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AbstractA growing body of literature attempts to explain the life‐cycles of public sector organizations. Of particular interest have been the form and incidence of their birth and termination, and connecting these events to such variables as legal status and political ideology. Less attention has been given to the effect of intermediary life‐cycle events, the tasks performed by agencies, and their policy domains. This study builds on existing fixed characteristics (nature) and dynamic environmental (nurture) approaches and uniquely supplements them with a new institutional legacy paradigm that examines how previous organizational reforms influence future reform. Moreover, we advance existing studies by providing more comprehensive tests of the role that task type and policy domain play. Finally, we retest "classic" nature and nurture variables, namely, political turnover and legal form. Results suggest that nature and nurture provide important pieces of the organizational life‐cycle puzzle and that nurture comprises both external and intra‐organizational dynamics.

In the last decade, reforms in the public sector have been implemented at an ever‐increasing pace. Hereby, organizations are repetitively subject to mergers, splits, absorptions, or secessions of units; the adoption of new tasks; changes in legal status; and other structural reforms. Although evidence is largely missing in the literature, there is a growing belief that such intense reform sequences may be damaging to organizations. This article aims to fill this gap in the literature by empirically examining the existence of such repetitive change injury for public organizations. To do so, we employ organizational absenteeism rates as an indicator for repetitive change injury and link this to the reform sequences an organization experienced. Results indicate that intense reform sequences disproportionally increase organizational absenteeism rates, supporting the existence of repetitive change injury and suggesting that reforms remain rooted in organizational memories for a longer time than is often assumed.

Through recurrent structural reform programmes governments are on a quest to design public organizations that will stand the test of their environment. One of the approaches to uncertain or sensitive issues has been to create various forms of (semi‐)autonomous organizations with substantial strategic discretion. However, while governments repeatedly experiment with designs, one might simultaneously expect that such interference through repeated structural change may limit the degree of strategic policy autonomy perceived by senior managers. More specifically, we propose that intense structural reforms may inadvertently reduce strategic policy autonomy perceptions through two mechanisms. First, intense sequences of structural reforms may lead to perceptions of relatively controlling political principals. Second, they may reduce an organization's ability to accrue resources beneficial to autonomy, such as a strong internal culture, network embeddedness and expertise. Results indicate that strategic policy autonomy perceptions will indeed be detrimentally affected for organizations that experience intense sequences of structural reform.

Over the past few decades, social, economic, and political developments have forced public organizations to continuously adapt to changing circumstances, casting them in ongoing cycles of organizational change. The continuous introduction of various types of change in an employee's work environment may generate substantial levels of role ambiguity, which in turn could hamper performance and satisfaction. Given the increasing degree of change complexity in the public sector, it is surprising that no research has investigated whether more complex change is associated with greater reductions in role clarity. To gain a better understanding of how change complexity impacts organizations and their employees, we analyze survey data from the Australian Public Service Employee Census using propensity score matching. Results indicate that increasing levels of change complexity results in greater reductions of role clarity, suggesting that change trajectories sometimes exceed employees' capability to adapt.

Public organizations were once seen as the epitome of stability and implacability. More recently, however, public organizations have been subject to fast-paced environmental change. One common response to the challenges posed by these volatile environments has been the adoption of various organizational changes to make public organizations more adaptable. However, following threat-rigidity theory, this study argues that as employees perceive multiple organizational changes, managerial support for innovative work behavior (IWB) of employees decreases. Analyses on the Australian Public Service (APS) employee census support these assertions. Our results contribute to the literatures on work behavior, organizational innovation, and human resources management, by demonstrating that multiple organizational changes negatively affect managerial support for IWB of individual employees, which may—through their negative impact on individual-level innovations—ultimately affect the very adaptability of organizations that many changes aspire to achieve.

The steep rise in the exchange of (citizen) data through government-wide platforms has triggered a demand for better privacy safeguards. One approach to privacy is to give citizens control over the exchange of personal data, hoping to reinforce trust in and support for data-driven governance. However, it remains unclear whether more control fulfils its promise of more support and higher trust. Using an online survey experiment, we study how 1) textual information on control and 2) direct control (simulated through an exercise in which respondents choose data types that can be shared) affect citizen trust, support and policy concerns. Results suggest that a combination of information on and direct control result in relatively high levels of trust, support and policy concern. Moreover, we observe an interaction effect in which those respondents with low pre-existing trust in government report more positive attitudes when assigned to the full intervention (information on control + direct control) group. Our results imply that perceived control may be especially useful to mitigate negative attitudes of those who have low trust in government.

Public sector organizations frequently restructure due to shifting management trends, crises, and political developments. Earlier research indicates that the sometimes-drastic reforms implemented in government strongly affect employees, causing psychosocial effects such as frustration, stress, and negative work environments. This may in turn increase the likelihood of severe phenomena such as workplace bullying and harassment. It remains unclear, however, how public organizations can introduce changes while preventing side-effects such as bullying and harassment. The goal of this article is twofold. First, we test whether evidence on the relationship between workplace change and bullying and harassment holds when using a large, public sector-wide sample. Second, we investigate whether satisfaction with change management plays a mediating role. Using cross-sectional and strata-based panel data analyses on Australian data, results indicate a positive relationship between workplace change and workplace bullying and harassment, but also suggest that satisfaction with change management mitigates this effect.