Encouraging civil servants to be frank and fearless: Merit recruitment and employee voice

Abstract

Recruiting civil servants on the basis of merit is believed to improve the quality of governance because it increases the bureaucracy's expertise, leads bureaucrats to develop distinct preferences and encourages them to candidly voice their opinions to others. Yet, to date, the reason why merit recruitment positively affects employee voice remains theoretically vague and has received little empirical scrutiny. This article advances this research by theoretically specifying why merit recruitment positively affects employee voice, and by empirically testing this association with survey data measuring the perceptions of federal civil servants in Canada. Controlling for several additional factors believed to influence employee voice, the results from various multivariate regression models show a robust and statistically significant association between merit recruitment and fear to voice a dissenting opinion. The more civil servants believe that merit recruitment is high, the less they fear reprisal for expressing a dissenting opinion to their superiors.

Privation of Inclusion: An Exploration of the Stealth and the Strategy that Sabotaged Racialized Public Servants’ Career Mobility in British Columbia, Canada

“…Another reason that providing a depth-focused picture of workplace racism is significant is that major institutions such as government ministries and other publicly funded employers are influential with respect to modeling equity hiring (Anand & Sossin, 2018; Cooper, 2018). In fact, these institutions are not only places of employment but they also function and serve as powerful examples of social infra(structures) that “by their nature operate to support the functioning of the society as a whole” (Better, 2008, p. 113).…”

Enacting Accountability Under Populist Pressures: Theorizing the Relationship Between Anti-Elite Rhetoric and Public Accountability

“…This paints a gloomy picture of the practical capacity of bureaucratic agents to protect values of pluralism and expertise in government. This article instead anticipates the installation of populist political allies (and the demotion of critics) which will impinge upon the behavior of individual bureaucrats, encouraging them to be more subservient to their superiors or less confident in voicing dissent to senior colleagues and ministers (see Cooper, 2018). Faced with such a challenge to established working practices, it is also anticipated that the installation of populist political allies will-in time-encourage bureaucratic exits; as extant scholarship has already demonstrated the link between politicization and retention (Cooper, 2018) and the relationship between political instability and bureaucratic turnover (Rattus & Randma-Liiv, 2018).…”

Parliamentary scrutiny of executive patronage: The relationship between institutional norms, reputation and accountability

“…However, despite such benefits, politicized appointments jeopardize the credibility gains associated with agency independence (Ennser‐Jedenastik ) and risk politicizing the hitherto ‘unimpeachably professional and neutral’ (Mulgan , p. 7). More broadly, politicized appointments risk several spillover effects, as a proliferation of underqualified appointees may reduce careerists’ incentives to acquire relevant experience, and make it difficult for agencies to recruit and retain personnel (Mulgan ; Lewis ; Cooper ).…”