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Ethical leadership is of growing interest and concern in public administration research and practice. Although both scholarship and practical wisdom suggest that the outcomes of leadership are contingent on followers' characteristics, knowledge about what individual preferences matter for the leadership–outcome relationship and how they moderate it is still scant. This study expands on extant scholarship by focusing on the moderating role of followers' need for autonomy in the association between perceived ethical leadership and two important follower outcomes, i.e., job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment. Building on self-determination theory, we test rivaling hypotheses on the moderating effect of follower's need for autonomy in a sample of public sector employees in Germany (n = 462). The results support the enhancement hypothesis, according to which the association between ethical leadership and follower outcomes increases at higher levels of need for autonomy. However, we find this effect only for job satisfaction, while no such moderation occurs in the case of affective organizational commitment. Future research is challenged to further explore the multiple contingencies of ethical leadership in the public sector by examining other configurations of outcomes and moderators at various levels of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Public Administration is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Employees' attraction to public or private employers is an issue of enduring practical concern and scholarly debate, with inconclusive evidence of both the levels and the drivers of employer attractiveness. This study builds on online reviews of more than 5,000 U.S.-based organizations by more than 200,000 current and former employees, using their recommendations as a behavioral and consequential measure of employer attractiveness. Results of a relative weight analysis show that public employees place less importance on altruistic and intrinsic attributes compared to their counterparts in the private sector when they recommend or do not recommend their employers, but more importance on social attributes; while no sector differences emerge for extrinsic and prestige attributes. These patterns remain stable when we focus on an industry with little occupational variation across the sectors. As some of these results contradict previous scholarship, they suggest that employer attractiveness at the post-entry stages of the human resource cycle, when preferences may change as a consequence of employee expectations and experience, is a puzzle that deserves more scholarly and practical attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Public Administration is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Cross-sectoral strategic negotiation is a key challenge in PPPs. Based on framing and game theory, we investigate the effect of sectoral agency, affect, and bargaining domain on sectoral agents' bargaining behaviour in a PPP renegotiation scenario. Results confirm that public agents are more likely to bargain for satisfactory, 'good enough' contracts than private agents, who maximize their utility. This difference is stronger in the loss vis-a-vis the gain domain. These experimental findings advance our understanding of psychological mechanisms underlying cross-sectoral negotiations, suggesting that public managers and policy-makers account for partners' dissimilar bargaining logics to prevent asymmetric loss socialization in PPPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we focus on think tanks as intermediaries between exploration and exploitation. To underpin our theoretical arguments on their linking function between both domains, we conducted a case study. The object of investigation is a think tank which has played a decisive role in the modernisation of the German public sector. The managerial innovation it has triggered is a control model which departs from the principles of bureaucracy by shifting emphasis from input to output control. We visualise the links between exploration and exploitation by analysing citations of reports and journal articles in which the think tank outlines this model. Three stages of the discourse on New Public Management (NPM) in Germany are distinguished, resulting in a remarkable diffusion rate in administrative practice. (Contains 1 table and 3 figures.)

Sector preferences in job choice have rarely been tested empirically across different administrative systems. We address this gap and apply a between-subject experimental design to examine the attractiveness of public, private, and nonprofit employers in two countries in different administrative traditions. Respondents (n = 362) from an Anglo-Saxon (i.e., the U.S.) and continental European country (i.e., Germany) were exposed to job advertisements that only differed in the employer's sector affiliation, with other job attributes, such as payment and working hours, held constant. Contrary to expectations, and consistently across the two country samples, respondents evaluated public sector jobs more positively compared to vacancies in the private sector. In contrast, we found no such comparative advantage of public over nonprofit employers. By providing counterevidence to the prevalence of negative attitudes toward public organizations, our study warns against overgeneralizing previous findings on negativity biases to the context of employer attractiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Management consultants are often hidden and therefore understudied actors in public administration. Building on institutional and social identity theory, we investigate consultants' identity work in search of legitimacy as knowledge providers in the public sector. We substantiate our theoretical reasoning with 43 semi-structured interviews with consultants and clients and extract four social identities of consultants, only one of which complies with what the literature commonly considers a management consultant in the public sector. Our study extracts new patterns of identity work and shows how they help actors in need of legitimacy to cope with the institutional complexity of public administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous scholarship provides little insight into the differences between public and private leadership in people's a priori assumptions about leaders. We advance a socio‐cognitive approach and examine how implicit social attributions to leaders are contingent on sector and performance cues. Participants completed the Semantic Misattribution Procedure to reveal implicit associations of traits with leaders in contrasting scenarios. Results show that sector cues affect such attributions, which in turn influence behavioral intentions, but only so in interaction with performance information. We conclude that public leaders earn fewer credits for success or failure than private leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]