During the past three decades, the performance of public organizations has become more and more of an issue. However, academic research on public administration pays relatively little attention to how organizational performance is related to work environment and human resources within organizations. In this research, work environment characteristics, job satisfaction, and customer satisfaction are studied by comparing customer satisfaction data with data on the well-being of front-office employees in 35 Dutch municipalities. The authors test their hypotheses using structural equation modeling. Contrary to what was expected, the findings indicate that the effect of job satisfaction on customer satisfaction is twofold. In organizations in which employees are more satisfied with their jobs, customers are more satisfied with the empathy of the employees, but the waiting times for services tend to increase concomitantly. In addition, findings indicate that the work environment characteristics influence job satisfaction. These results have some implications for human resource management (HRM).
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