James L. Perry

Indiana University Bloomington | IUB

Competent leadership is essential to helping achieve agency missions. While governments around the globe invest in leadership development most struggle to calculate the return on their investment (ROI). The lack of ROI evaluations makes it difficult to maintain leadership development budgets during financial crises and political changes. In this es...

Despite an increase in research on how performance information regarding public agencies affects citizens’ evaluations of public agencies, we know very little about how performance information regarding public employees affects citizens’ evaluations of public employees and public employees themselves. This represents an important gap in the literat...

The external control of public organizations and their members, commonly referred to as accountability , is an enduring theme in public administration. This article shifts attention from a traditional focus on accountability as a macro-institutional matter to the psychology of accountability, that is, whether and how employees internalize accountab...

Employee accountability is a phenomenon of central importance to public administration. The volume of empirical research, however, has been modest given the absence of valid measures. This article develops a reliable and valid five-dimension scale to measure public employee accountability. The measure is distinguished from prior scales in that it f...

The authors analyze the performance and efficaciousness of agency-based leadership development programs, which ensure that leaders understand trends affecting their jobs, such as risk management or cybersecurity; such programs prepare future leaders for the rigors of driving action across the federal government’s $4.4 trillion enterprise that touch...

Employee accountability is a phenomenon of central importance to public administration. The volume of empirical research, however, has been modest given the absence of valid measures. This article develops a reliable and valid five-dimensional scale to measure public employee accountability. The measure is distinguished from prior scales in that it...

The external control of public organizations and their members for holding accountable, is an enduring theme in public administration. This article shifts attention from a traditional focus on accountability as a macro-institutional matter to integration with the psychology of accountability, that is, how public employees internalize accountability...

This study assesses the impact of different job security rules on federal employees’ organizational commitment by looking at the effects of changes in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) precipitated by MaxHR, introduced to DHS in 2005. The 2005 job security rule changes, as part of the “reformed” personnel system of the new DHS, reduced empl...

This essay is a potpourri of reflections about elevating both the status of public affairs as a field and the Journal of Public Affairs Education (JPAE), the field’s journal of record. The reflections argue that public affairs programs need to elevate their status in our universities, and program leaders and faculty must take more responsibility fo...

The 2017 John Gaus Award Lecture: What If We Took Professionalism Seriously? - Volume 51 Issue 1 - James L. Perry

Using a sample of 63 supervisors and their direct reports (189 immediate subordinates), this study investigated a cross-level model of public service motivation's (PSM) antecedents in the Chinese public sector. Correlation analyses and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) results simultaneously revealed that both subordinates’ proactive personality a...

Public service motivation research has proliferated in parallel with concerns about how to improve the performance of public service personnel. However, scholarship does not always inform management and leadership. This article purposefully reviews public service motivation research since 2008 to determine the extent to which researchers have ident...

Theory building within public administration has been slow and uneven, due in part to the field’s search for grand theories and its failure to systematize knowledge. Middle range theory may be a particularly useful theory-building strategy for public administration scholarship due to its emphasis on generating testable hypotheses, organizing knowle...

For most of the 20th century, public employers granted their employees high levels of job security. The 21st century has brought a reversal of fortunes, with emphasis increasingly on at-will employment systems. Both distant and recent policy choices about job security have been based largely on normative and ideological considerations rather than b...

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Although significant progress has been made in developing leadership theory and understanding the traits, skills, behaviors, and styles that make a good leader, progress in bridging the gap between theory and practice using models of leadership training and development has been slow. This research attempts to answer the question of whether leadersh...

This article takes stock of public service motivation research to identify achievements, challenges, and an agenda for research to build on progress made since 1990. After enumerating achievements and challenges, the authors take stock of progress on extant proposals to strengthen research. In addition, several new proposals are offered, among them...

The study of civil service systems has traditionally emphasized issues of examinations, compensation, fairness and equity as central features. Questions about the market competitiveness and internal fairness of pay systems, the validity of selection devices, and the adequacy of career systems remain important concerns for the management of civil se...

This study estimates the impact of different job security rule change on federal civilian employees’ organizational commitment through looking recent Department of Homeland Security (DHS)’s at-will employment system using difference-in- differences (DID) method. Result shows that overall effect of introduction of new job security rule in DHS is a d...

This paper seeks to develop a research agenda for future public job security research. We begin by clarifying the meaning of the job security concept and specifying its content domain based on Greenhalgh and Rosenblatt’s (1984) study. We review subsequent job security research with origins in labor and employment relations, organizational behavior,...

To explore the psychological mechanism of public service motivation (PSM), we used a time-lagged design to examine the mediating effects of organizational identification on the relationship between PSM and work attitudes (i.e., job satisfaction) and behavior (i.e., community citizenship behavior). A two-wave study of 241 public servants from Distri...

The signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration on September 24, 1984, returning the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong to the sovereignty of the People's Republic of China (PRC), initiated a unique episode of political and administrative change. On July 1, 1997, Hong Kong will become a semi-autonomous Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the PR...

Research on public service motivation has garnered significant attention from scholars, especially in the last two decades. This article divides the evolution of the research into three waves: definition and measurement; assessing and confirming construct validity and diffusion of the construct; and learning from past research and filling shortcomi...

Competing theoretical models and conflicting findings leave unanswered questions regarding job security’s effect on employee work attitudes (i.e., job satisfaction and organizational commitment). The present meta-analysis of 47 studies (including 56 independent samples) aims to clarify this association and identify factors that may explain differen...

The latter 20th and beginning of the 21st century have ushered in new forms of governance, opening the gates to what has been variously described as a “new public service,” a “multisectored public service,” and a “state of agents.” As government authority is dispersed, we increasingly rely on these new public servants for service delivery and polic...

The growth in international research on public service motivation (PSM) raises a number of important questions about the degree to which the theory and research developed in one country can contribute to our understanding of PSM in other counties. To help address this issue, this study revisits the conceptual and operational definitions of PSM to a...

Motivation scholars have argued that intrinsic motivation is an important driver of employee attitudes. This research tests the influence of intrinsic motivation on employee attitudes and explores three factors conditioning the effects of intrinsic motivation: managerial trustworthiness, goal directedness, and extrinsic reward expectancy. The analy...

Federalist No. 72 is an oft-neglected defense of the president's reeligibility for election. However, the paper goes well beyond this issue to basic models of human nature and motivation. James L. Perry's essay confronts this broad issue as a guide to "apublic service ethic." Like other authors in this special issue. Perry reads broadly through the...

Functional theory suggests that people choose activities based on their perception of how well the work matches their personal motives.This process implies that worker motivations vary by activity even when controlling for typical motivational antecedents. Although this perspective is common in the volunteering literature, the public service motiva...

This article seeks to identify the status and infrastructure of public service in 2020. It first examines Leonard White’s early effort at predicting a future search for public service, written in 1942, but with an eye toward the 1950s and 1960s. The authors assess the subsequent structural and ideological development of public service to lay a fram...

How has research regarding public service motivation evolved since James L. Perry and Lois Recascino Wise published their essay “The Motivational Bases of Public Service” 20 years ago? The authors assess subsequent studies in public administration and in social and behavioral sciences as well as evolving definitions of public service motivation. Wh...

This study develops the concept of integrated leadership in the public sector. Integrated leadership is conceived as the combination of five leadership roles that are performed collectively by employees and managers at different levels of the hierarchy. The leadership roles are task-, relations-, change-, diversity-, and integrity-oriented leadersh...

This article develops a strategic research agenda for public human resource management. The agenda originates from the perception that research about public human resources has matured during the Review of Public Personnel Administration’s 30 years of publication and now is an appropriate juncture to initiate an intentional and strategic agenda. Th...

The purpose of this study is to develop a measurement tool to test perception of ethical sensitivity (ES) in the area of public administration and to apply this measurement. The primary hypothesis is “Ethical sensitivity will be low.” Main results are as follows. First, the low ethical sensitivity of respondents was identified. Second, the free tic...

This article examines the argument that Information Communication and Technology (ICT) and social capital serve as major factors to reduce corruption. ICT has the potential to reduce unnecessary human intervention in government work processes, thus reducing the need to monitor corrupt behavior. Furthermore, citizens living in a society with a high...

This article conceptualizes and measures collaboration. An empirically validated theory of collaboration, one that can inform both theory and practice, demands a systematic approach to understanding the meaning and measurement of collaboration. We present findings from a study that develops and tests the construct validity of a multidimensional mod...

This study investigates cross-national diffusion of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (CSRA). Two theoretical lenses are used to analyze the diffusion of performance appraisal, merit pay, the Senior Executive Service (SES), and the separation of positive and regulatory functions. The analysis indicates that most CSRA provisions have diffused mor...

President Jimmy Carter initiated the most sweeping reforms of the U.S. federal civil service in 95 years when he signed the Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) on October 13, 1978. This introduction reviews the substantive reforms whose implementation began with creation of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), on January 1, 1979. CSRA's provi...

This study examines the relationship between public service motivation and antecedents believed to be important determinants of moral commitment. Research conducted during the past decade indicates that public service motivation is a valid construct that is useful for predicting outcomes that are important to public organizations and to society. Th...

This research note reports a confirmatory factor analysis for three of Perry's (1996) public service motivation (PSM) subdimensions: self-sacrifice, commitment to public interest, and compassion. A mail survey of national award-winning volunteers constitutes the sample. Results indicate strong support for Perry's instrument, most noticeably better...

This study explores the impact of campaign web sites on electoral civic engagement by exam- ining 2004 Internet Tracking Survey data. Propensity score matching and the recursive bivari- ate probit model are employed to deal with endogeneity and the missing data problem, which are often ignored in existing literature. Findings show that effects of c...

This article explores the process by which formal management systems foster the creation of shared organization values, addressing the basic question: Can workplace values be “managed?” Drawing upon interviews conducted at a Department of Defense installation with civilian employees and managers over a 5-year period, we use comparative case analysi...

This article reviews the growing literature on citizen service since 1990 to identify design principles to guide the incorporation of a service learning peda - gogy into public affairs programs. The article begins with an analysis of a biblio - graphic database of service-related research published between 1990 and 1999. Although little of the rese...

In 1968, Frederick Mosher published his influential book Democracy and the Public Service. This article revisits themes Mosher developed in the book to assess the status of our democracy in the context of a new public service. The author argues that the new public service poses significant challenges for democracy. One is that new public service is...

This study investigates the motivations and voluntary activities of exemplary volunteers. The researchers surveyed winners of the Daily Point of Light Awards and the President's Community Volunteer Awards and conducted in-depth telephone interviews with a sample of the mail survey respondents. Researchers then compared the survey data with informat...

Social science research contains a wealth of knowledge for people seeking to understand collaboration processes. The authors argue that public managers should look inside the “black box” of collaboration processes. Inside, they will find a complex construct of five variable dimensions: governance, administration, organizational autonomy, mutuality,...

This paper examines four of the major accrediting bodies to identify commonalities in core elements for curriculum design and competency development. Some are detailed and specific; others focus on broad knowledge areas. CAHME is considering recommendations that will enhance the possibility for joint accreditation visits that streamline an accredit...

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As government devolves its responsibilities, service providers are competing for resources, but are working collectively to solve public problems. The divergent requirements of branding and collaboration create a paradox that helps to explain why collaborations are hard to sustain. We integrate ideas from literature exploring public sector manageme...

Civic service is well established in North America, where the United States and Canada are among the world leaders. The evolution of civic service has not been a story of continuous growth but rather one of episodic and cyclical development. The past decade’s events indicate that civic service is in a new cycle of growth and innovation. Among the r...

Books reviewed in this article:Jonathan G. S. Koppell, The Politics of Quasi-Government: Hybrid Organizations and the Dynamics of Bureaucratic Control

An issue that has long nagged scholars who study the effects of information technology (IT) investments is the so-called productivity paradox. Investments in IT have promised productivity improvements, but the benefits often have not materialized. This research explicitly studies many of the explanations for null findings in previous research in a...