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For managers in public service organizations, stakeholders are very important as they have different and sometimes conflicting values. Yet, public administration scholars often neglect the stakeholders despite their vital role in defining good performance in democratic political systems. This chapter combines theoretical perspectives on public values (different understandings of the desirable) with contributions focused on creating public value. The chapter also pays attention to the co-existing and competing governance paradigms that are part of the context in which managing for public service performance occurs. These paradigms provide institutional templates, policies, operational strategies, and desired programs that prescribe how public service provision should be structured and how it should operate. Governance paradigms can be used to understand the links between stakeholders, public values, and public service performance. Giving insight into these links is the key contribution of the chapter. It uses nine illustrative studies to examine how the stakeholder concept and public value(s) are used in the public service performance literature. A key implication is that public administrators can be portrayed as experts who exercise judgment and make consequential decisions in identifying relevant public values, in creating public value, and in generating public service performance.

Human resource management (HRM) scholars studying HRM in a public-sector context hold that the public-sector context is distinctive despite decades of reforms oriented on private-sector management principles. Distinctive characteristics include (1) the multiple goals that public organizations serve, making vertical alignment of HRM difficult; (2) the constraints on managerial autonomy resulting from red tape and trade union involvement; and (3) employees’ public service motivation, which is antithetical to performance management. However, there is a lack of evidence on public- versus private-sector differences in the human resource practices that are actually applied. Using Cranet 2014/15 survey, this chapter examines whether public-sector institutional characteristics affect the application of human resource practices as theoretically expected. The results show that, compared to the late 1990s, HRM in public organizations continues to differ in some respects from HRM in private-sector organizations, but not in other respects. The traditional belief that public-sector HRM is not outright aimed at efficiency and effectiveness still holds. The public service ethic and the resilience of collectivized industrial relations likely contribute to this. However, the traditional public-sector HRM orientation on employee well-being is less distinctive, which will likely affect the position of public organizations in the labor market.

The central issue in this chapter is people management in public organizations. That is, managers’ implementation of HR practices and their leadership behavior in supporting the employees they supervise at work. This chapter focuses on five key aspects related to HRM and leadership in a public sector context. First, the historical move from personnel management to HRM and leadership. Second, the distinction between external and internal management and this chapter’s focus on internal management. Third, the role of middle and frontline leaders in the implementation of policies and their responsibility for turning general policies into results. Fourth, the mutual dependency between HRM policies and leadership. Fifth, the distinction between intended, implemented, and perceived HRM and leadership. This chapter systematically draws on both the general HRM and leadership bodies of literature, and specifies these insights to the public sector context whenever possible.

It is easy to think of public service organizations in generic terms. However, on the basis of a multidimensional institutional perspective of publicness, which includes authority, funding, and values, one can quickly understand that the publicness of organizations comes in various guises. This institutional perspective not only explains the behavior of these various public service organizations themselves but also the behavior of individuals operating within these institutional boundaries. Key to explaining individual institutional behavior is the concept of identities. Depending on the extent of their internalization, identities influence individual behavior more or less strongly. An important level at which these insights can be harnessed to the benefit of the organization is at the level of management, which is the link between the individual and the organization. The mechanisms of management influence are illustrated by analyzing four different organizational systems (work design, reward, human resources flow, and employee participation) to manage human assets in public service organizations.

This chapter examines managers’ role in people management within a public sector setting and the factors explaining differences in people management performance between managers. The main question guiding this contribution is: What are the antecedents (favoring and hindering factors) of public managers’ HRM implementation and leadership behavior? The AMO model is used as a conceptual framework to map and examine the antecedents of public managers’ people management. Under the Ability category of the AMO model, the focus is on managers’ people management abilities and management development. Under the Motivation category, the focus is on managers’ willingness to take up people management responsibilities and their priorities. Under the Opportunities category, support from different organizational stakeholders (HR department, upper management, etc.) and (personnel) red tape are covered. As such, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the impact that typical public sector characteristics have on managers’ people management performance.

This chapter uses research findings and examples from practice to provide a state-of-the-art overview of public sector workers’ employability and its determinants and outcomes. Employability is attracting growing attention from both public and private sector organizations. However, scarce research attention has been paid to the importance and features of the employability of employees in public organizations. Scholars regard and study employability mostly as an issue for business organizations. This chapter demonstrates, among other things, that both in research and in practice, employability is predominantly treated in a generic, non-sector-specific way. This leads to a call for public sector-specific studies and comparative research across countries and sectors. The chapter ends with proposals for future research and policy agendas.

The central concept in this study is people management, referring to line managers’ implementation of HR practices and their leadership behaviour oriented at supporting the employees they supervise at work. In this study we conceptualize people management and develop a multidimensional scale to measure it from the perspectives of both employees and line managers. Using a Study 1/Study 2 design, including two-wave multilevel data from employees and line managers of a financial service provider, and cross-sectional data from teachers, educational support staff, and supervisors, we demonstrate the scale’s reliability and multidimensionality across samples and over time. We provide evidence of the convergent validity by showing that employees’ and line managers’ perceptions of people management are significantly related, and that people management is significantly related to transformational and transactional leadership. Also, we demonstrate that people management adds explained variance above and beyond transformational and transactional leadership in predicting team performance. We demonstrate criterion-related validity through people management’s relationship with job satisfaction, commitment, and work engagement. We discuss the implications of our measure for theory and research on people management, its antecedents, and its effects.

Leadership behavior is recognized as an important variable in the Human Resource Management (HRM)-Performance chain. However, in most studies, leadership behavior is viewed as an independent variable, and one that influences employees’ attitudes and behavior. Because of this premise, claims that public managers’ discretionary room for supervisory support is constrained, and that personal motivation is the most important reason for a manager engaging in supervisory support, have not been systematically examined. This article fills this gap by examining the antecedents of supervisory support by middle managers in the police force and in an academic medical center in the Netherlands. The results show that the extent of the discretionary room that middle managers experience has an effect on supervisory support and that this relationship is mediated by their willingness to support employees. Furthermore, a manager’s supportive ability is an important additional antecedent.

This article examines the impact of austerity policies in seven EU Member States on municipal employment and the ways in which social dialogue can influence consequences for employees. It provides a comparative institutional framework, looking at municipal tasks and powers, and the social dialogue institutions available in the respective countries. In addition, the outcomes of austerity policies are compared with regard to wages, employment levels and the public service provision, as well as the influence of social dialogue institutions on these outcomes. Trade unions and workplace employee representatives face a dilemma, having to choose between concession bargaining and opposition to employer plans in order to preserve public sector employment. Between and within countries there seem to be significant differences in their success. Generally speaking, however, these are tough times for municipal workers, their representatives and citizens dependent on the services municipalities offer.

Successful organizational change depends on leadership, and this chapter reviews the literature on leadership in different types of public organization change processes. While transformational leadership is typically used more in planned processes of change, distributed leadership often accompanies emergent change processes. A key insight, however, is that the two leadership approaches should be viewed as complementary, depending on the characteristics of the different public organizations’ environments and structures. The bureaucratic structure and primacy of politics, the employment of public service professionals, and the environmental complexity with many stakeholders and complexity in tasks are all factors that affect the effectiveness of change leadership in public organizations. Future studies should address these characteristics in comparative and longitudinal studies that examine the mechanisms through which leadership contributes to the implementation of organizational change.

This chapter deals with an important issue in every public organization: employees’ well-being, which the academic literature consistently relates to organizational performance. After addressing the definition of well-being, the chapter presents the two main theoretical lenses through which well-being is considered: the job demands-resources (JD-R) and the person-environment (P-E) fit models. With respect to these two theoretical models, the main empirical findings, specifically for public organizations, are described and discussed. Thus, variables are identified that can be considered as levers for or obstacles to well-being in public organizations. This permits an “institutional” reading of the antecedents of well-being, highlighting, among other characteristics, environmental, organizational, and task characteristics that are particularly important to consider when studying public organizations. Finally, the chapter also points out some gaps in the current literature and proposes new avenues of research for the study of well-being in public organizations.

Collaborative networks have come to form a large part of the public sector’s strategy to address ongoing and often complex social problems. The relational power of networks, with its emphasis on trust, reciprocity and mutuality provides the mechanism to integrate previously dispersed and even competitive entities into a collective venture(Agranoff 2003; Agranoff and McGuire 2003; Mandell 1994; Mandell and Harrington 1999). It is argued that the refocusing of a single body of effort to a collective contributes to reducing duplication and overlap of services, maximizes increasingly scarce resources and contributes to solving intractable or 'wicked’problems (Clarke and Stewart 1997). Given the current proliferation of collaborative networks and the fact that they are likely to continue for some time, concerns with the management and leadership of such arrangements for optimal outcomes are increasingly relevant. This is especially important for public sector managers who are used to working in a top-down, hierarchical manner. While the management of networks (Agranoff and McGuire 2001, 2003), including collaborative or complex networks (Kickert et al. 1997; Koppenjan and Klijn 2004), has been the subject of considerable attention, there has been much less explicit discussion on leadership approaches in this context. It is argued in this chapter that the traditional use of the terms ‘leader’ or ‘leadership’ does not apply to collaborative networks. There are no ‘followers’ in collaborative networks or supervisor-subordinate relations. Instead there are equal, horizontal relationships that are focused on delivering systems change. In this way the emergent organizational forms such as collaborative networks challenge older models of leadership. However despite the questionable relevance of old leadership styles to the contemporary work environment, no clear alternative has come along to take its place.