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Building on transparency literature, we theorize that information characteristics such as accessibility of raw data and data source provision influence citizens’ trust in public performance information. Next to the question of whether providing a data source matters, we argue that information provision from a non-government actor can compensate the information asymmetry between citizens and public sector organizations due to a stronger symmetric data exchange relationship. Integrating and elaborating these theoretical assumptions of principal-agent theory with bureaucratic reputation theory, the organization's reputation, rather than the stakeholder group the information provider is belonging to, may explain varying trust. We conduct eight online experiments in large-N data collections in Austria and Germany, and find that data accessibility and source provision increase trust in performance information. Whereas citizens have more trust in government-provided data compared to data provided by other citizens, source reputation matters dominantly for building trust in performance information.

Although absenteeism is a key concern in most western societies, research on reducing absenteeism in public sector organizations is scarce, particularly regarding the impact of organizational relationships. By building on the concept of workplace social capital (WSC) and using a large longitudinal cohort of Danish municipal employees, this study shows that three types of WSC (bridging, direct-leader-linking, and top-level-linking WSC) reduce absenteeism, while there is no significant effect of bonding WSC. Our empirical results further suggest that the relationships with the immediate leader and the top management (direct-leader-linking and top-level-linking WSC) are most important for employees’ absenteeism.

Vor bald zehn Jahren wurde für den deutschen öffentlichen Sektor ein multicultural turn konstatiert.1 Bedienstete des öffentlichen Dienstes sollen, so das erklärte Ziel, in ihrer Personalstruktur die Bevölkerung abbilden. Das Versprechen einer solchen „repräsentativen Bürokratie“ liegt nicht nur in einer diskriminierungsfreien Praxis, sondern auch im effektiveren Verwaltungsvollzug, da Bedürfnisse und Belange aller gesellschaftlichen Gruppen besser adressiert werden sollen. Die derzeitige Personalstruktur des öffentlichen Dienstes ist jedoch noch weit entfernt von jeglicher Repräsentativität, nicht zuletzt aufgrund des Ausbleibens eines klaren Bekenntnisses hin zu Repräsentativität und ein darauf aufbauendes, konsistentes System der Förderung unterrepräsentierter Gruppen. Ausgehend von den hier vorliegenden Befragungsdaten (n = 1.003) kann gezeigt werden, dass die deutsche Bevölkerung eine repräsentative Bürokratie klar befürwortet. Gleichzeitig wird jedoch ein Spannungsverhältnis deutlich, welches sich durch die Forderung der Neutralitätswahrung im öffentlichen Dienst und dem Verfolgen des Leistungsprinzips in der Personalauswahl auftut.

Civil courage refers to the behavior where people actively intervene to protect a victim in a concrete situation of injustice despite the risk of becoming a victim themselves. To act with civil courage, one requires competencies that relate to prosocial values as well as the physical and social ability to act. In this context, this brief reports the opinions of 2,046 respondents—representatives of Germany with respect to age, gender, and region—on what, according to them, are the best contexts for learning civil courage. “At home and/or from family” as well as “through volunteering” are considered the most suitable contexts to learn civil courage. In contrast, television, social media, and the internet are considered the least supportive contexts.

Human resources are vital to an organization’s success and are a driving force behind innovation processes. This study examines the influence of various employee characteristics and their effect on the innovation culture with public and nonprofit organizations (innovation climate). Using data collected from 1220 public and nonprofit employees, we evaluate the role of various elements such as work motivation, job flexibility, and financial motivation, and how they affect an innovation culture within organizations. Findings from a series of OLS regressions suggest that job flexibility, the quality and reputation of the organization, and importance placed on work are positively related to both public and nonprofit innovation climates. Personnel inflexibility negatively affects the innovation climate in both the public and nonprofit sectors, and the effects of other variables, including advancement motivation, vary by sector.

Reputation is a crucial asset for service organizations, in particular when actual service quality is hard to assess, e.g. in the context of hospitals. Employees and their recommendation intentions to other professionals and potential patients are crucial in the reputation building process. Against this background, we test with a quantitative-exploratory approach, for 1,022 employees in two German hospitals, how eleven dimensions of employees’ job satisfaction explain their recommendation intention on behalf of the hospital they work. Moreover, we explore this for different employee groups. Our results show that there are different employee job satisfaction dimensions explaining recommendation intention for different employee groups such as nurses, doctors, or employees in the administrative field. We frame our findings against the broad but scattered management literature that is relevant for job satisfaction and organizational reputation, and discuss implications for practice and further research.

This study investigates the impacts of negative and positive signals on public-serving organizations’ reputations. We draw on sociocognitive perspectives to test how organizations’ breaches of stakeholders’ trust are repairable over time as well as the moderating effect of organizational mission valence on this forgiveness process. Multilevel data from two slope-shift experiments (n = 304; n = 582) show that mission valence, or individuals’ affinity with an organization’s mission, intensifies the effects of both negative and positive signals in organizations’ reputation building processes. Negative signals have stronger negative effects on intentions to support the organization for individuals with high mission valence. However, the effect of successive positive signals is also stronger for individuals with high mission valence, suggesting greater forgiveness following a stronger breach of trust among these stakeholders.

Over the past decade, practitioners and scholars have intensified the discussions around people’s expectations from their jobs and how public and private organizations can succeed in the war for talent. In this context, it has become obvious that people not only seek high salaries and career opportunities but also meaningfulness in their daily tasks. Although many public service jobs offer opportunities to help others (prosocial impact) or contribute to society (societal impact), employees tend to become accustomed to these positive aspects or forget about them. This article tests whether a microintervention that emphasizes employees’ prosocial or societal impact can positively affect their well-being, intention to stay in the job, and willingness to recommend their respective jobs to others. The combined results of three preregistered experiments reveal that microinterventions can indeed have these effects, particularly if they focus on creating awareness about the jobs’ societal impact.

Based on privacy calculus theory, we derive hypotheses on the role of perceived usefulness and privacy risks of artificial intelligence (AI) in public services. In a representative vignette experiment (n = 1,048), we asked citizens whether they would download a mobile app to interact in an AI-driven public service. Despite general concerns about privacy, we find that citizens are not susceptible to the amount of personal information they must share, nor to a more anthropomorphic interface. Our results confirm the privacy paradox, which we frame in the literature on the government’s role to safeguard ethical principles, including citizens’ privacy.

Non-formal education (NFE) is increasingly put forward by scholars and policy makers as a way to meet globally changing educational needs. However, a clear insight into how this sector can and should be governed is missing. Therefore, this article proposes a framework to help classify NFE governance challenges depending on the learning goals and content of various NFE programs, organizations, and networks. This framework serves to help practitioners identify public governance challenges depending on particular NFE contexts. For researchers, it provides an overview to explore, identify, and test the impact of factors that influence NFE practices and its effectiveness.

Public trust in nonprofit organizations (NPOs) is the extent that stakeholders consider nonprofit organizations reliable and truthful to what they do and communicate. Concretely, this means that stakeholders believe that nonprofits’ acts conform to their goals, including that these nonprofit organizations do not produce profit for personal and/or private gains (Hansmann, 1987). The public aspect of public trust in nonprofit organizations focuses on the aggregated trust perceptions – or shared cognition – from several relevant stakeholder groups, like beneficiaries, donors, funders, volunteers, employees, and collaboration partners, such as government agencies, businesses, and other nonprofit organizations. Hence, individual stakeholders can trust NPOs to a different extent, depending on various factors, such as their concrete stakeholder role towards the organization, earlier experiences, personal needs and preferences, and access to information about the nonprofit organization (Becker et al., 2020). The aggregated concept of public trust in nonprofits is the extent to which these individual trust perceptions are shared within larger stakeholder groups.

Over the past 20 years, as the study of transparency has evolved into a burgeoning multidisciplinary field, nonprofit scholars have developed an impressive body of research on the antecedents and outcomes of the transparency of nonprofit organizations (NPOs). From both theoretical and practical purposes, it is necessary to develop an overall picture of such antecedents and outcomes, to allow scholars and NPOs to understand why, when, and how transparency should be implemented. Current studies provide a fragmented view, focused on specific elements of NPO transparency; with a systematic literature review of 76 articles, this article offers both an integrative framework of the antecedents and outcomes of NPO transparency and an agenda for research, based on a critical analysis of the integrative framework. Four relevant research orientations emerge: (1) direction of NPO transparency, (2) distinguishing actual from perceived transparency, (3) the dark side of NPO transparency, and (4) NPO transparency contingency factors. Research along these four orientations could add nuance to existing knowledge of transparency and provide key insights with regard to why, when, and how transparency works.

Tätigkeiten im öffentlichen Dienst bieten häufig die Möglichkeit, anderen zu helfen sowie einen Beitrag zum Gemeinwohl zu leisten. Diese als prosozialer und gesellschaftlicher Einfluss bezeichneten Eigenschaften, bieten ein großes Motivationspotenzial. Oftmals gewöhnen sich Beschäftigte allerdings an diese positiven Aspekte ihrer Tätigkeit und der Motivationsanreiz geht verloren. Der Artikel präsentiert die Ergebnisse dreier Experimente, in denen Beschäftigte über ihren prosozialen und gesellschaftlichen Einfluss reflektieren. Die Ergebnisse legen nahe, dass die Erinnerung an den prosozialen und gesellschaftlichen Einfluss einer Tätigkeit im öffentlichen Dienst das Wohlbefinden der Beschäftigten erhöhen, ihre Kündigungsabsicht verringern und sie eher dazu neigen, ihre Tätigkeit anderen zu empfehlen.

Nonprofit organizations highly depend on the public’s trust for legitimacy and support, to ultimately further their missions. Despite its high importance, little is known about the trust-building processes of the general public. In this study, we develop and test a multilevel study design to provide deeper insights into the public’s trust in nonprofit organizations and its relevant determinants. We used a comprehensive data set of 4,072 dyads, with survey data from 1,686 individuals and organizational data related to 102 German NPOs to investigate the different trust-building components: (1) individual public trust evaluation in NPO, (2) individual (trustor) context, and (3) organizational (trustee) context. The results of the analysis reveal unexpected differences in the importance of the different components for explaining the public’s trust in nonprofit organizations. Results show that the individual context is as relevant as the individual public trust evaluation, but the organizational context is far less important.

There is a broad academic discussion about the impact of funding grants from a foundation or a government department on individual support intentions toward the nonprofit organization receiving the grant. However, the role of the grant provider's reputation has frequently been overlooked. In this study, we experimentally tested whether there is a reputation spillover effect of a grant-providing organization. Based on a real-life example, we asked citizens to rate their willingness to donate to a nonprofit organization, and we experimentally manipulated the available information on funding sources. We test this for both a government department and a foundation as a grant provider. Our results suggest that not the act of receiving a grant, but the citizens' awareness about the funding organization—at least in the case of a foundation—has an impact on support intentions. In contrast, for a prominent government department as a grant provider, we did not find support for a reputation spillover effect.

Aktuelle technologische Entwicklungen (z.B. künstliche Intelligenz) führen immer wieder zu Debatten, wie diese sinnvoll für die öffentliche Verwaltung genutzt werden können. Die Verwaltung selbst und entsprechende Expertinnen und Experten diskutieren mögliche positive Wirkungen auch in Bezug auf Werte, wie Effizienz, Transparenz oder Fairness. Diese Studie untersucht, ob Bürgerinnen und Bürger von der Anwendung dieser Technologien in der öffentlichen Verwaltung ebensolche Wirkungen ebenso erwarten. Dabei wird auch analysiert, ob eine andere Erwartungshaltung als bei gewinnorientierten Unternehmen besteht. Die Befragungsergebnisse (N=1.577) zeigen, dass weder negative noch positive Erwartungen in Bezug auf Wirkungen dieser Technologien bestehen, das gilt für öffentliche wie für die privatwirtschaftliche Leistungserbringung. Es wird diskutiert, ob die Ergebnisse in der bisher mangelnden Anwendung der untersuchten Technologien begründet liegen oder aus einer unzureichenden Kommunikation mit und Einbindung von Bürgerinnen und Bürgern in entsprechende Planungs- und Implementationsprozesse resultieren.

Public service stereotypes have been the subject of various studies in public administration research. However, the cognitive processes that form the basis of these stereotypes and the heuristics processing of stereotypical information, remain empirically vague. Starting from insights on the anti-public sector bias and representativeness heuristic, we apply an experimental vignette study (n = 1,412) in which we analyze how citizens process information on employees' sector affiliation. Furthermore, we integrate non-work role-referencing to test the stereotype confirmation assumption underlying the representativeness heuristic. Our results show that sector as well as non-work role-referencing influences perceived employee professionalism but has little effect on positive stereotype confirmation. However, our results do not confirm a congruity effect of consistent stereotypical information.

Nonprofit leaders face the challenge of making deci- sions within a complex environment of heterogeneous and often competing stakeholder claims. In such a set- ting, leaders not only make judgments about the power of their organization's stakeholders but they also make conscious choices about which stakeholders they per- sonally represent while making organizational decisions. This study uses insights from stakeholder theory and agency theory to investigate (1) how nonprofit leaders' perceptions of stakeholder power and stake- holder representation are interrelated across a wide range of stakeholder groups and organizations, and (2) how perceptions of power and representation differ between board members and executive managers. Drawing on data from 491 nonprofit leaders, we find evidence of stakeholder representation surpluses and deficits for several stakeholders, although perceptions of these deficits and surpluses differ considerably between board members and managers. Our study holds important implications for nonp rofit governance,the practice of stakeholder analysis, and the use of stakeholder constructs in future empirical research.

As stereotypes strongly influence social interactions, this study explores the stereotypical associations regarding public servants, and about various professions in the public sector as well as the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. This leads to a better understanding of the theoretical and practical challenges, such as citizen behaviour towards public servants, attractiveness of and political decisions about public service jobs. With a mixed-method analysis of cognitive associations (7,470 associations by 415 respondents for 12 professions), the defining epithets of public servants are clarified, along with their positive or negative connotation. Despite the strongest associations for public servants being positive (caring, helpful and dedicated), as an overall category, it has a less positive connotation compared to some specific professions typical in the public sector (nurse, firefighter and police). However, cognitive associations are substantially more positive for public servants compared to politicians, lawyers and salesmen.

In this research, we focus on the governance role of the coordinator affiliated to the leading agency in publicnonprofit service networks. We analyze the extent to which different types of coordinators are able to build consensus on a set of network goals in close collaboration with the nonprofit network partners. We explore three network cases, respectively, coordinated by a commissioner, a co-producer and a facilitator. Both network coordinators and respondents from participating nonprofit service agencies are interviewed. In contrast to earlier studies our analysis indicates that, in comparison with a facilitator, a commissioner and a co-producer are better equipped to reach consensus on a set of goals in service networks. The practice of synthesis is considered as very important when establishing consensus in a network.

In den letzten Jahrzehnten hat das Streben nach Effizienz und Effektivität des Managements viele öffentliche und zivilgesellschaftliche Organisationen verändert. Viele öffentliche Organisationen – wie z.B. die deutschen öffentlichen Universitäten im oben beschriebenen Fall – haben sich im Zuge der New Public Management Reformen als eigenständige Einheiten neu organisiert. Eine solche Umstrukturierung hat die Chance erhöht, dass kontextspezifische Management- und Führungspraktiken eingeführt werden. So können die öffentlichen Universitäten nun beispielsweise freier über die Verwendung der Mittel entscheiden. Die Umstrukturierung hat jedoch auch die Notwendigkeit erhöht, dass die Organisationen ihre Leistungen managen und darüber berichten, um somit langfristig ihre Reputation gegenüber externen Stakeholdern aufzubauen. Dies können sie erreichen, indem sie das richtige Maß an Transparenz wahren und ihren Stakeholdern gegenüber Rechenschaft ablegen. Öffentliche Universitäten bemühen sich nun mehr um ihr Image, z.B. indem sie Hochglanzbroschüren drucken und ihre Jubiläen feiern. Gleichzeitig wird von ihnen mehr Transparenz bezüglich ihrer Prozesse und Wirkungsbereiche erwartet. Wenn zivilgesellschaftliche Organisationen für den Staat die Erbringung öffentlicher Leistungen übernehmen, dann geschieht dies zunehmend auf Basis von Leistungsverträgen mit komplexen Leistungs- und Zielvereinbarungen. Infolgedessen ist bei zivilgesellschaftlichen Organisationen die Notwendigkeit gestiegen, ihre Leistung, ihre Reputation, ihre Transparenz und ihre Rechenschaftspflicht gegenüber staatlichen Akteuren zu verwalten und zu steuern. Auch die Erwartungen privater Geldgeber/innen sind gestiegen, weil Skandale im Zusammenhang mit dem Missbrauch von Spendengeldern Spender/innen sensibilisiert haben (in Österreich z.B. der berüchtigteWorld Vision Skandal von 1998, der schließlich zur Einführung des österreichischen Spendengütesiegels führte). Aktuelle Trends in Richtung Venture Philanthropy und Impact Investment haben die Anforderungen privater Geldgeber/innen in Hinblick auf die Rechenschaftslegung von NPOs weiter erhöht.

This study reports the development and the validation of three related attitude scales that measure the attitudes of citizens towards the public sector, the public servants, and the politicians respectively. With three samples (n1 = 325, n2 = 320, n3 = 337), scale items were assessed based on item-scale correlations, internal consistency, and social desirability. Moreover, convergent and discriminant validity were verified, based on the relatedness of the three attitude scales with several focal constructs from the public management literature, including public service motivation and citizens’ trust in government. In addition, this study outlines the avenues for further research on how the use of these scales can advance the field of public management, and particularly behavioral public administration.

Which work-related COVID-19 changes are here to stay? We were able integrate a 9-item scale in the eleventh wave (12 June 2020 – 17 June 2020) of the large-scale data collection process of the Austrian Corona Panel Project . The items for the construct that we analyzed focused on whether respondents were in favor or against particular COVID-related changes in the work environment. Respondents are in general in favor to keep particular COVID-related changes in the working context, such as more flexibility with respect to home office, working hours, and part-time work. Respondent are also in favor for less bureaucratic procedures for sickness leave, and less business trips and outside appointment. However, this should not come with more employer control, nor with increasingly fading boundaries between personal and professional life contexts. These results mainly show the overall challenges for the future of work, where more autonomy and flexibility is desired, but not at the cost of losing a clear delineation between professional and personal contexts. Moreover, women are for several aspects more in favor to keep COVID-related changes, such as keeping distance in the work environment, less business trips, and flexibility with respect to part-time work and home-office. Younger respondents (under 45) are also in favor of less business trips and external appointments, however not as much as respondents above 45. Except for the reduction of business trips and external appointments, no significant differences are reported between employees of the private and the public sectors. This suggest how challenges are similar across these sectors, and both public and private organizations can learn from each other to shape new attractive work environments.

Zielsetzung und Design: Die Umfrage (482 in Österreich lebende Personen) erhebt in Form von zwei offenen Fragen die Wahrnehmung von persönlichen und gesellschaftlichen Nachteilen in der Zeit des COVID-19 bedingten Shutdowns. Die Daten werden im Hinblick auf Inhalt und Häufigkeit für die Gesamtgruppe sowie geschichtet nach Alter und Geschlecht analysiert. Zielsetzung ist, die direkten sozialen, wirtschaftlichen, ökologischen und politischen Folgen der Krise bzw. der zur Bewältigung gesetzten Maßnahmen zu identifizieren, und für die wissenschaftliche und politische Auseinandersetzung mit Krisensituationen aufzubereiten. Erkenntnisse: Die Ergebnisse zeigen ein gewisses Auseinanderfallen der wahrgenommenen individuellen Nachtteile und der gesellschaftlichen Nachteile: Während als die drei wichtigsten persönlichen Nachteile das Social Distancing, der Alltag in der neuen Situation und die eingeschränkte (Bewegungs)freiheit genannt werden, wird auf gesell-schaftlicher Ebene primär der wirtschaftliche Nachteil, Social Distancing und der Bereich Politik | Medien | Gesellschaft genannt.

The reputations of nonprofit organizations can be damaged as a result of an organizational scandal, as demonstrated by recent examples of international nonprofit and non-governmental organizations. Common practice and findings from studies using administrative data suggest that nonprofits can reduce the negative effects of scandals by voluntarily disclosing information about the event to stakeholders. This study tests those assumptions in an experimental framework and finds that organizations’ voluntary disclosure of a scandal does not effectively mitigate negative donation intentions following the crisis.

In the context of the INSERT project, we have been developing a clinical single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) insert for a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system, in order to perform simultaneous SPECT/MRI of the human brain. This system will consist of 20 CsI:Tl scintillation detectors, 5-cm wide and 10-cm long, with a 72-channel silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) readout per detector, and a multimini slit-slat (MSS) collimator set up in a stationary partial ring. Additionally the system has a custom-built transmit/receive MR coil to ensure compatibility with the SPECT system. Due to the novel design of the system/collimator, existing geometric calibration methods are not suitable. Therefore we propose a novel and practical calibration procedure that consists of a set of specific independent measurements to determine the geometric parameters of the collimator. This procedure was developed utilizing a prototype system that consists of a reduced-size single detector with a 36-channel SiPM-based readout and a single MSS collimator module. Validation was performed by reconstructing different imaging phantoms, using a rotating stage to simulate a tomographic acquisition. Regarding uniformity, the coefficient of variation (COV) for the cylinder phantom reconstructed with correct calibration parameters is 6.7%, whereas the COV using incorrect parameters is 9.4%. The quality of the phantom reconstructions provide evidence of the applicability of the proposed method to the calibration of the prototype system. This procedure can be easily adapted for the final INSERT system.

Background To assess hospital performance, quality perceptions of various stakeholders are increasingly taken into account. However, because of substantial background differences, various stakeholder groups might have different and even contrasting quality perceptions. Purpose We test the hypothesis that an overall perception gap exists between employees and patients with respect to perceived hospital quality. We additionally elaborate on how various employee groups differ from each other and from patients. Methodology We use primary survey data on perceived hospital quality from 9,979 patients and 4,306 employees from 11 German hospitals. With a multilevel regression and variance analysis, we test the impact of respondent type (employee or patient) on quality perception scores and test the interaction with hospital size. We additionally contrast different employee groups and test differences for various quality dimensions. Results and conclusion Hospital employees score hospital quality consistently lower than patients and are also more heterogeneous in their assessments. This makes it from a managerial point of view relevant to subdivide employees in more homogeneous subgroups. Hospital size has no clear effect on the perception gap. Doctors compared to patients and other employee groups have substantially different perceptions on hospital quality. Practice implications Our findings fuel the practical and ethical debate on the extent that perception gaps could and should be allowed in the context of high-quality and transparent hospital performance. Furthermore, we recommend that the quality perception gap is a substantial part of the overall hospital evaluation for ethical reasons but also to enable managers to better understand the (mis)match between employees' priorities and patients' preferences. However, we do warn practitioners that perceptions are only to a limited extent related to the organizational level (in contrast to the individual level), and only minimal improvements can thus be reached by differentiating from other hospitals.

What is the meaning of social entrepreneurship? This question is still a source of confusion and frustration for many scholars, educators, and students. In this research note, we seek to grasp the meaning of social entrepreneurship by examining statements from more than 300 nonprofit managers. Using a mixed-method analysis, we outline three lenses through which educators and students can comprehend social entrepreneurship: output, behavioral, and contextual. We test whether this framing is related to self-evaluation of social entrepreneurship. We discuss and elaborate our findings by contrasting respondents’ quotes with the social entrepreneurship literature. This article does not provide definitive answers, but rather provides a useful starting point for educators and students to begin to comprehend the different perceptions that frame the meanings of social entrepreneurship. Subscribe to JNEL

Over the past decade, practitioners and scholars have intensified the discussions around people’s expectations from their jobs and how public and private organizations can succeed in the war for talent. In this context, it has become obvious that people not only seek high salaries and career opportunities but also meaningfulness in their daily tasks. Although many public service jobs offer opportunities to help others (prosocial impact) or contribute to society (societal impact), employees tend to become accustomed to these positive aspects or forget about them. This article tests whether a microintervention that emphasizes employees’ prosocial or societal impact can positively affect their well-being, intention to stay in the job, and willingness to recommend their respective jobs to others. The combined results of three preregistered experiments reveal that microinterventions can indeed have these effects, particularly if they focus on creating awareness about the jobs’ societal impact.

Wir bewerten die Zufriedenheit mit verschiedenen Aspekten der COVID-19-Krise 2020 für eine repräsentative Stichprobe von 1798 in Österreich lebenden Befragten. Eine zuvor geplante Datenerhebung wurde um Erhebungsfragen ergänzt, die auf konkreten Fragen basieren, die in einer Sitzung des BKA-Clearing Boards (Dienstag, 14.04.2020: Subarbeitsgruppe Psycho-Soziale-Effekte im Rahmen von "COVID-19 / Future Operations"). Insgesamt sind in Österreich lebende Menschen zufrieden mit den abgefragten Aspekten der COVID-19 Krise: Sämtliche Mittelwerte liegen im positiven Bereich der Skala (also über 0 auf der Skala von -3 bis +3). Die größte Zufriedenheit zeigen die Befragten mit sich selbst im Umgang mit der von Regierung und Arbeitgeber\*in gesetzten Maßnahmen zur Bewältigung der Krise. Das betrifft sowohl die Umsetzung als auch die Einhaltung der Maßnahmen durch die Befragten. Im Gegensatz dazu ist die Zufriedenheit am geringsten, wenn es um die Befolgung der Maßnahmen durch Nachbarn und andere Bürger\*innen sowie um die Berichterstattung über die Maßnahmen in den österreichischen Medien geht. Die Schichtung nach Geschlecht, Alter, Bundesland, Bildungsabschluss, Beruf oder beruflichem Sektor zeigt geringe, aber keine bedeutenden Unterschiede zwischen den jeweiligen Untergruppen. Die Splittung nach Altersgruppen zeigt, dass je älter die Befragten sind, desto zufriedener sind sie mit der Befolgung der COVIC-19 Maßnahmen durch andere (Mit)Bürger*innen / die Bevölkerung. Mit der Regierung, sowohl hinsichtlich des Umgangs mit der Krise als auch die Kommunikation der Maßnahmen betreffend, sind Selbstständige am wenigsten und Studierende am meisten zufrieden. Zu beachten ist allerdings, dass die Datensammlung vor der zweiten Lockerung der Restriktionen für (kleine) Unternehmen durchgeführt wurde.

Although many stakeholders perceive face-to-face street fundraising as unpleasant, nonprofit managers encourage it as a way to attract donors. To understand the long-term effects of this fundraising method, we used a mixed-methods experimental design to investigate how face-to-face street fundraising affects organizational reputation and stakeholder support intentions in comparison with letter fundraising. The findings reveal that face-to-face street fundraising has a significant negative influence on the stakeholders' perceptions of an organization. Further, qualitative data show that the negative perception originates primarily from perceived pressure, distrust, and obtrusion, which are triggered by face-to-face street fundraising. Our study thus reveals long-term reputational consequences that nonprofit organizations should consider before deciding on fundraising methods.

Repository for Vogel,D., & Willems,J. (2020). The Effects of Making Public Service Employees Aware of Their Prosocial and Societal Impact: A Microintervention study. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 30(3), 485–503. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muz044

Future Care Robots (CRs) should be able to balance a patient’s, often conflicting, rights without ongoing supervision. Many of the trade-offs faced by such a robot will require a degree of moral judgment. Some progress has been made on methods to guarantee robots comply with a predefined set of ethical rules. In contrast, methods for selecting these rules are lacking. Approaches departing from existing philosophical frameworks, often do not result in implementable robotic control rules. Machine learning approaches are sensitive to biases in the training data and suffer from opacity. Here, we propose an alternative, empirical, survey-based approach to rule selection. We suggest this approach has several advantages, including transparency and legitimacy. The major challenge for this approach, however, is that a workable solution, or social compromise, has to be found: it must be possible to obtain a consistent and agreed-upon set of rules to govern robotic behavior. In this article, we present an exercise in rule selection for a hypothetical CR to assess the feasibility of our approach. We assume the role of robot developers using a survey to evaluate which robot behavior potential users deem appropriate in a practically relevant setting, i.e., patient non-compliance. We evaluate whether it is possible to find such behaviors through a consensus. Assessing a set of potential robot behaviors, we surveyed the acceptability of robot actions that potentially violate a patient’s autonomy or privacy. Our data support the empirical approach as a promising and cost-effective way to query ethical intuitions, allowing us to select behavior for the hypothetical CR.

To simplify decision making processes, online platforms frequently display reputation star ratings as an indication of the quality of a product, service, or organization. Can information provided by such star ratings draw away attention from other information? This is an important question for platform developers to adjust the use of such ratings. We conduct a between-subjects laboratory experiment (n = 121) where we manipulate the difference between the reputation star ratings of two social profit organizations, and ask respondents to indicate which organization they prefer. Applying eye-tracking technology, we analyze how the visual attention between the treatment conditions differs. Our findings show that reputation star ratings are consulted as complementary information, rather than as substitute information. Moreover, the results suggest that the lack of stars – not the presence of more stars – attracts visual attention.

The work of volunteers is indispensable for the well functioning of healthcare organizations, and for maintaining the quality of care in times of austerity. As feelings of intrinsic motivation stimulate volunteer well-being and their long-term engagement, we study how team inclusion relates to volunteers’ intrinsic motivation during their activities. We hypothesize that volunteers’ perceptions of inclusion are positively related to intrinsic motivation, via the satisfaction of their basic needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. To test our hypothesis, we conducted a daily-diary study, obtaining a final sample of 43 volunteers and 204 completed diaries. Multilevel path analyses showed that team inclusion was positively related to volunteers’ intrinsic motivation during their activities. Subsequent mediation analyses revealed that competence and relatedness need satisfaction mediated this relationship. Thus, when volunteers feel part of the team with which they complete their activities, they experience intrinsic motivation because feeling included stimulates their feelings of being competent and being related to others.

Research on volunteering has mainly focused on the explanatory demographics and functional motives to volunteer, but little is known about the reasons that people might have not to volunteer. However, these reasons need more academic attention, as they form the barriers that organizations have to overcome when attracting new volunteers. We examine a sample of 1248 respondents on whether they volunteer, are interested in volunteering, or have no interest to volunteer. We verify whether demographic differences exist between these groups. By means of an exploratory factor analysis, we analyze the reasons not to volunteer for those who have no interest to volunteer. This complements earlier research by focusing on the barriers that people might have, instead of the benefits of volunteering that have extensively been documented.

This study explores which governance practices nonprofit leaders consider necessary to avoid organizational crises. Further, it explores whether these leadership mental models of crisis resistance depend on the organizational context. This helps determine whether practical learning points are organization specific or can be applied broadly. With a multilevel sample of 304 leaders from 44 Belgian nongovernmental development organizations, an exploratory path analysis reveals that nonprofit leaders consider continuous improvement, as a governance practice, particularly relevant for effective organizational crisis resistance. A multilevel analysis also shows that variations in leadership mental models cannot be explained by the organizational variables used in this study (organizational size, leadership group size, operational activities, and languages in the leadership group). This article concludes with a discussion of consequences for further research.

Even though the emergence of reputation is a long and cumulative process, each stakeholder immediately has impressions of an organization. To understand how early impressions of nascent sustainable...