A number of organizations across sectors have begun efforts toward managing workforce diversity. At the federal level in the United States, almost 90 percent of agencies report that they are actively managing diversity. However, very little empirical research has tied diversity management to work group performance or other work‐related outcomes. This paper uses a survey of U.S. federal employees to test the relationships between diversity management, job satisfaction, and work group performance. The findings indicate that diversity management is strongly linked to both work group performance and job satisfaction, and that people of color see benefits from diversity management above and beyond those experienced by white employees.

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In this study, we examine the factors that predict whether an employee chooses to voluntarily leave the federal service.

Public organizations in the new millennium are tasked with a myriad of human resource management challenges that stem from workforce diversity, but the field of public administration has not produced a body of research that adequately assists them with these struggles. In 2000, Wise and Tschirhart called for “greater contribution from public administration scholars to the body of research focusing on how human diversity can best be managed to produce positive results.” They found that existing research contributed little usable knowledge for diversity management policies and programs. The authors examine whether their call for more rigorous and more practice-oriented research has been heeded by identifying articles on workforce diversity published in a core set of public administration journals since 2000. A broad overview of the literature on diversity is provided, followed by a more focused discussion of empirical research on employment diversity, diversity management, and organizational outputs and outcomes. It is found that although diversity issues remain salient to public administration scholarship, usable knowledge is in short supply. A substantial share of this research can be categorized as focusing on representative bureaucracy issues. Few empirical studies test diversity effects or hypotheses. Some empirical work explains factors beyond the control of human resource policies or practicing managers, which makes findings less useful to practitioners. The research suffers from inadequate data, little innovation in methodology, and insufficient attention to empirical connections between diversity and organizational results.

Although there is considerable literature on strategic planning and management in the public sector, there has been little effort to synthesize what has been learned concerning the extent to which these tools are used in government, how they are implemented, and the results they generate. In this article, the authors review the research on strategic planning and management in the public sector to understand what has been learned to date and what gaps in knowledge remain. In examining the 34 research articles in this area published in the major public administration journals over the past 20 years, the authors find substantial empirical testing of the impacts of environmental and institutional/organizational determinants on strategic management, but efforts to assess linkages between strategic planning processes and organizational outcomes or performance improvements are sparse. Large- N quantitative analyses and comparative case studies could improve the knowledge base in this critical area.

Public management research on diversity suffers from a lack of coherence and little theory building. There have been few attempts to establish a comprehensive theoretical framework through which streams of research can unite and better inform public managers-rather, issues of recruitment, management, and cultural values are pursued as wholly separate areas of inquiry. This article critically evaluates the current ways in which public management research addresses the diversity issue and proposes a new comprehensive model for research. The model is based on three functions of diversity management: recruiting and outreach, building cultural awareness, and promoting pragmatic management policy. These functions are linked to organizational performance through a series of intermediate steps, and the resulting model for quantitative analysis is specified.

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In a period of ongoing public sector reform in the United States (US), federal government agencies have been pushed to find new ways of performing their public functions more effectively and efficiently. Frontline public sector employees are a particularly vital source of innovations in organisational function and form. This study seeks to identify factors that motivate front line employees in the US federal bureaucracy to engage in innovative behaviour. The empirical analysis is based on data from the 2006 Federal Human Capital Survey. The results show that a constellation of factors encourage bottom-up innovation,including the expectancy of innovation being rewarded, employee training and development, employee empowerment and involvement in decision-making, and high-exchange dyadic relationships with supervisors.