Are public servants self-interested, or motivated by a sense of duty and commitment far above what we would expect given their often modest compensation and frequent public criticism? This book looks at research on this and related questions in assessing the current state of our scientific knowledge.

The Palgrave Handbook of the Public Servant examines what it means to be a public servant in today’s world(s) where globalisation and neoliberalism have proliferated the number of actors who contribute to the public purpose sector and created new spaces that public servants now operate in. It considers how different scholarly approaches can contribute to a better understanding of the identities, motivations, values, roles, skills, positions and futures for the public servant, and how scholarly knowledge can be informed by and translated into value for practice. The book combines academic contributions with those from practitioners so that key lessons may be synthesised and translated into the context of the public servant.

"During the last three decades, social and behavioral scientists have intensively studied the motivating power of public service. The research focuses on varied concepts-public service motivation, altruism, and prosocial motivation and behavior. This research has produced a critical mass of new knowledge for transforming the motivation of public employees, civil service policies and management practices. The book is the first to look systematically across the different streams of other-oriented motivation research. It is also the first to synthesize research across applied questions that public organizations and their leaders confront, including: recruiting and selecting staff who will ethically and competently pursue public service; designing public work to leverage its meaningfulness; creating work environments that support intrinsically-motivated, prosocial behavior; compensating and rewarding employees to energize and sustain public service; socializing employees for public service missions and values; and leading employees for causes great than themselves"--

Public services touch the majority of people in advanced and developing economies on a daily basis: children require schooling, the elderly need personal care and assistance, rubbish needs collecting, water must be safe to drink and the streets need policing. In short, there is practically no area of our lives that isn't touched in some way by public services. As such, knowledge about strategies to improve their performance is central to the good of society. In this book, a group of leading scholars examine some of the most pressing issues in public administration, political science and public policy by undertaking a systematic review of the research literature on public management and the performance of public agencies. It is an important resource for public management researchers, policy-makers and practitioners who wish to understand the current state of the field and the challenges that lie ahead.

"Uses a detailed empirical examination of policies in health services, education, social security and taxation to illustrate how policies can be designed to give the proper balance of motivation and agency." - cover.

Confronted with rising citizen discontent, the Reinventing Government movement, and new technological challenges, public organizations everywhere are seeking means of improving their performance. Their quest is not new, rather, the concern with improving the performance of government organizations has existed since the Scientific Management Movement. Public Sector Performance brings together in a single volume the classic, enduring principles and processes that have defined the field of public sector performance, as written in the words of leading practitioners and scholars. Taken as a whole, this volume provides a performance compass for today's public managers, helping them to reconstruct the public's confidence in, and support of, government.Defined here as managing public organizations for outcomes, performance is examined in all its varied dimensions: organizing work, managing workers, measuring performance, and overcoming resistance to performance-enhancing innovations. The selected articles are interesting, thought provoking, and instructive. They are classics in that they have been widely cited in the scholarly literature and have enduring value to public managers who seek to understand the many dimensions of performance. The book is organized into three sections: Performance Foundations, Performance Strategies, and Performance Measurement. Excerpts from additional selected articles feature special topics and wisdom from performance experts.

Many countries are still struggling to adapt to the broad and unexpected effects of modernization initiatives. As changes take shape, governments are challenged to explore new reforms. The public sector is now characterized by profound transformation across the globe, with ramifications that are yet to be interpreted. To convert this transformation into an ongoing state of improvement, policymakers and civil service leaders must learn to implement and evaluate change. This book is an important contribution to that end. Reforming the Public Sector presents comparative perspectives of government reform and innovation, discussing three decades of reform in public sector strategic management across nations. The contributors examine specific reform-related issues including the uses and abuses of public sector transparency, the "Audit Explosion," and the relationship between public service motivation and job satisfaction in Europe. This volume will greatly aid practitioners and policymakers to better understand the principles underpinning ongoing reforms in the public sector. Giovanni Tria, Giovanni Valotti, and their cohorts offer a scientific understanding of the main issues at stake in this arduous process. They place the approach to public administration reform in a broad international context and identify a road map for public management. Contributors include: Michael Barzelay, Nicola Bellé, Andrea Bonomi Savignon, Geert Bouckaert, Luca Brusati, Paola Cantarelli, Denita Cepiku, Francesco Cerase, Luigi Corvo, Maria Cucciniello, Isabell Egger-Peitler, Paolo Fedele, Gerhard Hammerschmid, Mario Ianniello, Elaine Ciulla Kamarck, Irvine Lapsley, Peter Leisink, Mariannunziata Liguori, Renate Meyer, Greta Nasi, James L. Perry, Christopher Pollitt, Adrian Ritz, Raffaella Saporito, MariaFrancesca Sicilia, Ileana Steccolini, Bram Steijn, Wouter Vandenabeele, and Montgomery Van Wart.

Leadership pervades every aspect of organizational and social life, and its study has never been more diverse, nor more fertile. With contributions from those who have defined that territory, this volume is not only a key point of reference for researchers, students and practitioners, but also an agenda-setting prospective and retrospective look at the state of leadership in the twenty-first century. It evaluates the domain and stretches it further by considering leadership scholarship from every angle, concluding with an optimistic look at the future of leaders, followers and their place in organizations and society at large. Each section represents a distinctive slant on leadership: - Macro perspectives - including strategic leadership, organization theory, charismatic leadership, complexity leadership, and networks. - Political and philosophical perspectives - including distributed leadership, critical leadership, ethics, the military and cults. - Psychological perspectives - including personality, leadership style and contingency theories, transformational leadership, exchange relationships, shared leadership, cognition, leadership development, gender, trust, identity and the ′dark side′ of leadership. - Cultural perspectives - including spirituality, aesthetics, and creativity. - Contemporary and emergent perspectives - followership, historical methods, virtual leadership, emotions, image, celebrity, and the quest for a general theory of leadership

Those who study value conflicts have resisted rational choice approaches in the social sciences, contending that political conflict over cultural values is best explained by group loyalties, symbolic motives, and other "nonrational" factors. However, Chong shows that a single model can explain how people make decisions across both social and economic realms. He argues that our preferences result from a combination of psychological dispositions, which are shaped by social influences and developed over the life span. Chong's book yields insights about the circumstances under which preferences, beliefs, values, norms and group identifications are formed. It offers a provocative explanation of how ingrained social norms and values can change over time despite the forces maintaining the status quo. "Going beyond the tired polemics on both sides, [Chong] constructs a new interpretation of human behavior in which culture and individual rationality both matter. The synthesis is a more comprehensive and powerful explanatory framework than either side could have produced, and Chong's creativity should influence subsequent interpretations of our social life in fundamental ways."—Christopher H. Achen, University of Michigan

With over three decades of experience in public sector HR, Bob Lavigna gives managers the tools they need to leverage the talents of government's most important resource: its people. You know firsthand that your government workers are not underworked, overpaid, or mindless clones just carrying out the morally compromised work that politicians forced through the pipeline. Besides having to daily overcome the persona of being a government employee, your hard-working employees face enormous pressures and challenges every day and are asked to solve some of our country’s toughest problems, including unemployment, security, poverty, and education. To be able to return to their desks daily with the passion and commitment required to accomplish these overwhelming duties will require a manager who knows how to leverage talent, improve performance, and inspire passion within these true servants. In Engaging Government Employees, you will learn: Why a highly engaged staff is 20 percent more productive How to get employees to deliver “discretionary effort” How to assess the level of engagement Why free pizza and Coke every Friday is not a viable strategy Engaging Government Employees rejects the typical one-size-fits-all approach to motivation. Drawing on a wealth of empirical evidence, this indispensable resource shows how America’s largest employer can apply the science of engagement to get team members passionate about the agency’s mission and committed to its success.