Review of Public Personnel Administration

A systematic literature review of performance appraisal in a selection of public administration journals revealed a lack of investigations on the cognitive biases that affect raters’ evaluation of ratees’ performance. To address this gap, we conducted two artefactual field experiments on a sample of 600 public sector managers and employees. Results show that anchoring and halo effects systematically biased performance ratings. For the former, average scores were higher when subjects were exposed to a high rather than a low anchor. For the latter, higher ability on one performance dimension led participants to provide a higher average score on another performance dimension. Halo effect was moderated by rater’s gender. We conclude by discussing the study limitations and providing suggestions for future work in this area.

How does a body of scholarship emerge, develop, and evolve? Research is the product of a community of scholars and their collaboration over time builds and disseminates knowledge. One way to examine a scholarly community and scholarship evolution is to consider patterns of collaboration through coauthorship networks. This article conducts a social network analysis of coauthorship between public service motivation (PSM) scholars from 1990 to 2016. This analysis depicts the social structure of the field as it evolved and offers implications both for its theoretical progress and for individual scholars. In general, we find that the PSM coauthorship network has grown increasingly since 1990 but it is not a cohesive network of scholars. It consists of many disconnected subgroups that actually represent opportunities for individual scholars to build social capital and influence. We conclude with implications of our findings and we offer suggestions for further analysis.

In this article, we investigate characteristics associated with highly cited journal articles in Public Administration, especially the extent to which high impact contributions are theoretical. Using citations as a measure of scholarly influence, we used a mixed qualitative and bibliometric approach to understand the factors associated with the most highly cited articles in Public Administration in the last 20 years. Specifically, we assessed the extent to which each article was theoretical or empirical in nature, the role of the journal in which each article was published, and the extent to which the article’s impact spanned disciplines. Results indicate that theoretical development, the journal in which an article is published, and strategic placement with regard to the intended audience matter for scholarly impact. We also identify that theoretical versus empirical approach of subdisciplines is aligned with the maturity of that subdiscipline, consistent with Kuhn’s ideas of scientific evolution.

Research on public service motivation (PSM) has paid attention to the concept of fit to identify underlying mechanisms of the relationship between PSM and beneficial outcomes such as higher job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Nonetheless, there have been rare studies aimed at theoretically comparing PSM with the person–environment (P–E) fit. In this article, PSM is reviewed from the perspective of P–E fit, not only because PSM and P–E fit share some theoretical perspectives, such as job attraction, employee rewards, and individual performance, but also because incorporating the concept of PSM into the fit framework may allow us to better understand PSM and enhance its theoretical development. This article concludes that PSM has a complementary relationship with P–E fit as the two provide more concrete and valid explanations for job applications, outcomes, and rewards when they are incorporated.