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ABSTRACT
Do public managers' religious beliefs and behaviors affect their work and their work-related attitudes? Perhaps due to the sensitive nature of this question, there is almost no empirical work on the topic. Our study uses questionnaire data (n = 765) from the National Administrative Studies Project-III to test hypotheses about the impacts of U.S. public managers' religiosity, as well as their political activity, on work attitudes. Religiosity is defined by public managers' responses about attending religious services. Political behavior is defined in terms of membership in political organizations and election groups. An application of ordinary least squares regression shows that religious public managers tend to have a stronger orientation toward job security and a more favorable view of their organization and fellow employees. Public managers are no more or less oriented to security than other respondents in the sample, but they have more negative views about their organization and fellow employees. These findings do not change when obvious controls are introduced into the model.
Notes
These include: “Professional societies, trade or business association, or labor union,” “Service organizations such as Rotary or Lions,” “Youth support groups (e.g. Girl's and Boy's Club, Little League Parents Association),” “Neighborhood or homeowners associations PTA, PTO, or school support groups,” “Groups sports team or club (e.g. softball team, bowling league),” and “Other.”
It would have been useful to have been able to distinguish between “married” and “domestic partner.” However, these categories were taken together in the original questionnaire after a pre-test indicated essentially no domestic partners. Unless the sample is completely different from demographic results for the U.S., at least some of the respondents should have had domestic partners. We attributed this failure to identify domestic partners as a socially desirable response artifact and, thus, collapsed to two categories so as to have a “safe” means of respondents indicating domestic partners.
For both this model, and the regression model reported below, we ran alternative specifications that included a variable interacting “state” and “religious.” These interaction variables were not significant at the .05 level and are not reported.
This is according to a differences of means t-test, not reported here, but available upon request from the authors.