Suchergebnisse

Since politicization persists, threatening public sector governance and management, there is a need to further understand this phenomenon and its consequences. Previous empirical studies conducted predominantly in the United States have found a negative impact of politicization on performance; however, the reasons behind this relationship remain elusive. In this article, we inquire into the effect of politicization on organizational performance, and we propose that such influence can be explained by a deterioration of human resource management (HRM) practices. Using data from a national survey of municipal managers and mayors in Chile, our results confirm the negative impact of politicization on the performance of public agencies, which is partially mediated by politicization's deleterious effect on their HRM practices.

Abstract We review the literature on people management and performance in organizations across a range of disciplines, identifying aspects of management where there is clear evidence about what works as well as aspects where the evidence is mixed or does not yet exist. We organize our discussion by four lenses, or levels of analysis, through which people management can be viewed: (i) individual extrinsic, intrinsic, and psychological factors; (ii) organizational people management, operational management, and culture; (iii) team mechanisms, composition and structural features; and (iv) relationships, including networks, leadership, and individuals' relationships to their job and tasks. Each of these four lenses corresponds not only to a body of literature but also to a set of management tools and approaches to improving public employees' performance; articulating the connections across these perspectives is an essential frontier for research. We find that existing people management evidence and practice have overemphasized formal management tools and financial motivations at the expense of understanding how to leverage a broader range of motivations, build organizational culture, and use informal and relational management practices. We suggest that foregrounding the role of relationships in linking people and performance—relational public management—may prove a fertile and interdisciplinary frontier for research and practices.

AbstractNumerous studies associate ethical leadership with ethical behavior in the public sector. By contrast, the effects of unethical leadership in the public sector have largely not been explored. Yet, unethical leadership need not beget unethical followership. Instead, we theorize that some bureaucrats may perceive unethical leadership as a moral threat and respond to it with moral compensation and greater ethical behavior. We provide evidence for our theorized effect through a vignette experiment with 19,852 bureaucrats in Chile. Bureaucrats exposed in the vignette to unethical role modeling by their superior or peers react with greater ethical awareness and ethical intent. This effect is concentrated among bureaucrats recruited through merit‐based, public service criteria rather than connections, and thus bureaucrats who more likely feel morally threatened by unethical leadership. This suggests that unethical leadership in the public sector may differ in its consequences from the mere absence of ethical leadership.