What Drives Entrepreneurial Orientation in the Public Sector? Evidence from Germany's Federal Labor Agency

Along with the introduction of private sector management tools, public servants are expected to act more entrepreneurially—as public managers. However, research lacks quantitative evidence on what drives entrepreneurial orientation (EO) in this context. Our article examines the antecedents of department-level EO in public sector organizations. By integrating different research streams into one study, we combine partly opposing discourses. This deductive study develops and empirically tests hypotheses on antecedents identified from private sector corporate entrepreneurship literature and from the current debate on new public management and public value management. It uses data from 250 middle managers of Germany's Federal Labor Agency to do so. Contrary to expectations, the influence of management support, work discretion, and resources is only limited. Furthermore, a focus on key performance indicators and goal ambiguity does not seem to impede EO. Instead, a multitude of expectations, middle managers' localism, and position tenure have the greatest impact on department-level EO. As a result, this study provides insights into the strong role of antecedents outside of administration. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for both theory and practic

Public Value at Cross Points: A Comparative Study on Employer Attractiveness of Public, Private, and Nonprofit Organizations

A commonly held assumption is that public service motivation (PSM) positively affects individuals’ attraction to government, but there are also private and nonprofit organizations that are beneficial to the common good. Therefore, the goal of this study is to shed light on an understudied topic in Public Administration, namely, how the public value of public, private, and nonprofit organizations affects their attractiveness to citizens and how PSM moderates this relationship. We find that employer attractiveness is strongly influenced by organizations’ public value regardless sectoral affiliation. This attribution of public value interacts with citizens’ PSM. For high-PSM individuals, the relationship between public value and attractiveness is stronger than for low-PSM individuals. Furthermore, high PSM exercises an asymmetric effect, punishing organizations with low public value more strongly in the private sector. These results highlight important implications for HR practitioners in all three sectors seeking to attract and retain highly motivated employees

Too much of a good thing? On the relationship between CSR and employee work addiction

Recent research highlights the positive effects of organizational CSR engagement on employee outcomes, such as job and life satisfaction, performance, and trust. We argue that the current debate fails to recognize the potential risks associated with CSR. In this study, we focus on the risk of work addiction. We hypothesize that CSR has per se a positive effect on employees and can be classified as a resource. However, we also suggest the existence of an array of unintended negative effects of CSR. Since CSR positively influences an employee’s organizational identification, as well as his or her perception of engaging in meaningful work, which in turn motivates them to work harder while neglecting other spheres of their lives such as private relationships or health, CSR indirectly increases work addiction. Accordingly, organizational identification and work meaningfulness both act as buffering variables in the relationship, thus suppressing the negative effect of CSR on work addiction, which weakens the positive role of CSR in the workplace. Drawing on a sample of 565 Swiss employees taken from the 2017 Swiss Public Value Atlas dataset, our results provide support for our rationale. Our results also provide evidence that the positive indirect effects of organizational CSR engagement on work addiction, via organizational identification and work meaningfulness, become even stronger when employees care for the welfare of the wider public (i.e., the community, nation, or world). Implications for research and practice are discussed

Doing good, feeling good? Entrepreneurs' social value creation beliefs and work-related well-being

Entrepreneurs with social goals face various challenges; insights into how these entrepreneurs experience and appreciate their work remain a black box though. Drawing on identity, conservation of resources, and person–organization fit theories, this study examines how entrepreneurs’ social value creation beliefs relate to their work-related well-being (job satisfaction, work engagement, and lack of work burnout), as well as how this process might be influenced by social concerns with respect to the common good. Using data from the German Public Value Atlas 2015 and 2019 and the Swiss Public Value Atlas 2017, a three-study design analyzes three samples of entrepreneurs in Germany and Switzerland. Study 1 reveals that entrepreneurs report higher job satisfaction when they believe their organization creates social value. Study 2 indicates that these beliefs relate negatively to work burnout; entrepreneurs’ perceptions of having meaningful work mediate this relationship. Study 3 affirms and extends these results by showing that a sense of work meaningfulness mediates the relationship between social value creation beliefs and work engagement and that this mediating role is more prominent among entrepreneurs with strong social concerns. This investigation thus identifies a critical pathway—the extent to which entrepreneurs experience their work activities as important and personally meaningful—that connects social value creation beliefs with enhanced work-related well-being, as well as how this process might vary with a personal orientation that embraces the common good

Measuring public value: scale development and construct validation

The public value concept is highly popular among practitioners and researchers, yet, to further test and develop the construct it needs more diversity in empirical research. We aim to contribute to future empirical public value research by providing a new public value scale based on Meynhardt’s conceptualization of public value. Conducting two empirical surveys with highly representative samples, we have developed and validated a twelve-item public value scale. Additionally, we applied the scale to empirically test what distinguishes public value from adjacent constructs, such as CSR or reputation, and to examine its explanatory power regarding important client/customer outcomes. The scale will allow future research to test extant public value hypotheses more thoroughly than before by using survey or experimental research designs. Practitioners can use the scale to gain a deeper understanding of public evaluation

Die Gemeinwohl-Bilanz auf dem Prüfstand der Bevölkerung. Empirische Überprüfung der demokratischen Legitimation der Gemeinwohl-Bilanz

The Common Good Balance Sheet is an instrument to measure a company’s contribution to the common good. Based on a representative empirical survey in Germany, we approach the question of democratic legitimacy of the common good conceptualization of this balance sheet. In sum, the respondents’ opinions mostly reflect the general outline of the common good conceptualization, yet also reveal deficits in terms of the intended distinctiveness, exhaustiveness, depth of definition and equal weighting of the values

Making Sense of a Most Popular Metaphor in Management: Towards a HedgeFox Scale for Cognitive Styles

Research on cognitive style has gathered momentum over the past 40 years, especially with respect to learning, problem-solving, and decision-making. This investigation adapts Tetlock’s hedgehog–fox scale for German-speaking respondents through three large-scale studies (n = 17,072) and examines the influence of cognitive style on employees’ public value assessments of their employing organizations. Our data led us to propose a revised and more economical HedgeFox Scale. In contrast with Tetlock’s findings, our results provide empirical and theoretical arguments for a two-factor structure. This shift in dimensionality affects the nature of the construct and aligns hedgehog–fox research with the latest developments in cognitive style research. Our results contribute to the ongoing interest in the dimensionality of cognitive styles and support the call for a more diverse picture. Finally, we provide recommendations for individuals and organizations

Justified by ideology: Why conservatives care less about corporate social irresponsibility

We examine the cognitive and motivational process underlying the effect of consumers' conservatism on their corporate social responsibility (CSR) perceptions of irresponsible versus responsible companies. Building on political psychology and system justification theory, we identify and test market system justification (MSJ) as a motivated social cognition underlying ideological differences in CSR perceptions and reactions. Using four empirical studies, we find that the relatively high MSJ of conservatives (compared to that of liberals) results in less critical CSR perceptions of irresponsible companies and, thus, in less penalizing reactions. Moreover, we find that conservatism influences CSR perceptions of irresponsible companies more strongly than of responsible companies because MSJ affects only perceptions of market behaviors that threaten notions of fair markets (i.e., low CSR). The results improve predictions of consumers' perceptions and reactions to responsible and irresponsible companies