Experience, Emotion, and Exhaustion: How Unionization Influences Emotional Labor

While HRM scholars have built a rich body of knowledge regarding emotional labor (EL), we know comparatively less about the social origins of EL components and individual outcomes in government work contexts. To address this gap, we employ conservation of resources theory to examine how one prominent social institution within government organizations, labor unions, influence the process through which EL shapes one individual-level outcome, emotional exhaustion. We also draw from the process model of EL developed by Brotheridge and Lee to evaluate one specific countervailing resource, person-job fit. Results obtained using data from the 2016 U.S. Merit Principles Survey suggest that unionization indirectly increases emotional exhaustion via increases in the perceived need for false face acting. While unionization does not have a direct relationship with person-job fit, perceived increases in the need for false face acting contributes to emotional exhaustion by reducing person-job fit.

Explaining High Performance Among Indian Administrative Service (IAS) Officers: A Job Demands-Resources Perspective

Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers are careerist senior civil servants (SCS) in the world’s largest democracy, holding senior roles of policymaking and implementation. Therefore, identifying exceptionally performing SCS to unravel their “job demands” along with “personal resources” should help with understanding how best to manage these critical human resources. Employing a qualitative approach, we interviewed 11 high performing IAS officers identified through a unique career progression index. Our data analysis revealed that the IAS suffers from the following job demands: difficulty in coordination with other departments and stakeholders, financial inadequacy, and dishonest subordinates or coworkers. This study also found that self-directed learning, personal reputation, empathy, and service orientation are essential personal resources for high-performing SCS. While expanding the list of job demands and personal resources in the public administration context, our research provides a deeper insight into the challenges confronting careerist SCS in lower-middle income developing countries.

I’m Only Human: A New E-road to Advancing Social Equity Through a Humanist Approach to Mentoring in Public Service

This research reviews how mentoring has manifested in public service and how it can evolve to be better positioned to address key diversity, equity, and inclusion objectives. This work inventories the current understanding of public sector mentoring, highlighting the contrast between the classical mentoring approach of functionalism with the emerging humanist approach. Barriers to implementing meaningful humanist mentoring are reviewed, and e-mentoring is presented as a modality well situated to overcome these obstacles. The humanist e-mentoring model provides a process and modality to advance social equity by removing existing barriers to opportunities. Finally, best practices and outcomes for successfully implementing e-mentoring humanist and relationships in public service are presented and an updated model of critical outcomes is advanced. A brief agenda for future scholarship on this topic is presented.

Managerial Challenges of Emotional Labor Disruption: The COVID-19 Crisis in Mexico

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the knowledge of managing emotional labor during a crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a disrupting event, particularly affecting frontline healthcare workers and their supervisors who faced pressures to manage emotions during their interactions with patients. Emotional labor has been studied in emergencies; however, the case of Mexico offers insights into an understudied context and a long and singular crisis. Drawing from multi-level storytelling interviews with medical managers, physicians, and nurses in hospitals in different states of Mexico, this article argues that COVID-19 blurred relationships between performance and outcomes of emotional labor. As the organizational goal focused mainly on saving lives, some workers intensified and performed emotional labor innovatively, but others deviated from feeling rules. Managers’ role became crucial for employees to abide by affective requirements facing disruption.

Comparing Employer Attractiveness of Public Sector Organizations to Nonprofit and Private Sector Organizations: An Experimental Study in Germany and the U.S.

Sector preferences in job choice have rarely been tested empirically across different administrative systems. We address this gap and apply a between-subject experimental design to examine the attractiveness of public, private, and nonprofit employers in two countries in different administrative traditions. Respondents ( n = 362) from an Anglo-Saxon (i.e., the U.S.) and continental European country (i.e., Germany) were exposed to job advertisements that only differed in the employer’s sector affiliation, with other job attributes, such as payment and working hours, held constant. Contrary to expectations, and consistently across the two country samples, respondents evaluated public sector jobs more positively compared to vacancies in the private sector. In contrast, we found no such comparative advantage of public over nonprofit employers. By providing counterevidence to the prevalence of negative attitudes toward public organizations, our study warns against overgeneralizing previous findings on negativity biases to the context of employer attractiveness.

“I Expected More From You”: The Effect of Expectation-Disconfirmation on Employees’ Satisfaction With Supervisory Support

Are employees less satisfied with supervisor support when their expectations are disconfirmed? In this study, we examine this question for both predictive expectations (what will happen) and normative expectations (what should happen). Results from two preregistered experiments suggest that expectation-disconfirmation does not affect satisfaction with supervisor support. Instead, we find that expectation-disconfirmation as perceived by participants affects satisfaction with supervisor support. We conclude that even though supervisor support seems to be the most important predictor of satisfaction, perceived disconfirmation of expectations also influences employees’ satisfaction with supervisor support.

Moving On Up? Effects of Leadership Training and Intersectoral Mobility on Women’s Advancement in Danish Public Administration Management

Women’s underrepresentation in middle and upper management is a well-documented feature of the public sector that threatens performance and legitimacy. Yet, we know far less about the factors most likely to reduce these gender inequalities. In this article, we focus on two well-understood drivers of career advancement in public administration: leadership training and intersectoral mobility. In theory, training in leadership and experience across government levels and policy areas should help both women and men to climb management ranks. We use logistic regression to test this proposition using a representative sample of 1,819 Danish public managers. We find that leadership training disproportionately benefits women, and this helps to level the playing field. However, our analyses show that differences in intersectoral mobility do not explain the gender gap in public sector management.

Well-Being of Public Servants Under Pressure: The Roles of Job Demands and Personality Traits in the Health-Impairment Process

The health-impairment process from job demands to lower well-being among public servants is still understudied. This article therefore uses the Job Demands-Resources model and answers the following question: What is the relationship between sector-specific job demands and public servants’ work-related well-being, and which of the Big Five personality traits ensure that either the hindering effect of these demands is lowered or the challenging effect enlarged? Four public sector specific demands are studied including organizational restructurings, technological innovations, aggression from citizens, and integrity pressure. The analysis of two representative subsamples of the Dutch public sector show that all job demands negatively relate to well-being. Organizational restructurings is the strongest hindering job demand, while technological innovations is the least hindering demand. Moreover, some personality traits turned out to be demands instead of resources, opening new doors for future research in the health-impairment process of public servants.

The Performance of Performance Appraisal Systems: A Theoretical Framework for Public Organizations

Performance appraisal (PA) plays a strategic role in public sector human resource management (HRM), acting as a driver for better performance. Drawing from previous theoretical research on the social context of performance appraisal systems and their effectiveness, the study develops a generalizable theoretical framework for classifying performance appraisal systems according to their structural and process proximal variables: purpose, rating source, and structured face-to-face feedback sessions. Through a multiple case study analysis, the theoretical framework has been applied to a sample of Italian PA systems for senior civil servants, aiming to explore the relationship between the structural and process proximal variables of PA systems and rating discriminability, intended as a measurement of performance effectiveness. The results show that the framework accurately represents the variation of the design of performance appraisal systems in the Italian context, highlighting the central role played by multi-source feedback and face-to-face rater-ratee interactions in promoting rating discriminability.