Organizational image, identity, and identification are powerful concepts in terms of understanding members’ behaviors and beliefs. In particular, the term “image” has frequently been used to describe the overall impression of the organization, but most scholars have only focused on organizational image as it is perceived by external audiences. However, organizational image as perceived by members within an organization is critical for determining its impact on individual employees’ motivation, work behaviors, and further performance at work. This article explores the roles of organizational image and identification in explaining organizational behaviors—extra‐role behavior and absenteeism—in public and nonprofit organizations. A series of seemingly unrelated regressions were used to analyze survey data from 1,220 respondents. Results show that organizational image is positively related to employee identification, and identification has a significant influence on promoting extra‐role behavior and lowering employee absenteeism.
Organizational image as perceived by members of an organization is an aggregate of individual employees’ perceptions of the organization based on their own experiences and judgments (perceived organizational identity) and outsiders’ judgments about the organization (construed external image).
Both perceived organizational identity and construed external image influence the extent to which employees are likely to identify themselves as part of their organization.
The higher an employee's level of identification, the more he or she is likely to engage in extra‐role behavior.
Managing organizational image and identification in a positive way can significantly reduce costly voluntary employee absences, which are reasonably avoidable absences.
The determinants and consequences of contracting are examined in more than 1,000 Texas school districts for 1997–2008. The results largely replicate prior research by O'Toole and Meier, showing that contracting is negatively related to spending on school districts’ core instructional functions and that the relationship between contracting and bureaucracy is reciprocal. The present findings, based on data from a longer period, indicate that contracting is positively related to school district performance. This article also finds support for an extended model of contracting determinants involving two environmental shocks: negative budget shocks and enrollment shocks.
Appraisals of public employees are important for a host of reasons, and particularly so with the increasing emphasis on pay-for-performance systems and performance-based management in the public sector. However, managerial appraisals of employees can be somewhat subjective and our understanding of the appraisal process in the public sector is largely U.S.-centric. In this study, we explore whether characteristics of managers, like a rater's public service motivation (PSM), affect appraisal outcomes for their subordinates. Using a mixed experimental design, we analyze these dynamics in a non-U.S. context with MBA and MPA students enrolled in one of Korea's top universities. We find that rater PSM moderates the influence of both task and non-task behavior on an employee's performance appraisal.
This article examines how gender influences top managers’ networking activities and what situational factors intensify or ameliorate such gender effects. Focusing on female top managers’ efforts to engage in external networking activities, the authors conceptualize how and why female managers might develop different networking patterns and how such relationships could be redirected by several contingent factors specific to the context of U.S. local school districts. Using three sets of surveys on managerial behavior and management styles supplemented with six years of information related to organizational contexts, the authors find that, in general, gender differences lead to corresponding differences in the extent of involvement in managerial networking. Such effects are moderated by situational factors that impede or facilitate the number of available strategic managerial choices that allow managers to cope with them. The findings emphasize the need to consider the strengths and weaknesses of gender conjointly in assessing networking behaviors.
This article examines how a dynamic view of managerial networking contributes to the cumulative knowledge of the study of managerial networking in the public sector. The current study contributes to our understanding of the relative influences of past and current networking relationships on current program performance by (1) exploring the nonlinear effects of relative levels of networking on performance and (2) investigating how relative networking influences may interact with organizational conditions characterized by different aspects of institutional and task environments. Employing a panel data set of U.S. local school districts from 1999 to 2015, the research finds that organizational performance improves at an increasing rate as the relative level of managerial networking increases and that the advantages of relative networking are leveraged more effectively when the organization meets its institutional requirements and when the environment is less complex, highly munificent, and highly turbulent.
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