Review of Public Personnel Administration

This study examines how smart work use affects innovative behavior among public bureaucrats, particularly focusing on the moderating role of organizational goal ambiguity. Using large-scale survey data from Korean central and local governments (N = 29,197), we discover that smart work use, work autonomy, and innovative culture significantly enhance innovation, whereas organizational goal ambiguity suppresses it. Notably, smart work benefits are diminished under goal ambiguity conditions. These findings offer new insights into designing flexible work policies in the public sector, especially where performance and innovation are prioritized.

This paper explores public servants’ public service motivation through the prism of the circumplex model of affect (CMA). The application of CMA to work, and specifically public sector contexts, is relatively novel, and the framework helps explain how multiple states of affect (i.e., comprised of underlying feelings, emotions, and moods) cluster together and are shaped by one’s work environment. The mixed method paper begins with a qualitative study of Australasian public servants, presenting evidence of the CMA and its connection to PSM. The subsequent quantitative analysis of 222 survey respondents offers four distinct latent profiles of public servants’ PSM and associated circumplex states of affect. The research builds on the state and trait proposition of PSM, showing how PSM and associated states of affect, shape and are shaped by public servants’ underlying psychology and their work environment.

Telework research has gained significant attention in the wake of the global pandemic. Existing studies in public management generally suggest that telework reduces work-family conflict. However, drawing on conservation of resources and social role theory, we propose that the effects of telework on work-family conflict vary based on the gender of the teleworkers. Using survey data from Korean government employees, we find that telework can help public employees mitigate work–family conflict, but its benefits do not extend equally to women. Specifically, telework is negatively associated with men’s perceptions of work–family conflict, while women report no reduction in such conflict.

This article examines how meaningful work is produced through fragile public HRM systems in reform-driven public education contexts. While often treated as a positive individual experience, meaningful work is conceptualised here as a socially and institutionally embedded process shaped by employment regimes and reform pressures. Drawing on 48 interviews with managers, professionals, and administrative staff across four public education providers, the analysis identifies four interrelated dynamics: HRM structures that institutionalise precarity; commitment to vulnerable communities; self-recognition in the absence of formal validation; and the normalisation of sacrifice as dedication. The article advances public HRM scholarship in three ways. First, it shows that ambivalence in meaningful work is institutionally produced under conditions of fragility. Second, it specifies how HRM configurations mediate between reform-driven instability and employees’ meaning-making. Third, it situates meaningful work within debates on decent work (SDG 8) by demonstrating how moral commitment sustains service delivery while compensating for deficits in security, recognition and institutional care.

The public sector is experiencing a hiring crisis. This challenge is particularly evident in organizations that manage complex service delivery while facing sustained high turnover rates. Such organizations have, therefore, implemented multiple policy changes to improve employee stability with a limited understanding of how they affect retention and performance. This study analyzes 9 years of child welfare services data from one U.S. state to explore the relationship between frontline turnover and service outcomes, while accounting for the broader influence of professional identity and workforce capacity. The results show that the turnover-outcome relationship was weak and contingent on goal proximity. Additionally, a hiring policy change to address turnover by expanding the labor pool but ignoring professional identity further exacerbated human capital instability. The paper highlights the need to consider policy context and potential effects on professional identity when implementing changes to address turnover and encourage retention in complex public organizations.

There is a significant emotive dimension to the work of public interest lawyers (PILs), whose jobs involve working with traumatized clients in a high-stakes legal environment. This vital public service profession represents marginalized clients, many of whom face extraordinary challenges. These attorneys must maintain their own composure as they simultaneously manage their clients’ emotional distress and legal predicaments. Drawing on interviews of PILs, we identify themes related to emotion regulation, vicarious trauma, burnout, and resilience. Findings reveal that PILs leverage emotion to build the trust that is essential for effective legal advocacy and they do this while navigating client trauma and systemic injustice. Compounding the emotive burden are risks of secondary trauma and feelings of institutional betrayal. Findings also reveal strategies that PILs employ to thrive, including on-ramps and off-ramps they use to set boundaries around the emotive demands of their work. HR implications are discussed.

This study investigates the impact of High-Performance Work Practices (HPWPs) on public employees’ organizational affective commitment and turnover intentions, focusing on the mediating role of HR attributions. Drawing on the Ability-Motivation-Opportunity (AMO) framework and attribution theory, the research adopts a mixed-method design combining Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). Based on data collected from a mid-sized Swiss municipality, the findings reveal that HPWPs foster employee loyalty both directly and indirectly, especially when these practices are perceived as supporting employee well-being and aligned with public service values. The study contributes to the strategic HRM literature by validating the relevance of core theoretical frameworks in a public administration context and demonstrating the added value of a configurational perspective. It also provides actionable insights for HR professionals seeking to design integrated HRM systems that enhance commitment and reduce turnover in the public sector.

Understanding the motivational mechanisms of administrative corruption is of paramount importance for public integrity. We propose and test a novel demands-resources model of civil servants’ corruptibility from a micro-level perspective, focusing on important personality and job-related demands and resources, that is, personality traits, motives, and states. Drawing on experimental evidence (Obs. = 263) from Swiss public administration, this study reveals how public service motivation and social value orientation function as integrity-enhancing resources but through different psychological mechanisms. Furthermore, Machiavellianism and psychopathy—but not narcissism—significantly stimulate civil servants’ capacity to morally disengage and hence increase corruptibility, serving as integrity-draining demands, while job-related burnout has no effect. These novel insights contribute to the “bright side” discourse of PSM, advance the conceptual understanding of administrative corruption, and expand the state-versus-trait debate of public integrity, providing important insights for the effective design of anti-corruption strategies and public personnel selection for public integrity.

Based on social information processing (SIP) theory, this study examines the relationship between supervisor developmental feedback and civil servants’ taking-charge behavior by exploring the mediating role of responsibility awareness and the moderating role of workplace inclusion. A multi-wave field study was conducted with data collected from 229 civil servants working in four local government institutions in China. The results show that supervisor developmental feedback is positively related to civil servants’ taking-charge behavior by increasing the perception of constructive responsibility. In addition, we found that workplace inclusion moderates not only the relationship between constructive responsibility perception and taking-charge behavior but also the indirect relationship between supervisor developmental feedback and taking-charge behavior via the constructive responsibility perception. The paper concludes with a discussion of the findings in light of their implications for future research and practice.

This study examines the applicability of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in public employee selection. Our interest in how cultural differences influence GenAI outputs leads us to compare OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Baidu’s ERNIE. We designed a conjoint experiment wherein these GenAI models evaluated pairs of hypothetical candidates with varying meritocratic attributes (including pre-employment assessment results, education level, and relevant experience) and non-meritocratic attributes (including gender, ethnicity, and age). Experimental vignettes were created based on two distinct settings—police and teacher—to control for job type. Our mixed-methods findings indicate that GenAI’s hiring recommendations are more swayed by meritocratic than non-meritocratic attributes. However, compared to ERNIE, ChatGPT’s candidate selections are slightly more influenced by considerations of gender diversity. Additionally, both models exhibit inconsistencies when non-meritocratic factors are involved. Based on these findings, we recommend a cautiously optimistic approach incorporating training and oversight if GenAI is to be used in employee selection processes.

Outsourcing comes with potential negative employee-related social costs since private sector organizations are not obliged to uphold public personnel regulations. In response, some local governments specify contract rules safeguarding outsourced employees. To understand why, we combine literature on outsourced employees and incomplete contracts. We hypothesize that employee safeguards are a function of local governments’ political interests, fiscal capacity, and priority of contract price. Collaborating with purchasing practitioners, we develop a safeguard catalog and determine the use of safeguards in a unique dataset of 3,396 documents related to 247 Danish tenders involving the transfers of employees from public to private employment. We find that local governments with less fiscal capacity and more price orientation include fewer safeguards. These findings signal that certain local governments have more willingness and capacity to safeguard employees and thus potentially decrease unaccounted employee-related social costs of outsourcing.

Employee engagement has emerged as a critical area of interest within public management. Scholars recently proposed that engagement may exhibit a curvilinear relationship with positive outcomes. Previous research posits that greater effort on the job increases employees’ appreciation for pay equity, which, in the public sector, is defined by three components: equal pay for equal work, market-based pay, and performance-based pay. Using Merit Principles Survey data, this study finds that as employees become more engaged, their perceived importance of these three components remains relatively unchanged or even declines—until a certain threshold of engagement is reached. Beyond this point, the perceived importance of pay equity increases significantly. These findings offer an empirical response to Bakker et al.’s call for research on nonlinear engagement effects and refine the conventional view that greater effort is consistently associated with stronger concerns for pay equity.

Nonstandard employees typically receive less favorable treatment than their standard counterparts, yet little is known about how supervisors manage and interact with them. Drawing on three-wave, time-lagged survey data from 650 nonstandard employees in Chinese public organizations, this study reveals that abusive supervision increases employees’ use of surface acting while reducing their use of deep acting, thereby intensifying emotional exhaustion. Unexpectedly, the likelihood of standard employment, which is often regarded as a positive expectation, intensifies rather than mitigates the negative effects of abusive supervision. This study enhances our understanding of emotional labor under abusive supervision and provides practical insights for public organizations to better motivate and support nonstandard employees.

In today’s competitive labor market, attracting and retaining talent is challenging, especially for public organizations facing aging workforces and declining interest in public service careers. To address this, organizations implement public employer branding strategies to attract and retain talent. Employees play a crucial role in promoting the organization’s employer brand, making it essential for public employers to encourage employees to display ambassadorship. Leadership practices can create an environment that fosters employee contributions to organizational success. This study, employing self-determination theory, explores how supervisors satisfying employees’ basic needs could foster ambassadorship. Surveys administered in a Belgian local government (N_employees = 228; N_supervisors = 41) revealed that social support indirectly related to ambassadorship via relatedness need satisfaction. Exploratory analyses showed some support for the moderating role of supervisor ambassadorship modeling in this relationship. Overall, social support emerges as a crucial leadership practice for fostering ambassadorship, explaining leadership’s role in employer branding within the public sector.

Public organizations regularly undergo reforms that create uncertainty for employees. Trust in change management, meaning employees believe leaders will handle reforms fairly, transparently and competently, is essential for coping with such changes. Team dynamics can weaken this trust. One important factor is overqualification, which occurs when employees have more skills or education than their job requires. Although sometimes viewed as an advantage, overqualification can also create frustration and doubt during reform. This study examines how the presence of overqualified employees in teams affects collective trust in change management and shapes perceptions of qualitative job insecurity, the feeling that valued aspects of work are under threat. Using data from a Belgian government agency, the findings show that teams with more overqualified employees report lower trust in change management, which increases qualitative job insecurity. The results highlight the paradox of overqualification and its implications for managing change.

By reframing fear as a strategic resource in HRM, this study explores how public sector organizations can support employees while maintaining operational effectiveness. Efforts to enhance service delivery through efficiency, targets, and accountability create tensions between professional values and corporate imperatives, leading to disengagement. While managers may use fear to align individuals with corporate values, employees can mobilize it as concertive resistance against identity regulation. Setting our study in the UK Probation Service, we reveal how employees’ strategic use of fear challenges managerial control, resisting the divisions imposed by identity regulation and identity threat. Rather than portraying employees as passive subjects of managerialism, we position them as active contributors to reducing the structural, instead of the interpersonal, imbalance between them and managers. Recognizing resistance as integral to public management allows HRM frameworks to foster a resilient, engaged workforce, addressing those complexities in an evolving public sector.

Recently, there has been a significant shift toward equality, diversity, and inclusion in the workplace, particularly for LGBTQI+ employees in several countries. However, research addressing this issue within public administration, specifically concerning HRM practices in public service organizations, remains relatively scarce. Drawing on social identity theory (SIT), our study aims to fill this gap by examining the relationship between HRM practices and job satisfaction and engagement of LGBTQI+ employees in government agencies, with a focus on perceived supervisory support. We analyzed two waves of data collected from 268 LGBTQI+ federal employees working in US government agencies. Our findings reveal that HRM practices directly impact job satisfaction and engagement of LGBTQI+ employees. Additionally, perceived supervisory support was identified as a mediator in these relationships. This article addresses the critical issues of equality, diversity, and inclusion in the workplace and provides insights for designing more effective HRM practices to tackle these challenges.

This study employs a quasi-experimental pre–post research design, exploiting a political uprising in Bangladesh as an exogenous shock to examine its effects on the organizational behaviors of public servants. Drawing on a unique pre- and post-uprising survey, the study categorizes bureaucratic behaviors into situational and dispositional responses. The findings show that political instability primarily disrupts context-dependent organizational dynamics (situational), while core individual values (dispositional) remain comparatively stable. Situational behaviors, such as job satisfaction and inter-service relationships, decline significantly following the regime change due to heightened uncertainty, role ambiguity, and job insecurity. In contrast, dispositional behaviors, such as Public Service Motivation (PSM) and Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB), remain resilient, suggesting that deeply internalized values are less vulnerable to political disruptions. By distinguishing between situational and dispositional behaviors, the study contributes to understanding bureaucratic resilience during political crises and offers practical implications for public-sector human resource management following political upheaval.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) emphasize inclusive economic growth (SDG 8) and reduced inequalities (SDG 10), including equal employment opportunities for workers with disabilities (WWDs). Despite international and national efforts, WWDs still face barriers to labor market participation. Public sector organizations are expected to lead in inclusive HRM but often lag behind in employing WWDs, raising concerns about their ability to contribute to the SDGs. Using Social Exchange Theory and Self Determination Theory, we examine how three HR practices of training and development, workplace accommodations, and establishing clear expectations affect the employability of 313 WWDs in a Dutch public sector organization. Survey data were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and regression-based mediation analysis. Findings show that HR practices primarily impact employability mediated through basic psychological needs satisfaction, with limited direct effects. This study offers empirical insights on how inclusive HRM in the public sector can advance the SDGs.

The effectiveness of inclusive leadership has been examined in stable Western contexts, but not in fragile states. This study investigates its impact on Subordinates’ job performance in the South Sudan public sector. A cross-sectional quantitative design was employed, collecting data from 370 civil servants across various ministries in Juba, South Sudan. Data analysis utilized SPSS and SmartPLS employing structural equation modeling (SEM) to test direct, mediating, and moderating effects. Results indicate that inclusive leadership is significantly associated with public employees’ job performance, with motivation and engagement partially mediating this relationship. Organizational culture, particularly the dimensions of involvement and adaptability, significantly moderated these effects. These findings demonstrate that inclusive leadership can significantly improve job performance, even in fragile state contexts, by repairing social exchange, redefining motivation, and serving as a vital resource, challenging the universal applicability of Western theories. Practical implications and future research direction are discussed.