Bureaucratic Structure, New Public Management, and Work Orientation of Public Sector Employees: Evidence from Cross-National Analysis

How do bureaucratic structures and New Public Management affect work-related behaviors of public sector employees? In particular, how does the variation in the bureaucratic structure such as degree of meritocratic recruitment, tenure protection, and closedness or openeness of public administration system affect job satisfaction and organizational commitment of public employees? To what extent, do NPM reforms increase or reduce organizational commitment and job satisfaction? There have been a large volume of literature that assesses the impacts of bureaucratic rules on work behavior (DeHart-Davis and Pandey 2005; DeHart-Davis, Davis, and Mohr 2014). However, surprisingly most literature focuses on a single country. Cross-national comparisons of bureaucratic structures and work behavior of public employees have been very few (Dahlström, Lapuente, and Teorell 2012). Therefore, we still do not know how the variation in the bureaucratic structure affect public sector employees from a comparative perspective. To fill the gap, we examine how the variation in bureaucratic rules and NPM reforms influence work-related behavior of public bureaucracy. In doing so, we rely on two novel cross-national datasets of bureaucracy and work behavior of public sector executives: the QoG (the Quality of Government Institute) expert survey and the Executive Survey on Public Sector Executives in Europe (COCOPS). We adopt an empirical strategy in which we analyze how structural level factors such as bureaucratic rules and NPM reforms influence individual level work-related behaviors by using multilevel analysis across 21 European countries. Bureaucratic structures and rules are operationalized by the degree of meritocratic recruitment, tenure protection, openness of civil service system, and NPM reform efforts. We particularly examine how these factors affect job satisfaction and organizational commitment of public employees. Job satisfaction and organizational commitment among employees are used as this study’s two dependent variables because those are an important predictor of employee work effort and performance. Overall job satisfaction in this research is defined as global job satisfaction including numerous facets, and it is measured by the COCOPS survey question. Organizational commitment is measured with seven items adapted from the three items-affective commitment, one item-normative commitment, and three item continuance commitment scale following Caillier (2012), Meyer and Allen (1991), and Moldogaziev and Silvia (2014). This study not only contributes to previous studies of work orientation of public sector employees by offering a cross-national empirical evidence on the effect of bureaucratic structures and rules but also offers practical implications for understanding factors that affect work behaviors of bureaucracy in an understudied context.