Suchergebnisse

Institutions of Higher Education (HE) are subject to rapid and radical changes. Faced with rising socio-political demands, globalization and digitization of HE, public sector austerity, and conflicting strategic goals, HE leadership has become extremely challenging. In the wake of the fiscal crisis in 2008, top-level executive leaders in public HE are put under severe pressure to implement neo-classical cost-saving strategies that are alien to the traditional values of European academia. Consequently, HE institutions are moving away from traditional public value-oriented principles of collegial and value-oriented HE management (Public Value Orientation) toward a marketized, competition- and performance-oriented view on HE (New Public Management). While the negative effects of this latent paradigm shift on academic staff is well researched, there is hardly any evidence on how top-level executives perceive and cope with this phenomenon. This master thesis closes this research gap by investigating whether HE leaders in Europe to-date are mainly driven by NPM-related values, it explores how prevalent politicized NPM-related value trade-offs are in the operative processes of HE leadership, and it reveals the detrimental consequences of the paradigm shift for European HE. Using an explorative and iterative mixed-methods approach, this thesis, first, derives research questions based on a systematic review of the scientific discourse on HE leadership and NPM to, second, conduct exploratory quantitative analyses on data of a unique survey conducted in 21 European countries with N = 7,312 top-level public sector executives, n = 631 of which are actively involved in (higher) education. Results show that the paradigm shift toward marketized HE has created substantial conflict between the traditional values, identities, and goals of HE leaders and institutions by enforcing hierarchy, politicization, and a dysfunctional pressure toward short-term oriented criteria of economic productivity. NPM escalates the power of political stakeholders on HE who demand the implementation of policy reforms that are essentially obstructive to collaborative and innovative research and teaching HE leaders struggle severely to meet those ever-growing and value-incongruent demands without alienating themselves and their organizations from their core mission and the traditional values of academia.

AbstractPublic sector corruption is one of the most pressing unresolved issues of our time. Based on the Theory of Planned Behavior, this study examines the psychological and contextual mechanisms that allow individuals to rationalize their engagement in administrative corruption. By conducting a systematic literature review of 93 studies, 241 cases of empirical evidence on the relationships between micro, meso, and macro‐level factors are synthesized to reveal seven dimensions, which affect civil servants' corruptibility. Mapping the status quo of the discourse, this study reveals that moral justification for administrative corruption is the outcome of a multi‐layered and dynamic process of social cognition based on various processes of rationalization beyond greed: accountability conflicts, social obligations, and culturally reinforced norms (mis‐)guide behavior in the context of socially varying psychological reference points of accountability and legitimacy that lead to essential value conflicts between self‐serving behavior and integrity.

AbstractPublic-private partnerships (PPPs) have become widespread in the delivery of public services. This study explores behavioral mechanisms of building and eroding trust in partnering across sectors at the micro-level of interaction between public and private partners. Combining classic theoretical concepts on the development of interorganizational trust and administrative behavior, this study derives theory suggesting that partners' sector affiliation may have adverse signaling effects on individuals' intention to uphold effective partnerships over time, and that this intent may be moderated by sector-specific associations. Tested with a novel and dynamic multi-stage behavioral experiment based on the classic centipede game conducted with German graduate students (N = 482; Obs. = 4,338), results suggest that sector affiliation functions as a strong but potentially misleading signal for partners' strategic behavior in PPPs and that sector-specific associations asymmetrically moderate respondents' will to collaborate. These findings contribute to a more nuanced theoretical understanding of the micro-foundations of strategic behavior, particularly at nascent stages of PPPs, calling into question basic assumptions about coordination efficiency in cross-sectoral partnerships.

Bribery is a complex and critical issue in higher education (HE), causing severe economic and societal harm. Traditionally, most scholarship on HE corruption has focused on institutional factors in developing countries and insights into the psychological and motivational factors that drive HE bribery on the micro-level mechanisms are virtually non-existent. To close this research gap, this study investigates the connection between study-related burnout and university students' willingness to offer bribes to their lecturers to pass important exams. Conducting a vignette-based quasi-experimental replication study with 624 university students in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands we find that university students in three countries differentiate sharply between different shades of bribery and that a majority accept using emotional influence tactics to pass (failed) exams. In contrast, offering a helping hand or money (i.e., darker shades of bribery) to their lecturer was less acceptable. Study-related burnout is associated with a higher likelihood of engaging in these darker shades of bribery and students' commitment to the public interest is but a weak factor in preventing unethical behavior. In summary, this study provides solid empirical evidence that university students are likely to use emotional influence tactics violating both the ethical codes of conduct and the formalized bureaucratic procedures of HE examination, particularly if they suffer from study-related burnout. However, the accelerating effect of burnout on bribery is conditional in that it only holds for darker shades of bribery. HE institutions may benefit from implementing the four-eye principle and from launching awareness campaigns that enable lecturers to better recognize these tactics and engage students in creating a transparent environment for testing, grading, and collaboration that is resistant to bribery.

Digital-era governance is one of the central challenges of the twenty-first century and marks a fundamental paradigm shift in public administration. Based on the concepts of collaborative capacity and organizational maturity for co-creation, this study explores the factors that determine municipal administrations' capacity to engage in digitalization-related collaborations. Using unique survey data from 720 Swiss municipalities, this study investigates the relevance of intra-organizational and extra-organizational factors in stimulating local governments' likelihood of engaging in cross-sectoral and inter-organizational partnerships to implement the digital transformation. It reveals that extra-organizational impulses by digital change agents and stakeholder demand—in contrast to intra-organizational resources—are highly influential factors for municipalities to engage in digitalization-related collaborations. This study presents novel insights into the specific barriers to change and the success factors of co-creation in the process of municipalities' digital transformation to inform theory, practice, and policy design.

A commonly held assumption is that public service motivation (PSM) positively affects individuals' attraction to government, but there are also private and nonprofit organizations that are beneficial to the common good. Therefore, the goal of this study is to shed light on an understudied topic in Public Administration, namely, how the public value of public, private, and nonprofit organizations affects their attractiveness to citizens and how PSM moderates this relationship. We find that employer attractiveness is strongly influenced by organizations' public value regardless sectoral affiliation. This attribution of public value interacts with citizens' PSM. For high-PSM individuals, the relationship between public value and attractiveness is stronger than for low-PSM individuals. Furthermore, high PSM exercises an asymmetric effect, punishing organizations with low public value more strongly in the private sector. These results highlight important implications for HR practitioners in all three sectors seeking to attract and retain highly motivated employees.

We theorize that people with high Public Service Motivation (PSM) are especially prone to engage in prosocial rule-breaking (PSRB) behavior, which ultimately leads to discriminatory practices, particularly for clients associated with positive affect. We conduct an original vignette study in three countries (Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands) with 928 observations in total. Our findings provide tentative behavioral evidence on a linear relationship between PSM and the likelihood of PSRB and a strong positive association with client likeability, which is an asymmetric relationship: Negative affect cues have a larger negative effect than positive affect cues have a positive effect on PSRB. Although our results vary across the three country studies regarding the effects of PSM, overall, the results imply that high-PSM individuals have a tendency to being more likely to engage in PSRB and that clients who are perceived as more favorable will receive a less strict application of bureaucratic rules compared to less favorable clients.

We theorize that people with high Public Service Motivation (PSM) are especially prone to engage in prosocial rule-breaking (PSRB) behavior, which ultimately leads to discriminatory practices, particularly for clients associated with positive affect. We conduct an original vignette study in three countries (Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands) with 928 observations in total. Our findings provide tentative behavioral evidence on a linear relationship between PSM and the likelihood of PSRB and a strong positive association with client likeability, which is an asymmetric relationship: Negative affect cues have a larger negative effect than positive affect cues have a positive effect on PSRB. Although our results vary across the three country studies regarding the effects of PSM, overall, the results imply that high-PSM individuals have a tendency to being more likely to engage in PSRB and that clients who are perceived as more favorable will receive a less strict application of bureaucratic rules compared to less favorable clients.

AbstractTheory and evidence from the behavioral science literature suggest that the widespread and rising use of lingua francas in the workplace may impact the ethical decision-making of individuals who must use foreign languages at work. We test the impact of foreign language usage on individuals' susceptibility to bribery in workplace settings using a vignette-based randomized controlled trial in a Dutch student sample. Results suggest that there is not even a small foreign language effect on workplace bribery susceptibility. We combine traditional null hypothesis significance testing with equivalence testing methods novel to the business ethics literature that can provide statistically significant evidence of bounded or null relationships between variables. These tests suggest that the foreign language effect on workplace bribery susceptibility is bounded below even small effect sizes. Post hoc analyses provide evidence suggesting fruitful further routes of experimental research into bribery.

While it is known that life events are predictive for psychological and physiological illnesses, empirical research on the relationship between private life events and their effect on work-related outcomes in a public sector context is scarce. Based on the extended job demands-resources model, this study argues that experiencing private life events may exercise spillover effects into the sphere of professional life affecting public employees' work engagement and their risk of burnout. Longitudinal survey data from Switzerland reveals that negative private life events are associated with an increase in burnout but not necessarily lower levels of work engagement. Furthermore, experiencing transformational leadership exerts a mild stabilizing effect on work engagement in the face of private life events while public service motivation has no moderating effect. These findings have important implications for the practice and theory of public personnel management and leadership, employee performance, and well-being.