they may affect men and women differently. Using data from a 2011 study with a nationwide sample of state government employees, we investigate the effects of employee take-up of leave policies, employer supported access to child care, alternative work scheduling, and a culture of family support on work–life balance (WLB). We examine where these variables differ in their effects on WLB among men and women and make specific recommendations to further WLB among women. The results inform the literature on family-friendly policies and culture in public organizations.

Open government is an important innovation to foster trustworthy and inclusive governments. The authors develop and test an integrative theoretical framework drawing from theories on policy diffusion and innovation adoption. Based on this, they investigate how structural, cultural, and environmental variables explain three dimensions of open government: accessibility, transparency, and participation. The framework is tested by combining 2014 survey data and observational data from 500 local U.S. government websites. Organizational structure, including technological and organizational capacity, is a determinant shared by all dimensions of open government. Furthermore, accessibility is affected by a mixture of an innovative and participative culture and external pressures. A flexible and innovative culture positively relates to higher levels of transparency, whereas capacity is a strong predictor of adopting participatory features. The main conclusion is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to fostering the three dimensions of open government, as each dimension is subject to a unique combination of determinants.

Abstract
Open government is an important innovation to foster trustworthy and inclusive governments. The authors develop and test an integrative theoretical framework drawing from theories on policy diffusion and innovation adoption. Based on this, they investigate how structural, cultural, and environmental variables explain three dimensions of open government: accessibility, transparency, and participation. The framework is tested by combining 2014 survey data and observational data from 500 local U.S. government websites. Organizational structure, including technological and organizational capacity, is a determinant shared by all dimensions of open government. Furthermore, accessibility is affected by a mixture of an innovative and participative culture and external pressures. A flexible and innovative culture positively relates to higher levels of transparency, whereas capacity is a strong predictor of adopting participatory features. The main conclusion is that there is no one‐size‐fits‐all solution to fostering the three dimensions of open government, as each dimension is subject to a unique combination of determinants.

Engaging the public in government decision making is an important value and priority in a democratic society. Although there is research investigating public perceptions of citizen participation opportunities and efforts, little research focuses on understanding the motivations that public managers have to encourage citizen participation. This research seeks to understand the ways in which public managers' motivations are related to engaging the public in organizational decision making. We use data from two national surveys of U.S. local government managers conducted in 2010 and 2012 to investigate the extent to which performance-based rewards and public service motivation (PSM) contribute to citizen participation in government decision making and examine the ways in which the relationship between PSM and citizen participation is moderated by performance-based rewards and mediated by value congruence. The results indicate that performance-based rewards are negatively related to citizen participation in government decision making whereas PSM is positively related to citizen participation both directly and indirectly through person–organization value congruence.

Social media comprises a set of new technologies that enable richer data exchange in highly decentralized, dynamic, and loosely structured versatile virtual environments. Social media technology is expected to enhance participation, learning, and knowledge production in government settings, aligning traditional structural and authority boundaries while also challenging them. We examine the extent to which local governments in the United States are coupling social media technology with two types of participative tasks: collaborative work inside the organization and participative interaction with external stakeholders. We also explore how these two technology–task couples are associated with managerial perceptions of the positive and negative outcomes of technology use. We use survey data from five departments—community development, finance, police, mayor's office, and parks and recreation—in 500 U.S. cities. Findings show that social media and their use for specific tasks have limited impact on either positive or negative perceived outcomes. These non-findings may demonstrate that the implementation cost of social media technologies outweighs the managerial benefits they realize; that technology–task applications substitute for traditional approaches to the same task, but no effect is incurred; or that social media technologies are relatively new to local governments, and efforts to effectively utilize them for internal work tasks and external engagement are in their infancy.

Local governments in the United States have adopted and implemented e-government as a means of delivering services to the public and encouraging citizen participation. We use data from a national random survey of 902 government managers from 500 local governments in the United States to examine factors that explain the adoption of two types of e-government technologies: e-services, which enable electronic delivery of services, and communication technologies, which enable one- and two-way communication with citizens. We find that managerial perceptions of the organization, such as personnel constraints and organizational centralization, are negatively related to the adoption of e-services while citizen demands are positively associated with the adoption of e-services. In comparison, we find that public managers perceiving higher levels of external influences and citizen demands report increased adoption of communication technologies. The results contribute to the e-government literature by indicating the importance of distinguishing between communication technologies and e-services and the factors that explain the adoption of these technologies.

Although research‐extensive universities in the United States produce similar outcomes—research, teaching, and service—they vary substantially in terms of the publicness of their environments. In this article, the authors adopt a public values framework to examine how regulative, normative/associative, and cultural cognitive components affect realized public outcomes by faculty. Using survey data from a random sample of faculty scientists in six fields of science and engineering at Carnegie Research I universities, findings show that organizational and individual public values components are associated predictably with different realized individual public outcomes. For example, individual support from federal resources and affiliation with a federal lab (associative) are related to increased research outcomes, while tuition and fee levels (regulative) explain teaching outcomes, and perceived level of influence in the workplace (cultural cognitive) explains teaching and service outcomes.