Jan Wynen

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Verified

Jan verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• Phd
• Professor (Associate) at University of Antwerp

This study explores the influence of age diversity within teams on civil servants’ perceptions of organizational change. Age diversity is examined through two dimensions: age variety, which refers to the range of different ages within a team, and age polarization, which denotes the extent to which age groups are segregated or clustered within a tea...

Global political and economic instability have highlighted the importance of resilient governments capable of managing rapid change. However, continuous changes can overwhelm civil servants, leading to change fatigue. While prior studies have explored the impact of perceived frequent change on civil servants’ stress levels, little attention has bee...

Despite recurrent observations that media reputations of agencies matter to understand their reform experiences, no studies have theorized and tested the role of sentiment. This study uses novel and advanced BERT language models to detect attributions of responsibility for positive/negative outcomes in media coverage towards 14 Flemish (Belgian) ag...

This study examines how top leader turnover in the public sector affects organizational strategic decision-making processes in the post-succession phase. Survey responses of managers were combined with a novel database on CEO turnover in the U.S. Federal Government. Drawing on threat-rigidity theory, we hypothesize that as CEO turnover is perceived...

Trust is expected to play a vital role in regulatory regimes. However, how trust affects the performance and legitimacy of these regimes is poorly understood. Our study examines how the interplay of trust and distrust relationships among and toward political, administrative, and regulatory actors shapes perceptions of performance and legitimacy. Dr...

What happens to organizational rigidity when public organizations faced reputational threats over time? Do they take external criticism as incentives to become less rigid and more innovative and flexible through employee involvement and empowerment? Or do reputational threats paradoxically contribute to the very rigidity that is often stereotyped a...

The news media frame political debate about public agencies, and enable legislators with incomplete information to monitor and act upon agency (mal)performance. While studies show that the news media matters for parliamentary attention, the contingent nature of this relation has been understudied. Building on agenda‐setting theory, this study theor...

Les études sur l’innovation dans le secteur public n’ont pas encore exploré de manière systématique la manière dont le contexte cible (ou la phase de production) des innovations influe sur les premières phases des processus d’innovation. Cette étude théorise et vérifie si les organisations innovantes sont plus sensibles aux idées de certains groupe...

The extraordinary measures taken to constrain infections with the coronavirus may have altered the known psychological processes preventing stress and strain in the public workplace. We use survey data of a large public organization in Belgium to look at the capacity of affective organizational commitment, perceived job autonomy, and workplace soci...

Public service innovation involves a process of creative exploration of new ideas, knowledge and perspectives. The article poses that creative exploration emerges from the combination of a climate for creativity that is active inside the organization, and collaborations with diverse actors that are present outside the organization. We test the effe...

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,...

Les spécialistes de la comparaison soulignent que l’administration publique doit être comprise en termes de modèles d’organisation et de prise de décision liés au contexte. Les agences situées dans un même contexte afficheront plus de points communs que celles situées dans un autre contexte. En parallèle, des données empiriques attestent de la vari...

This paper aims to examine the effect of having experienced diverse changes over a short period of time on the turnover intent and presenteeism behavior of public sector employees. Identifying such effect has been difficult since extant research often defined and studied organizational changes as single, isolated events. Consequently, they may have...

Local policy freedom: give and take? About the relationship between formal policy freedom, administrative capacity, scale and political change Local policy freedom is often equated with the formal policy freedom of municipalities and thus with the formal boundaries that determine the local playing field. In this article, we question this approach....

Governments worldwide are relying on the COVID-19 vaccines as the solution for ending the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting crisis. Although scientific progress in the development of a vaccine has been astonishing, policymakers are facing an extra hurdle as increasingly more people appear to be hesitant in their intention to take such a vaccin...

Recent scholarly wisdom suggests that public sector organizations (PSOs) should not always innovate alone. Collaboration with diverse actors is often proposed so that more and better innovations can be developed. However, it remains unclear what capacities PSOs need in order to participate in collaborative arrangements for innovation and to collabo...

Why do employees continue to work during illness? So‐called presenteeism behaviour is a topic of great managerial and societal importance as it is connected to a series of negative individual and organisational outcomes. A growing body of research points to the importance of workplace factors in shaping employee stress and uncertainty and, ultimate...

Public sector innovation scholarship has not yet systematically explored how the target context (or output phase) of innovations impacts the early phases of innovation processes. This study theorizes and tests whether innovating organizations are more sensitive to ideas from particular stakeholder groups depending on the target group of said innova...

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 increa...

The extent to which public organizations contribute to crosscutting policy programs is a question of organizational commitment, resource allocation, and monitoring. In this paper, we triangulate survey and interview data to study the explanatory power of organizational factors to understand the extent of organizational adaptation. In line with the...

The original publication of the article was published with incorrect affiliation link and Table 7.

The aim of this study is to theorize and test the implicit assumption in the literature that reform perceptions vary according to employees’ position in the organizational hierarchy. Our theoretical argument centres on the expectation that employees appreciate reforms differently depending on their position in the organization. Our large-scale anal...

In times of increasingly turbulent public sector change and frequent career shifts, the relationship between attitudes towards workplace change, organizational identification and turnover intent are highly relevant, but poorly understood. Using data from the Australian Public Service's (APS) employee survey, this article examines the psychological...

An important rationale for the creation of semi‐autonomous agencies is to create some distance between politics and administration. As such, agencies are expected to shield policy implementation from the daily concerns of political life. However, political actors and politically controlled ministries still influence agencies in various intended and...

Comparative scholars emphasise that public administration should be understood in terms of context-bound patterns of organising and decision-making. Agencies in the same context will display more commonalities than those in another. At the same time, there is good empirical evidence for organisational-level variation in decision-making. For instanc...

Video on our latest article in Governance: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gove.12404

Employees frequently have ideas and opinions on the execution of tasks or on the organization itself. Yet, sometimes employees remain silent and withhold this valuable input from their organizations because they fear experiencing conflict or controversy , causing both performance and employee morale to suffer. This article tests to what extent such...

The flow of employees leaving the organization and the necessity of finding and training suitable replacements is an important issue in the day-to-day management of organizations. However, the body of research empirically examining the exact effects of such employee flows on the performance of organizations remains relatively underdeveloped. This a...

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...

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 ada...

Why do public sector organisations target different stakeholder audiences in their reputation management? Despite the recognition that reputation management is an audience-based exercise, the field lacks studies that systematically analyse which audiences matter for reputation management by different public service organisations. This article exami...

Despite substantial evidence for the negative effect of turnover on performance, several studies also note offsetting positive effects hereby recognizing an optimal rate of turnover. These mixed results stress the need to examine under which conditions turnover is more harmful or beneficial to the organization. Using panel data from 30 divisions of...

In this article, we explore one of the key underlying mechanisms that mediates the human resource management (HRM)–performance link, namely, the (effective) HRM implementation by line managers. In particular, the purpose of our study is to compare middle and first-line managers’ experiences of their human resource (HR) role and the factors explaini...

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 repeatedl...

Like many other aspects of the work environment, “innovation” is a gendered term that creates a barrier to women taking part in innovation processes and, in particular, in male-dominated and “masculine” industries. This article looks into the role of gender, as well as other potential determinants, in explaining differences in the perceived innovat...

Within the field of public administration, the experience with large-scale international comparative survey-based research is expanding. However, while such research might render extremely interesting data for comparison and analysis, such resource and time-intensive research bring also challenges, in terms of methodological risks, data quality iss...

Governments across the globe try to rebalance their budgets by rationalizing overhead operations. When overhead-reducing policies are adopted, it is important to understand why some central government organizations have a higher overhead than others, and why organizational models to produce overhead efficiencies are used to different degrees. This...

This study investigates to what extent the use of different performance management techniques within (semi-) autonomous public sector organizations, also called public agencies, can be explained by the defining organizational features of such organizations. Using multi-country survey data of over 400 public agencies, the effect of these features –...

The environments of public organizations have become substantially volatile due to economic and societal changes, requiring organizations to continuously adapt and to develop an innovation-oriented culture. In response to the multitude of challenges posed by this volatile environment, politicians in inter alia the executive and parliament impose st...

Accountability to political principals, stakeholders and citizens is a major issue in the literature on structurally disaggregated autonomous agencies. There are numerous accounts in the literature which claim that the need for independence of agencies reduces the ability of political principals to hold it and its leadership accountable for actions...

Sexual harassment in the workplace is commonly portrayed as the male supervisor harassing female subordinates. Within this popular characterization, the unequal distribution of formal, organizational power is believed to be a necessary precondition for sexual harassment. The traditional cultural image of harassers and targets has however not kept p...

Previous studies already established the idea of a partnership in which HR professionals and line managers share an organisation’s HRM responsibility. Yet, this relationship is often plagued by conflicts and other obstacles. As such, a perceptual discrepancy is likely to exist between both parties on the degree of HR devolution, which may eventuall...

Although there is considerable evidence for the hypothesis that an efficient use of management techniques is the key to a good public service delivery, a lot of studies come to the conclusion that there is only partial, reluctant implementation or even a general lack of the use of such techniques by public managers. This paper empirically examines...

Abstract: Although the horizontal representation of women in the U.S. workforce has significantly increased, numerous studies have found that there is still a substantial underrepresentation of women at high-level positions. In light of this fact, this article examines differences in perceived career opportunities between men and women in the feder...

The use of performance management techniques by public sector organizations is believed to lead to a higher efficiency and a better performing public sector in general. Using multi-country survey data, this article provides an understanding of the effect of organizational autonomy and external result control on the use of internal performance-based...

Regression analysis concerns itself with the application of mathematical statistics to the empirical measurement of relationships postulated by theory. As such regression analysis is a very powerful and useful tool for social scientists. It is however important to stress that the performance of regression analysis methods in practice depends on imp...

In this paper, we explore one of the key underlying mechanisms that mediate the HRM-performance link, namely the (effective) HRM implementation by line managers. In particular, the purpose of our study is to examine the role of various sources of support in explaining effective HRM implementation by line managers, taking into account the complexity...

Using data from the U.S. Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, this article seeks to provide an insight into the effect of the financial and economic crisis on turnover intention within the U.S. federal government. By constructing panel data and applying a first difference estimator, the effect of the crisis on turnover intention is examined, while de...

Using a principal-agent framework and multi-country survey data of over 400 public sector organizations, this article examines the effect of result control on the use of financial management techniques in public sector organizations. In order to avoid invalid conclusions, we test for heteroskedasticity and model residual variance using a heterogene...

Decentralization of managerial authority in public organizations, from top management to lower hierarchical levels, is believed to lead to more committed and empowered middle and lower managers and consequently to improved organizational performance. This article provides an empirical understanding of the effect of organizational autonomy and resul...

This article examines the effect of specific new public management (NPM)-related characteristics to explain innovation-oriented culture within public sector organizations. According to NPM doctrines, an enhanced managerial autonomy combined with result control will stimulate a more innovation-oriented culture in such organizations. Using multi-coun...

Interorganizational mobility can make a positive contribution both organizationally and government‐wide. Using data from the U.S. Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, this article seeks to provide a better empirical understanding of the determinants of interorganizational mobility within the U.S. federal government. A specific analytical framework is...

Agencification and granting public sector organizations managerial autonomy in particular is believed to change organizational cultures, away from traditional compliance- and detail-oriented bureaucratic cultures and towards organizational cultures which are more oriented towards external customers. There is however very little empirical informatio...

Distance travelled is a recurrent determinant of expenditures during same-day visits and destination choice. Identifying the factors determining distance travelled will thus lead to a better understanding of expenditures and location choice, which is of interest from a policy and economic perspective. By applying a specific analytical framework whi...

Few studies have attempted to identify predictors for spending behaviour on same-day visits. A good understanding of these predictors, however, could serve as a guide for the planning of marketing campaigns, could help in increasing the economic benefits of day trips and could be of interest from a policy perspective. Thus the main objective of thi...

The purpose of this study is to analyse the nature and degree of vulnerability of the EU industry with respect to accessing non-energy industrial raw materials. The focus is on competitiveness issues and unlike many earlier studies on raw materials; the approach is from a sectoral point of view

We examine the effect of innovation on export intensity, export growth, and the geographic scope of exports, using cross-section and panel data on Flemish firms. The empirical results highlight that the introduction of innovations, and in particular product innovations, is an important driver of export intensity and export growth. These results are...