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In the past decades, increasing attention in the public sector has been paid to the relationship between human resource management (HRM) practices and organizational commitment. The bureaucratic structure of public organizations has often been mentioned to have a negative impact on this relationship. To reduce red tape and increase goal clarity, governments worldwide have created semi-autonomous agencies that operate at arm's length, expecting that they would operate under more business-like conditions with positive effects on organizational commitment. In this study, these positive expectations were tested using groups of employees working at central government, two types of agencies, and businesses. Using multigroup structural equation modeling with a Dutch data set containing 2,432 respondents, the findings provide little support for the notion that agencies are similar to businesses in terms of bureaucracy and ways to stimulate employee commitment, and even indicate that some agencies are more bureaucratic than central government.

PurposePA scholars argue that two gaps are present in the stress literature: (1) "stress" is too simply treated as deleterious and (2) insufficient efforts are made to capture public servants' stress appraisal, i.e. the degree to which stressors are appraised as hindering or challenging. Overcoming Gap 1, this study aims to study stress as a continuum; from distress to eustress. Overcoming Gap 2, stress appraisal is studied through testing the interaction of PsyCap with the two most common clusters of public servants' job stressors: emotional and psychological stressors.Design/methodology/approachHypotheses are tested through structural equation modeling. A sample is used in this study of 1,853 Dutch public servants.FindingsThe results show that emotional and psychological stressors are high, but public servants often appraise them as challenging or as "part of the job", with consequently no increased distress or decreased eustress. Moreover, psychological capital helps public servants to appraise some of the negative effects of emotional, but not psychological, stressors as less deleterious.Originality/valueBy approaching stress as a continuum, the authors bring in a more complete picture of public servants' stress in PA literature. Moreover, this research shows that the ambiguous results in the existing stress literature about the consequences of emotional and psychological stressors on distress/eustress can partially be explained by sector differences as well as personality differences (i.e. PsyCap). Finally, this study criticizes the one-sided attention to PsyCap as purely positive. PsyCap is not only unhelpful in coping with psychological stressors, it also drains the challenging properties of psychological stressors for dedication.

Red tape has been viewed as a key concept in public administration for decades and one that can significantly impact the human resource management (HRM) process. Theoretically, red tape is argued to (a) constrain organizational practices, (b) alienate employees from their organization and, ultimately, (c) lower performance. However, there is some debate about how detrimental red tape is, and empirical evidence is mixed. Using a meta-analytic approach, we aggregated findings from previous studies to test the impact of red tape and to assess sources of heterogeneity across studies. The results provide support for the constraining and alienating effects of red tape, although red tape's impact on performance seems negligible. Furthermore, operationalizations of red tape and study context moderate some meta-analytic correlations. The lack of longitudinal and intervention studies and the use of single respondents remain the key limitations of current research, and therefore, future research is still needed.

Boards are expected to contribute to an organization's performance. In the case of schools, this means that the board should contribute to educational quality. However, there is no scientific proof that this expectation is valid. The (growing) literature on boards suggests that the effects of school boards depend on variables, such as board behaviour and corporate governance. In this study, we present the results of a secondary analysis drawing on representative existing datasets on Dutch secondary schools. This is unique as previous research usually dealt with non-representative cases or samples. Our merged dataset includes measurements of board characteristics, board behaviour and pupils' achievements. Through Structural Equation Modelling, we show that there is ample evidence that board characteristics and board behaviour affect pupils' achievements. The only variable affecting pupil's achievements is counter vailing power perceived by the executives in the school board. The model also hints at more complex patterns of interacting variables at the board level. To get more insight into how these variables interact, a different research approach is necessary, such as case studies on board behaviour, and on the effects thereof within the school.