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The purpose of this study is to develop and validate a taxonomy useful for classifying the training activity preference patterns adopted by executives and for describing how these patterns relate to important workplace measures. Although many organizations hold that well-trained and developed leaders are important for organizational success, little is known about the patterns of self-developmental activities that such leaders choose to initiate and how such training impacts organizational outcomes. Understanding these patterns may be useful in characterizing leaders in terms of training interest and showing a relation between executive training and valued organizational outcomes.

Using a sample of 4,624 senior executives who completed a training activity and attitude survey, cluster analysis was used to derive a five-type training and development (T&D) taxonomy. Types varied by training activity pattern/attitudes and the proportion of well-trained and less-well-trained executives in each agency were described. The researchers collected an independent sample of employee perceptions of engagement and leader effectiveness and number of equal employment opportunity (EEO) complaints within each agency.

Organizations with higher concentrations of well-trained/developed leaders tend to have employees with more favorable workplace attitudes and higher regard for senior leaders and generate smaller proportions of EEO complaints.

Data were collected from 2011 and 2012, government leaders were sampled, and outcome analyses were conducted at the agency level rather than at the individual level.

A link between leader training and organizational outcome is useful for promoting and justifying such training to stakeholders.

Characterizing leaders by training pattern will be useful in examining training usage/interest and in crafting programs tailored to leaders of different patterns.

An executive training pattern taxonomy is unique in the literature and evidence linking such training to outcome is rare.

Studies on entrepreneurship in public agencies suggest that managing for innovation may increase organizational performance. These studies, however, do not take into consideration the processes of opportunity identification. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to, first, situate the concept of opportunity identification within the broader research on public sector entrepreneurship, and second, to explore the relationship between managerial empowerment practices and employee alertness to new opportunities.

This paper uses aggregated data from the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey – an annual survey of the US Federal employees – to examine the relationship between managerial empowerment practices and employee alertness. The analysis employs a fixed-effects regression to model each panel of the US Federal agencies, from 2011 to 2017.

The results indicate that managerial empowerment practices have a clear correlation to employee alertness and are substantively different from empowerment practice’s relationship to “innovation” – an outcome of entrepreneurship. These findings suggest that scholarship should include opportunity identification as a moderating variable in future studies on public sector entrepreneurship.

The empirical analysis should be viewed as a novel approach to alertness in order to demonstrate the need to include opportunity identification processes in studies on managing for public sector entrepreneurship. Consequently, the results are not generalizable to all public agencies.

This paper highlights processes of entrepreneurial opportunity identification concerning management practices in the public sector, which scholarship has traditionally ignored.

The mechanism by which leadership influences organizational performance has largely been unexplained. This study intends to fill this gap. This study identified the six specific leadership practices: promoting inter-unit collaboration, managing diversity, providing performance feedback, ensuring goal directedness, developing employees, and resource provision. This study also identified a number of generic functions of leadership, that is, promoting cooperation, clarifying employees’ roles, and improving skills in organization. Then the mediating effects of the three generic functions were tested in order to link the specific leadership practices to organizational performance. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Structural equation modeling was used for analyzing the data from the 2014 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey to investigate the mediating model.

The effects of the six specific leadership practices on organizational performance were mediated by the three generic leadership functions.

The result of this study delineated the linking paths between leadership practices and organizational performance which has largely remained as a black box. Moreover, since the specific leadership practices are categorized by the generic functions that are instrumental for organizational performance, it provides theoretical and empirical grounds for managerial prescriptions for improving organizational performance.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between employees’ perception of their jobs and attitudes by investigating the effect of job resources (i.e. social support) on the relationship between job demands (i.e. workload, role ambiguity) and job-related well-being (i.e. efficacy, job satisfaction) among government employees.

Data were obtained from federal government employees responding to the 2012 Federal Employees Viewpoint Survey (US Office of Personnel Management, 2012). To test the hypotheses, hierarchical regression analyses were conducted.

Results revealed that social support served to mitigate feelings of inefficacy and simultaneously enhanced job satisfaction among employees experiencing work overload or role ambiguity, which supports the buffer hypothesis.

Since this study analyzes data collected by OPM, some items could not be modified, and using a limited number of items could be a limitation of this paper. Given that there has been a research stream linking public service motivation to work attitudes in the field of public management, the current study suggests there may be additional factors (i.e. job demands and resources) to enhance public sector employees’ work attitudes.

This study suggests the importance of government agencies adopting management strategies that encourage higher levels of social support from supervisors or colleagues in order to increase employees’ positive attitudes toward organizations.

This study focuses specifically on public sector employees, a population that has received limited attention in this area.

This study aims to examine the impact of job-related knowledge sharing on information availability and job satisfaction for information-receiving employees in the public sector. Following self-determination theory, the study suggests that job satisfaction is only partly affected by knowledge sharing itself, but particularly through the availability of job-related information enabling the information receiver to work effectively.

The hypotheses are tested with data from the US Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey from 2018. Additionally, results are replicated with earlier waves of the survey.

Results show the positive impact of job-related knowledge sharing on job satisfaction, whereby the availability of job-relevant information mediates this relationship partially.

This study confirms that managers should provide room for social interactions when introducing knowledge management practices.

The results emphasize that knowledge sharing is a highly social process in which support and relatedness play a significant role in success in addition to the diffusion of information itself.

This study examines the relationship between goal properties, both at the employee and organizational-level, and the perceived fairness of the performance appraisal system by federal employees.

We describe the theoretical framework regarding goals and employee perceptions of performance appraisal fairness. We then develop and test four hypotheses, exploring the relationships among variables using five years of the FEVS data. To strengthen the research design, we created an agency-level dataset, by calculating agency-level averages for all the covariates. Instead of examining 500,000 federal employees each year, we are examining 80 federal agencies. Creating a panel dataset at the agency level allows us to make stronger statements about causality than using cross-sectional data.

This study finds a significant positive relationship between goal setting factors and employees' perceived fairness of performance appraisals: perceived employee-level goal difficulty and perceived organizational-level goal specificity at the agency level. The study results show that certain control variables, such as intrinsic motivation, play important roles in predicting public employees' perceived fairness of performance appraisals. Federal employees who have a higher level of intrinsic motivation show a more positive perception toward performance appraisal fairness. The appropriate use of extrinsic rewards and intrinsic motivation, combined with effective goal setting strategies in public organizations, may enhance public employees' perceived fairness of performance appraisal systems.

This study used the FEVS, necessitating the reduction of the sample size to agency level averages to create a panel dataset. Also, this study was limited to federal agencies in the United States, so research results may lack generalizability.

This paper fulfills an identified need to avoid cross-sectional research design and leverage longitudinal panel data.

Job satisfaction assesses extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, leading to productivity. Job engagement internalizes an organizationʼs mission. Job engagement focuses an individualʼs efforts towards achieving meaningful results. Conceptually, job engagement must (1) establish the link between job engagement and organizational outcomes and (2) offer substantially more than currently provided by job satisfaction. Job engagement must be better than a common placebo or only a marginal improvement over job satisfaction. The Federal Employee View Survey (2013) includes global satisfaction and Job engagement indexes. Job satisfaction and job engagement are used as independent variables linked to productivity outcomes (accountability) and exit (intent to leave). Global satisfaction clearly provides a useful measure for productivity outcomes and exit. Job engagement adds usefully with regard to the accountability productivity outcome. However, using both constructs introduces redundancy.

This study explicitly explores the moderating role of management quality, at multiple organizational levels, in the relationship between telework and job satisfaction.

This study employs fixed effects regression with clustered robust standard errors at the departmental level to account for the multilevel nature of the data.

The results of fixed effects analyses suggest that when the quality of one's direct supervisor and the quality of their supervisor's manager is high, the relationship between job satisfaction and telework frequency becomes stronger and positive.

This research illuminates the crucial moderating role of management quality at multiple organizational levels in the relationship between telework and employee job satisfaction during an unprecedented workforce shock.

The purpose of this paper is to review recent practices by members of the Trump administration that may impact the ability of diversity researchers to have access to data in the coming years.

This is a viewpoint essay based largely on current news reports and does not rely on original research.

While there are strong reasons for concern that the collection, dissemination, and analysis of government data may negatively affect the ability to conduct research, the findings are still primarily speculative and not conclusive.

To the extent that researcher rely on the creation of and access to data generated by federal government agencies, there could be challenges to answering new research questions and/or doing research that compares the present to the past.

Researchers may want to take steps to protect their access to government data by downloading those databases that are most crucial for their work.

This viewpoint article represents only the author’s reflection on what might happen in the future based on what has happened so far.

The purpose of this paper is to explicate the role of followership behavior on employee job satisfaction as well as the conditions that may moderate its impact.

This study uses a large n survey data from federal agencies and investigates an additive moderation model in which two situational factors, perceived supervisor support (PSS) and performance-oriented culture (POC), interact with followership behavior.

Employees high on active followership perceived greater job satisfaction when PSS was high, rather than low. On the other hand, employees high on active followership perceived greater job satisfaction when POC was low, rather than high.

This is, to the knowledge, the first empirical study based on a cross-sectional survey that tests how the effects of active followership on employee job satisfaction may vary depending on the different types of situational factors. As such, more studies are needed to validate the causal directions of the findings.

The present findings show that active engagement had greater association with job satisfaction when leader involvement was high and performance orientation was low. For highly engaged employees, leaders are encouraged to show higher degree of involvement in their work but with less emphasis on the performance orientation of the organization.

This study contributes to the broader literature in public sector leadership in two ways. First, research on the relationship between followership and job satisfaction has been sparse. Second, and most importantly, this study is the first empirical study that tests the moderating roles of situational (organizational) factors on the relationship between followership and employee attitude (job satisfaction).