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AbstractNearly 70 years ago, Dahl noted the difficulty of constructing a science of public administration that was plagued by three interrelated problems: values, behavior, and culture. Underlying all three problems was the presumption that public administration could establish a set of universal principles independent of moral or political ends, individual human differences, or social influences. In discussing these three broad and easily accessible themes, Dahl did more than identify and critique the field's problems and presumptions. He also provided a road map to move the field forward and establish a science of public administration. Drawing on the framework provided by Dahl, this article argues that the field has made considerable progress in recognizing, if not addressing, each problem raised by Dahl. Even so, several current presumptions or omissions are also identified that, if challenged, can provide additional possibilities to advance the science of public administration.

Public administration is an interdisciplinary field, building on a variety of disciplinary approaches and values. But how well does the field of public administration reflect those values and processes? In contrast to previous arguments regarding the degree to which the field does or should incorporate values and lessons from other academic disciplines, this study provides a systematic assessment of the field's reliance on research and theory from the fields of law, management, and political science. An analysis of journal citations across these fields suggests that research in public administration is largely isolated from the three disciplines that are commonly believed to form its foundation.

This study advances our understanding of employee work motivation and performance in the public sector by reinterpreting the literature on public service motivation within the psychological framework of goal theory. An empirical test of this new framework suggests that goal theory provides a strong theoretical foundation for understanding the independent contributions of task, mission, and public service to employee work motivation and performance. The importance of an organization's mission increases employee work motivation in the public sector by making the job more important, even after controlling for the effect of performance‐related extrinsic rewards.

AbstractProponents of the behavioral public administration movement call for greater use of theories from psychology and experimental research designs to improve the rigor of public administration research. We agree that the use of such theories and methods will provide much‐needed reinforcements to public administration research, but the approach taken so far might be too narrow and might unnecessarily alienate scholars using other perspectives and research approaches. Reflecting on our own training and experiences, we suggest that adopting a more inclusive approach that employs insights and research tools not only from psychology but also from other disciplines will provide public administration scholars with a stronger footing in their efforts to generate actionable knowledge for public managers and policy makers. We also identify some key methodological issues that behavioral public administration scholars need to consider and address as the use of experiments becomes more common in public administration research. Finally, we encourage public administration scholars interested in behavioral research questions to do more to contribute to broader management and organizational behavior research.

Focusing on information technology (IT) professionals in state governments, this study found that organizational context (resources, participation, and feedback), job-related stressors (workload and role ambiguity), and career advancement opportunities affect work exhaustion experienced by state government IT employees. Work exhaustion, in turn, had a direct effect on IT employee turnover intentions and an indirect effect through its influence on job satisfaction. As a result, the study extends our understanding of IT employee exhaustion (a) by developing and testing a conceptual framework of work exhaustion that investigates the causal order of, and interrelationships between, the organizational context variables and job-related stressors previously recognized as antecedents of work exhaustion and (b) because of the potential contribution of career advancement opportunities in such a model.

A structural equationmodel was proposed to analyze the impact of employee participation and job characteristics on job satisfaction. The current study found that participative decision making has a significant positive effect on performance feedback, task significance, and career development support. Performance feedback was positively related to job specificity and career development support. Task significance and career development support were, in turn, positively related to job satisfaction. These findings suggest that participation has an important, albeit indirect, effect on employee job satisfaction through its influence on job characteristics. The implications of these findings for public management are discussed.