How Creating Semiautonomous Agencies Affects Staff Satisfaction

Abstract

Structural reforms such as the creation of autonomous agencies are a widely heralded solution for a multitude of problems in the public sector. These reforms have effects on public employees. This article shows how the structural disaggregation of ministries into autonomous agencies affects staff satisfaction with the organization. The article discusses three cases, where Dutch public organizations were either disaggregated from a ministry or reaggregated to the ministry. These structural reforms constitute a quasiexperimental setting where effects on agency staff and parent ministry staff are compared. In one case, creating the agency led to a decrease in staff satisfaction with the organization as compared to the staff that remained within the ministry. A second case showed that these negative effects linger and can last for more than eight years. An inverse organizational change-reaggregation-caused inverse effects: increasing satisfaction with the organization.

Linking Job Satisfaction to Employee Performance: The Moderating Role of Islamic Work Ethics

“…Employees in public sector organizations feel less satisfied than the corporate sector, which also becomes the cause of low performance (Khan et al, 2021). It has been observed in the earlier studies that job satisfaction (JS) has become an interesting research topic, especially in the context of public sector organizations (DeHart-Davis, Davis, & Mohr, 2015;Overman, 2020). Employees are the main capital of every organization, and especially in public sector organizations, management wants higher performance from their workforce by increasing satisfaction (Khan et al, 2021).…”