Adelien Decramer

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Ghent University

Red tape forms a major threat to many public organizations around the world. Building on the Job Demands–Resources model, supplemented by arguments from the psychological process theory of red tape, this study explores how and when red tape affects teachers’ employability competences (i.e., balance, anticipation and optimization, and personal flexi...

Performance Management (PM) is often criticized for undermining employee emotional exhaustion. To avoid such unintended consequences, this study investigates how PM can be of benefit to employee emotional exhaustion by integrating both process and content aspects of PM. Results show that a consistent PM process, in which the same performance expect...

Teachers are confronted with high levels of red tape in their jobs. By building on the Job Demands-Resources model, this article investigates how red tape originating from digital tools is related to teachers’ affective commitment. By exploring the mediating roles of role ambiguity and work engagement, we aim to advance the understanding of the und...

This study focuses on public secondary schools to examine the extent to which leader-level job demands impact the relationship between employees’ job resources, job demands, and well-being. Specifically, we investigate (1) how teachers’ developmental rewards and expected contributions relate to their work engagement and emotional exhaustion and (2)...

Purpose: Despite increasing attention to employee development, past research has mostly studied performance management systems (PMS) in relation to task-related behaviors compared to proactive behaviors. Accordingly, this study addresses the relation between PMS and innovative work behavior (IWB). Design/methodology: Building on signaling theory an...

Currently, the public sector is undergoing a major digital transformation. Although this digitization is seen as a positive transformation, digital tools can also put additional job demands on employees, resulting in negative HR outcomes. An example of a job demand resulting from such digital tools is red tape. By building on the job demands-resour...

In a context where the amount of red tape in healthcare organizations continues to rise, head nurses’ job satisfaction is constantly under pressure. By building on the Job Demands-Resources model, we developed a theoretical model investigating the relationship between red tape and job satisfaction. By investigating the mediating role of discretiona...

Although employee performance management (EPM) enhances performance, the effects that these systems have on employee quality of life remain unclear. Such information is particularly relevant for ‘vulnerable’ workers, whose employment situation has the potential to alter their social and economic position in life. Based on data gathered from 111 lea...

Although there is consensus among scholars that red tape has negative consequences, there is a lack of synthesis on these negative effects. We conduct a meta‐analysis and meta‐regression of public administration evidence and ask: What is the impact of red tape on organizational performance and employee outcomes, and which conditions moderate this i...

While a growing number of teachers use information and communication technology (ICT) for work tasks outside of formal working hours, research is inconclusive how this relates to their work-life balance. Following calls to examine the antecedents and moderating mechanisms of such behavior, the present study aims to examine how technology acceptance...

Using an ethical approach to the study of employability, we question the mainstream approach to career self-direction. We focus on a specific category of employees that has been neglected in past research, namely vulnerable workers who have been unemployed for several years and who have faced multiple psychosocial problems. Building on the Ability-...

Aim The aim of this study was to study the simultaneous relationships of work pressure with the performance and well‐being of nurses and to explore whether mindfulness moderates these relationships. Design A cross‐sectional survey design. Method We conducted a cross‐sectional survey of 1,021 nurses from 103 Belgian care homes for older people, in...

To guarantee team performance, employees should demonstrate high levels of relational coordination, which refers to the relational and communicational ties among employees. It is therefore essential to effectively manage relational coordination. This study examines how performance management generates relational coordination by focusing on both the...

Mindfulness has become quite popular. Both in scientific research and within regular media, the attention for the beneficial effects of mindfulness has increased. In the business world, claims on the effectiveness of mindfulness for well-being, focus, and performance are thrown around rather carelessly. In recent years, organizations are also provi...

Performance management is an ongoing process that intends to facilitate employee performance. There are concerns that this may lead to negative employee experiences. In education, an effectively operating performance management process is crucial, considering the challenging and demanding nature of the teaching profession. Drawing on social exchang...

This study contributes to the growing literature on the intersection between human resource management and corporate sustainability (CS) and, in particular, on sustainable human resource management (interpreted here as HRM practices informed by the CS principles, thus aiming at economic, social, environmental and human sustainability simultaneously...

This article extends the job demands–resources model in the public sector by including (a) crosslevel (moderation) effects of job demands and resources, (b) positive and non linear effects of job demands and (c) vitality as a key work engagement concept. Data on expected contributions and developmental rewards in public university colleges (n = 65...

The public sector requires job crafting from employees so that they can better cope with overdemanding jobs due to layer upon layer of public management reforms. Simultaneously, however, red tape and austerity constrain job autonomy. This study therefore tests how job crafting can be fostered in public organizations by studying social resources at...

Performance management (PM) can alienate employees from experiencing societal impact. This is problematic since societal impact influences employees’ job satisfaction. To avoid such unintended effects, we investigate two conditions under which PM could instead benefit the societal impact and job satisfaction of employees: consistency and leader-mem...

Using an ethical approach to the study of employability, we question the mainstream approach to career self-direction. We focus on a specific category of employees that has been neglected in past research, namely vulnerable workers who have been unemployed for several years and who have faced multiple psychosocial problems. Building on the Ability-...

Purpose – Drawing upon organizational justice theory, we examine how perceptions of performance management fairness affect burnout and organizational citizenship behaviors among academic employees. Methods – Data from 532 academic employees from a university in Flanders (Belgium) was analyzed using structural equation modelling. Findings – Academic...

Transformational leadership is a popular and well-researched leadership style. Although much is understood about its positive consequences, less research has focused on antecedents of transformational leadership. In this research we draw upon self-determination theory and incorporate a self-regulatory approach to investigate if and how leader mindf...

Mindfulness is een hype. Zowel in wetenschappelijk onderzoek als binnen de populaire media is de aandacht voor de gunstige effecten van mindfulness de laatste jaren erg toegenomen. Organisaties zetten meer en meer in op mindfulnesscursussen voor hun medewerkers. Ook het onderzoek naar 'mindful leiderschap' is in opmars. Als tegenreactie waarschuwen...

This study focuses on employee performance management in policing. We specifically aim to contribute to a better understanding of how the combined effect of performance planning and performance evaluation fosters the well-being of police officers. In the slipstream of public sector reforms many public organizations adopted employee performance mana...

Employees’ expected contributions can be incongruent with those of their leader. We examine the congruence effect of leaders’ and employees’ expected contributions on job satisfaction. Results of cross-level polynomial regressions on 947 employees and 224 leaders support the congruence effect. When expected contributions are congruent, employees ar...

Organizations operating in extreme environments rely on teams to tackle the highly demanding and complex situations. This study aims to provide new insights into the management of such teams by exploring the influence of environmental extremity on the relationship between performance management and team effectiveness. Mixed-method and multilevel an...

Hoewel performance management leidt tot een aantoonbare verbetering van de kwaliteit en kwantiteit van het onderzoek dat academici af-leveren (McCormack, Propper en Smith, 2014), bestaat het risico dat zulke systemen van personeelsbeheer het welzijn van academici aantasten (Franco-Santos en Doherty, 2017). Dit is zeker het geval bij jonge academici...

Performance management systems are used to increase employees’ performance with the ultimate aim of increasing organizational performance. Organizations rely on line managers to implement performance management systems and to engage in a continuous process of goal-setting, feedback, coaching and performance appraisal with their employees. Drawing o...

New Public Management popularized performance measurement in public organizations. Underlying performance measurement's popularity is the assumption that it injects performance information (PI) into decision‐making, thus rationalizing the ensuing decisions. Despite its popularity, performance measurement is criticized. In part, this criticism resul...

Het aansturen van politieambtenaren vormt een belangrijke, maar tegelijk ook moeilijke opdracht. Om die reden heeft de Belgische geïntegreerde politie tien jaar geleden de evaluatieprocedure geïmplementeerd. De effectiviteit van deze evaluatieprocedure wordt echter in twijfel getrokken. Voorgaand onderzoek over evaluatieprocedures toont aan dat een...

It has recently been recognized in the public administration literature that multiple reforms coexist in public organizations, ranging from the Weberian bureaucracy to New Public Management and, more recently, new public governance. This study develops a typology of the employment relationship with features of these macro‐level changes and tests th...

Public sector challenges translate in more complex job demands that require individual innovation. In order to deal with these demands, many public organizations have implemented employee performance management. In a multilevel study, we examine when employee performance management affects individual innovation. We contribute by focusing on consist...

Purpose Drawing on climate theory and social exchange theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine whether and how the strength of the expectation climate, defined as the degree of agreement among job incumbents on what is expected from them, affects their job performance. To explain this relationship, the authors utilize mediating trust-in-the...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the circumstances under which empowering leadership fosters creative performance. Arguments were developed for a three-way interaction of empowering leadership, problem solving demands and creative personality in this linkage. These arguments resulted in competing hypotheses from a fit and a compensation...

In search of maximizing efficiency, public organizations found solace in the adoption of employee performance management (EPM) systems. While research supports that managing employees’ performance has favourable outcomes, it is still unclear why and under which conditions. Moreover, EPM systems might even create additional pressures and therefore i...

There is a growing consensus that the adoption of performance measurement tools are of particular interest for social enterprises in order to support internal decision-making and to answer the demands of accountability toward their stakeholders. As a result, different methodologies to assess the non-financial performance of social enterprises are d...

To examine how home nurses' turnover intentions are affected by the quality and frequency of supervisory feedback and by their own self-efficacy. Little is known about effective retention strategies for the growing home healthcare sector that struggles to retain an adequate workforce. While the work environment and supervisors have been found to pl...

Employees may not agree on what the organization expects of them as to the quantity and quality of work, and extra-role behaviours such as helping new colleagues and taking new initiatives. When employees do not agree on what is expected of them, the expectation climate is weak. As a consequence, employees will experience unclarity of the expected...

This paper contributes to extend our knowledge on individual-level effects of corporate sustainability (CS), understood as the dynamic balancing of economic, social, and environmental performance of the firm. In particular, we provide empirical cross-country evidence the impact of CS on individual reactions of HR managers and professionals – throug...

To date, little is known about which and why employee performance management system characteristics lead to desirable organizational outcomes. This study contributes to this issue by focusing on the impact of internally consistent and vertical aligned employee performance management systems on turnover intentions. Moreover, we propose specific inte...

Integrating employment relationships, psychological empowerment, and individual innovation theory, this study develops a multilevel conceptual model linking employment relationships with individual innovation. To test this model, we use survey data on 82 job functions and 934 employees from a large Flemish service organization. The results highligh...

This article discusses the effect of academic teaching staff mobility and publication performance. It investigates how international teaching assignments affect research output (measured in terms of publication). The research described covered a large range of publication types (for example in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, book ch...

Purpose This paper aims to explore the relationship between external pressures and the adoption of employee performance management systems within academic units of Flemish higher education institutions. The literature on contextually based HRM and institutionalism is used to underpin the theoretical propositions. Design/methodology/approach A comp...

This article describes how evidence-based outcomes (EBOs) can be used to improve clinical, managerial, and policy decisions. As a component of evidence-based practices, EBOs are defined as measures obtained from the assessment of quality of life-related indicators that are based on a cross-culturally validated quality of life conceptual and measure...

As a result of the 2008 financial crisis, governments' budgets for higher education and research have come under pressure. In the aftermath of the crisis, higher education institutions are likely to face significant budget constraints, as governments and society became considerably more demanding concerning the level and amount of research output t...

Little is known about the satisfaction with employee performance management systems in higher education institutions. In this study, we contribute to this field by focussing on the alignment features of employee performance management systems, on communication related to these systems and on control tightness in the academic unit. An important cont...

Verschuere B, Moray N, Decramer A. Commercial, non-profit and governmental residential elderly care in Flanders: differences in client selection and efficiency? Inspired by New Public Management, governments have stimulated competition, outsourcing and privatisation in the public sector. Also, in care of the elderly, there has been a substantial in...

Purpose After two decades of research, the effect of a mission statement on an organization's performance is still unclear. In order to address these shortcomings, a research project via the setting‐up of this paper seeks to identify all empirical studies addressing the mission statement‐financial performance relation, analyze how the mission state...

The literature shows that fiscal policy decisions are constrained by political forces. Most of the time, these forces are studied individually. Still fiscal policy decisions are subject to these forces simultaneously. In this paper, we set up a model that tests these forces jointly on the Flemish local income tax rate and the local property tax rat...

Purpose: This article discusses the issue of performance management in a higher education context, with particular attention to the extent to which employee performance management systems have been implemented, the antecedents that explain the approach taken; and the consequences of the emergent approach.Approach: Most studies about Human Resource...