Reward Preferences among Public and Private Managers: In Search of the Service Ethic

1 B. Buchanan , "Red Tape and the Service Ethic," Administration and Society 6 (February 1975): 423-444.

2 W. Lasko , "Executive Accountability: Will SES Make a Difference?" The Bureaucrat 9 (Fall 1980): 6.

B. Buchanan and J. Millstone , "Public Organizations: A Value-Conflict View," International Journal of Public Administration 1 (1979): 261-305.

mention a study of high-level officials entering public service. Most took salary cuts to do so, said compensation was not an important influence on the decision, and said that the main factors were challenge and desire to perform public service. Also relevant is material on "purposive" incentives, in P. Clark and J. Wilson , "Incentive Systems: A Theory of Organizations," Administrative Science Quarterly 6 (1961): 129-166.

J. Schuster , "Management Compensation Policy and the Public Interest," Public Personnel Management 3 (November/December 1974): 510-523.

⁶ Buchanan, op. cit. Buchanan used the Lodahl-Kejner Job Involvement Scale. It asks respondents to rate how strongly they agree or disagree with these statements: The major satisfaction in my life comes from my job. The most important things that happen to me involve my work. I'm really a perfectionist about my work. I live, eat, and breathe my job. I am very much involved personally in my work. Most things in life are more important than work (reversed item). The response choices are strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree. For the six items with these 4 point scales, then, the maximum "score" would be 24.

7 On difficulties in measuring reward preferences, see T. Connolly , "Some Conceptual and Methodological Issues in Expectancy Models of Work Performance Motivation," Academy of Management Review 1 (January 1978): 37-47.

R. House and G. Dessler , "The Path-Goal Theory of Leadership: Some Post Hoc and a. Priori Tests," in J. Hunt and L. Larsen (eds.). Contingency Approaches to Leadership (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974), pp. 29-55.

⁹ The items were worded exactly as on the table. Instructions told the respondent to rate the importance of each item as a reward for his or her work, regardless of whether the reward was actually provided by the work at present. Respondents rated the rewards from 1, "extremely unimportant" to 7, "extremely important."

10 D. Hall , B. Schneider , and H. Nygren , "Personal Factors in Organizational Identification," Administrative Science Quarterly 15 (March 1970): 176-190.

11 B. Mitnick , "Incentive Systems in Environmental Regulation," Policy Studies Journal 9 (December 1980): 379-394.

Scale used by permission of Professor Smith. The JDI has five separate subscales, for Pay, Promotion, Work, Coworkers, and Supervision. The respondent indicates with a "yes" or "no" whether or not each of a set of descriptors—some of which are desirable, some undesirable—applied to his or her job. For example, items on the Coworkers subscale included "stimulating," "ambitious," "lazy," and others. The Promotion subscale includes "good chance for promotion," "unfair promotion policy," and others. The Work subscale includes "fascinating," "routine," "boring," and others. Three points are added to a respondent's score for each "yes" response to a desirable descriptor, and for each response of "no" to an undesirable one. There are 18 items on the Work, Coworkers, and Supervision scales, so the score on those subscales can range from 0 to 54. There are 9 items on the Pay and Promotion subscales, so the scores can range from 0 to 27. The JDI is so widely used that it is described in a number of research methods books, such as James L. Price , Handbook of Organizational Measurement (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1972).

13 G. Wamsley and M. Zald , The Political Economy of Public Organizations (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1973).

14 Examples of divisions represented: for the manufacturing firms—manufacturing, marketing and sales, personnel, finance and accounting, and others; for the transportation department—design, administrative affairs, operations, construction, finance, and others. In addition to this, some of the control variables are relevant to task characteristics. An effort was also made to compare similar job categories, such as personnel and finance. Most of the positions in the private sector, however, are hard to equate with position titles in the public sector. Within the comparable categories such as personnel, the differences were the same as the general differences reported below. Note that A. Lau , A. Newman , and L. Broedline , in "The Nature of Managerial Work in the Public Sector," Public Administration Review 40 (September/October 1980): 513-520, conclude that managerial tasks in public and private organizations are very similar in complexity and job characteristics.

15 Parametric statistics are reported because the results are the same with nonparametric statistics and no precise inferences or point estimates are attempted. Inference tests with nonrandom samples are mainly heuristic guides to the largest differences. See D. Campbell and H. L. Ross , "The Connecticut Crackdown on Speeding," Law and Society Review 3 (August 1968): 46n.

¹⁶ See Lau, et al., op. cit.

17 N. Demerath , G. Marwell , and M. Aiken , Dynamics of Idealism (San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass, 1971).

For a typology of conceptions of agent roles, and hence of service roles, see several references on Mitnick's work on a theory of agency in B. Mitnick , The Political Economy of Regulation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).

¹⁹ G. Chemiss, loc. cit.; B. Buchanan, op. cit.; Downs, op. cit., pp. 99 and 111; on civil rights workers shifting priorities in response to frustration, see Demerath, et al., op. cit., pp. 135ff.

quoted in M. Larson , The Rise of Professionalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 59.

21 C. Newland , Professional Public Executives (Washington, D.C.: American Society for Public Administration, 1980), p. 27.

J. Rohr , "Ethics for the Senior Executive Service," Administration and Society 12 (August 1980): 203-216.

²³ D. Hall, et al., op. cit.

A. Kidron , "Work Values and Organizational Commitment," Academy of Management Journal 21 (June 1978): 239-247.

E. Staub , Positive Social Behavior and Morality, Volumes 1 and 2 (New York: Academic Press, 1979).

²⁶ Demerath, et al., op. cit.

27 J. Fendrich , "Keeping the Faith or Pursuing the Good Life: A Study of the Consequences of Participation in the Civil Rights Movement," American Sociological Review 42 (February 1977): 144-157.

28 U.S. Office of Personnel Management , Federal Employee Attitudes (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979).

29 Delta: The World's Most Profitable Airline," Business Week, Aug. 31, 1981, 71.

30 J. Tannenbaum , "Paid Public Service Leaves Buoy Workers, But Return to Old Jobs Can Be Wrenching," Wall Street Journal, May 6, 1981.

³¹ U.S. Office of Personnel Management, op. cit.