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Managing people in semi-autonomous agencies: A between- and within-sector analysis
Abstract and Figures
This dissertation starts by noting that agencies are of vital economic and societal
importance, as they are responsible for delivering many public services. Agency
employees play a key role in delivering these services and, to manage these employees
effectively, policy makers believed that a business-like approach towards HRM is the way
to go. Agencies were created with the idea that they can adopt this approach more easily,
as they were expected to experience lower levels of bureaucracy typically associated
with central government. The claims that underlie the creation of agencies have barely
been tested empirically, particularly those related to HRM. This lacuna is the starting
point of this dissertation for a systematic investigation into the way people are managed
in agencies.
Through multiple studies on between- and within-sector differences in HRM and
work-related attitudes and behaviors in agencies, the conclusion is that a business-like
approach towards HRM is not found in agencies nor do they seem to operate under
lower levels of bureaucracy. While agencies are in some respects similar to central
government and businesses, they should not be viewed as simply in between government
and businesses. They are hybrid organizations that, on the one hand, constitute a fairly
similar group when it comes to HRM and work-related attitudes and behaviors, but, on
the other hand, also differ in what HRM entails and how it shaped.
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... The rhetoric of New Public Management-inspired reforms has been that the use of agencies brings higher performance, and that managerial autonomy within those agencies would for the same reason lead to higher performance in government agencies. An often-stated argument for this positive effect is that managerial autonomy allows organizations to adopt and implement certain management practices that were found to be beneficial in the private sector (Blom 2021). Since public management often incurs some inefficiency due to limited competition within the public sector, such private sector influence was argued to be potentially helpful for performance also in public agencies. ...
The relationship between HRM autonomy, business-like HRM, and performance in
government agencies has been of interest in research for decades now. Using survey
data from 365 respondents working in Dutch government agencies, we studied to
what degree HRM autonomy is a necessary and sufficient condition for HRM integration, distinguished between vertical and organizational integration, and, consequently, HRM performance in agencies. The findings from structural equation modelling and necessary condition analysis show that HRM autonomy is necessary but not sufficient for HRM integration, while HRM integration is necessary and partly sufficient for HRM performance.
Many studies have investigated potential differences in employee attitudes and behaviors across sectors. However, empirical evidence in this regard remains largely inconclusive or even contradictory. Although theoretical explanations may exist, it cannot be ruled out that there are issues pertaining to methodological choices at play as well. The aim of this contribution is to explore whether two issues, one related to the justification of interpreting the public sector as a homogenous one and one to controlling for measurement invariance, influence conclusions of comparative research. Using a Dutch data set containing 1,998 respondents, we tested the impact of these two issues on four concepts that have gotten much attention in employee level comparative research, namely work satisfaction, organizational commitment, proactivity toward self-development, and public service motivation. Our findings demonstrate that differences exist within the public sector and that lack of measurement invariance affects results, which, in turn, affect conclusions regarding within- and betweensector comparisons. We therefore recommend that scholars recognize these issues before conducting comparative research.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how the institutional context influences human resource management (HRM) policies in the public and private sector in Nigeria.
Design/methodology/approach
The convergent parallel mixed methods approach was adopted for this study. Survey data were collected from 122 HR managers across public and private sector organizations in Nigeria as well as 13 qualitative interviews. ANCOVA was used to analyse quantitative data while thematic analysis was used to analyse qualitative data in order to understand the influence of institutions on HRM in the public and private sector in Nigeria.
Findings
Findings indicate that while coercive, mimetic and normative institutional mechanisms influenced HRM in both the public and private sector, the influence of coercive mechanisms was significantly higher in the public sector, largely due to the poor enforcement of labour legislation and attempts by private sector organizations to adopt neo-liberal approaches to HRM.
Originality/value
The study provides an understanding of the institutional context of HRM in Nigeria by highlighting how varying degrees of pressures from the environment create internal diversity in HRM approaches in the public and private sector.
Red tape has been viewed as a key concept in public administration for decades and one that can significantly impact the human resource management (HRM) process. Theoretically, red tape is argued to (a) constrain organizational practices, (b) alienate employees from their organization and, ultimately, (c) lower performance. However, there is some debate about how detrimental red tape is, and empirical evidence is mixed. Using a meta-analytic approach, we aggregated findings from previous studies to test the impact of red tape and to assess sources of heterogeneity across studies. The results provide support for the constraining and alienating effects of red tape, although red tape’s impact on performance seems negligible. Furthermore, operationalizations of red tape and study context moderate some meta-analytic correlations. The lack of longitudinal and intervention studies and the use of single respondents remain the key limitations of current research, and therefore, future research is still needed.
Agencification has been pursued globally under the promise of increasing public administration performance. In spite of ample theoretical arguments, the empirical evidence on the causal link between agencification and performance remains scarce and methodologically contested. We contribute to this debate by empirically testing the impacts of agencification across Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom on value-for-money, competitiveness, and timeliness during the period 2006-2016. We use unique administrative datasets, enabling objective and granular measurements of reforms and their effects, employing quasi-experimental methods. Findings suggest heterogeneous effects both across countries and outcomes. On average, value-for-money improves by 2.8% or 1.7 billion EUR over a decade, while outputs and processes change only marginally. Recently agencified organizations barely improve their performance, while older agencies achieve substantial improvements. The three countries' heterogeneous administrative contexts play a critical role as mediating factors, with the biggest changes occurring in higher new public management take-up countries.
This overview paper focuses on the increased popularity of human resource management (HRM) in public management and public administration research. This is reflected in empirical articles published in scientific journals linked to HRM, public management and public administration in the period 2000–2016. The findings of the paper show some cross-fertilization between the different disciplines and the lack of it in some areas. The outcomes also provide input for a future research agenda including alternative theories, models, methods and research techniques for rigour and relevant HRM research in the public sector domain.
In the past decades, increasing attention in the public sector has been paid to the relationship between human resource management (HRM) practices and organizational commitment. The bureaucratic structure of public organizations has often been mentioned to have a negative impact on this relationship. To reduce red tape and increase goal clarity, governments worldwide have created semi-autonomous agencies that operate at arm's length, expecting that they would operate under more businesslike conditions with positive effects on organizational commitment. In this study, these positive expectations were tested using groups of employees working at central government, two types of agencies, and businesses. Using multigroup structural equation modeling with a Dutch data set containing 2,432 respondents, the findings provide little support for the notion that agencies are similar to businesses in terms of bureaucracy and ways to stimulate employee commitment, and even indicate that some agencies are more bureaucratic than central government.
Although a contextual perspective in Human Resource Management (HRM) research has been strongly advocated, empirical evidence on how context shapes HRM is still lacking. This study explored HRM philosophies and policies in Dutch semi-autonomous government agencies and how they are shaped. These agencies were given considerable autonomy by central government with regard to their HRM philosophies and policies in order to make more effective use of their human capital. Based on our findings from thirty semi-structured interviews with HRM managers, we identified that a) facilitation philosophies are dominant, while accumulation philosophies are less present and utilization philosophies nonexistent; b) mixed philosophies are present in some cases; c) ability- and motivation-enhancing policies are dominant, while opportunity-enhancing policies are less present; d) similarities in HRM are strongly shaped by external factors; and that e) differences in HRM are strongly shaped by internal factors.
Considering inconsistent results in the extant literature regarding whether participative practices improve performance, we focused on the mediating roles of an individual`s perception of human resource development practices, including training and career development, on the relationship between the two constructs. We began by examining the validity of the constructs under the study. Next, using structural equation modeling, we found that an individual`s perception of career development fully mediates the relationships between the two participative practices, including participation and empowerment, and in-role performance. In addition, the findings indicated that individuals` perception of training fully mediates the relationship between empowerment and performance, but failed to play a mediating role on the relationship between participation and performance.
This study aims to empirically test a model of affective and behavioural job outcomes grounded in Bagozzi’s reformulation of attitude theory in the novel context of a retail bank in Russia.