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ABSTRACT
To answer the question of who wants to work for the government, scholars have relied on a few approaches, including sector preference, sector-based comparison of work motives, and sector-switching patterns of job mobility. The present study offers a related but distinct approach: perceived sector mismatch. The attractiveness of public sector jobs differs greatly across countries; thus, in order to present a more comprehensive study, we examine data from the U.S., New Zealand, and Taiwan, where attitudes towards public sector jobs differ significantly as a result of different public service laws and traditions. Across all three samples, we find that, among private sector employees, the preference for a public service job is related to socio-economic disadvantage. Among public sector workers, reasons for perceived sector mismatch vary, but often suggesting job dissatisfaction in current public sector jobs, rather than perceived advantages of the private sector (including compensation). These findings are followed by theoretical and practical implications from this comparative study.
Notes
The boundary between the public and private sectors is indeed blurry nowadays, as frequently addressed in the research of publicness (Bozeman 1987; Andrews, Boyne, and Walker 2011). However, public management remains a distinctive field of research, and fundamental differences can still be found between traditional public and private organizations (Boyne 2002; Rainey 2009). Rainey (2009:66) notes that while “(c)lear distinctions between public and private organizations are impossible … scholars and officials make the delineation repeatedly in relation to important issues, and public and private organizations do differ in some obvious ways.” Rainey and Bozeman (2000:466), after providing an argument that the dimensional publicness and core publicness approaches are mutually compatible, with one representing the effects of sector blurring and hybridization and the other representing the enduring effects of core legal and ownership status, offer this summation: “The consistency and convergence in findings of studies that compare public and private organizations are noteworthy and, at least in a few cases, remarkable for the social sciences.” They go on to note that “research on the public-private distinction … shows a rare combination of rigorous examination and convergent results(.)”.
Feeney (2008) finds that public servants who experience significant red tape are more likely than other public servants to perceive that private sector work is more autonomous and personally gratifying. As red tape is a sign of excessive rules that limit one’s autonomy, we may infer that perceiving a poor condition of autonomy in the public sector can be projected onto public sector employees’ high expectation of work autonomy in the private sector.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/tw/2015-07/12/c_128010599.htm.
http://www.enz.org/new-zealand-salaries.html.
Some researchers claim that having work with a strong service component may be more important than sector and that, in such cases, sector choice is only incidental (Christensen and Wright 2011).
In addition to autonomy, relatedness and competence are also important psychological needs that determine the success of internalizing motivations.
Van de Walle, Steijn, and Jilke (2015), in fact, labeled a need for autonomy as intrinsic work value and combined it with a need for interesting work.
Datasets that target general organizations as a whole (e.g., ISSP, National Organization Survey, and General Social Survey) have the feature that private organizations/employees are more present than public organizations/employees in the sample. This may result in different statistical significance between results from public and private samples (significance is more pronounced in the private sector sample due to a larger sample size). Readers are encouraged to use caution when they interpret statistical significance.
Annual salary is reported in the US (per 10,000 USD) sample and the NZ sample (per 10,000 NZD), whereas monthly salary is reported in the Taiwan (per 10,000 NTD) sample.