Temporary Employment, Political Patronage, and Public Service Motivation: An experiment on temporary contractors’ performance in patronage contexts

Since the introduction of the so-called New Public Management reforms, short-term personnel contracting has been extensively used by governments as a strategy to lower the costs of permanent public personnel, reduce bureaucratic burden and improve the efficiency of public services provision. However, In countries with weak and highly politicized bureaucracies, this type of personnel contracting may introduce rent-seeking incentives for political elites and negatively affect government performance. Overall, we know little about how the behavior of employees under a short-term contract differs from those of traditional tenured bureaucrats. Bringing together insights from human resources management and bureaucratic politics, I argue that the uncertainty over potential career rewards (re-contracting) and its interaction with patronage networks create incentives for temporary contractors to behave against the original purpose of the reform. Additionally, I explore how these two factors moderate the role of intrinsic motivation in temporary contractors’ performance. Using a survey experiment with public employees (N=350) from Colombia, I analyze how temporary contractors decide about their job effort and adjust their performance depending on their links to political patrons and the uncertainty of being re-contracted. I find that reducing the uncertainty of future career rewards improves performance. I also show that patronage might create substitution effects that either increase or reduce performance depending on job uncertainty levels. Finally, I find that patronage reduces the influence of intrinsic motivation as a driver of performance. These findings provide evidence against the usefulness of short-term contracting in developing public administrations.