Conference Agenda

Public organizations must ensure public value via delivering public services (Leisink et al., 2021). Public service delivery becomes, however, more complex. Efficiently delivering high quality services must be combined with the incorporation of different contextual demands following from a multiplicity of stakeholders, diverging public values and competing government paradigms (Franken & Plimmer, 2019; Parikh & Bhatnagar, 2018; Røhnebæk & Breit, 2021). Dealing with diverging demands and guaranteeing public service performance is very often a leadership task (Kravariti et al., 2023; Priyanka et al., 2022; Vangen et al., 2015). The attempts of managers in trying to resolve complex demands, could potentially lead to experiencing tensions (Miron-Spektor et al., 2018). Miron-Spektor et al. (2018) argue, however, that the paradoxical mindset of a manager, the frame by which they interpret tensions as an opportunity or a hick-up, influences the relationship between experiencing tensions and performance. Furthermore, paradox theory argues that the way people work together in teams is important as well (Smith & Tushman, 2005). Namely, when working in teams, competing perspectives can be integrated, leading to a collective understanding of often competing demands, and acknowledgment of the tensions that arise (Smith & Tushman, 2005).

To expand our knowledge, this paper focuses on the following research question: ‘To what extent does experiencing tensions by managers relates to performance and how does a paradox mindset and team orientation influence this relationship?’. To answer this question, we implement an empirical-analytical approach and collected data (n = 157) via a survey based on validated Likert Scales among managers (top managers, middle managers, operational managers and functional managers) working for a Dutch executive agency of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management. Our analysis shows no significant results for the moderations but does show relevant direct effects. First, when managers experience tensions, it leads to lower task performance and more contraproductive performance. Second, having a paradox mindset leads to higher task and innovative performance. Third, team orientation has diversified effects on different aspects of performance. Hereby this paper contributes to the debate on how public organizations and especially their managers experience tensions within a context of complexity and what the impact is on performance (Hamblin et al., 2024). Second, our focus on paradoxical mindset and team orientation helps to enhance our understanding about how managers deal with complexity and can deliver effective public performance (Kravariti et al., 2023; Ngo et al., 2024).

Public leadership involves setting direction and creating value for citizens and society (Backhaus & Vogel, 2022). Accordingly, central challenges to the exercise of leadership concern (1) whether employees share the values of the leader and organization, and (2) whether employees accept the authority of public managers. Values are tied to the concept of public values (Jørgensen & Bozeman, 2007), but they can conflict when stakeholders such as politicians, managers, employees, and citizens prioritize values differently. Value congruence happens when personal values align with the values of the environment and is tied to outcomes such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and employees' intentions to leave (Kristof-Brown et al., 2005; Wright & Pandey, 2008). Building on Simon’s notion of a ‘zone of acceptance’, employee acceptance of management authority can similarly be critical to the successful impact of leadership (Simon 1997; Nielsen & Jacobsen, 2018).

In this study, we examine how organizational development in the form of training in goal-oriented leadership and distributed leadership affect public employees’ value congruence and acceptance of management authority. Prior research suggests that, under some conditions, value congruence can be increased through goal-oriented leadership, such as transformational leadership (Jensen, 2018). Goal-oriented leadership is relatively leader-centric type of leadership that emphasizes the role of formal managers. Accordingly, we expect that goal-oriented leadership training will also increase employee acceptance of management authority.

It is increasingly acknowledged that leadership goes beyond formal managers and that employees can play decisive roles in public leadership (Ospina, 2017). Through distributed leadership, managers can share leadership with employees and improve overall decision-making, innovation, and performance in public organizations (Jakobsen et al., 2023). However, there is a lacking understanding of how distributed leadership affects value congruence and acceptance of management authority. We hypothesize that whereas distributed leadership can increase value congruence through employee involvement and understanding, as well as integrating the employees’ own values in leadership, distributed leadership may simultaneously reduce employee acceptance of management authority, as employees come to expect greater influence on organizational decisions.

This study uses a field experiment to test how both goal-oriented and distributed employee-focused organizational development training affect value congruence and management acceptance compared with a control intervention (not directed towards leadership but towards motivation). We use panel survey data from 128 randomly assigned units and managers and 2,500 employees. We additionally examine whether initial levels of management acceptance moderate treatment effects on value congruence, and vice versa.

The public sector, facing critical labor shortages (OECD, 2024; The Washington Post, 2024) and escalating public service demands (Fernandez-i-Marín et al., 2023), urgently requires guidance on how to shape effective recruitment and selection strategies. While candidate attraction receives significant attention from academic literature, the core selection mechanisms remain surprisingly under-researched (Jacobsen et al., 2024). This gap manifests in two key areas. First, the limited literature on public sector selection inadequately addresses how recruiters process candidate signals, a core element of "environment processing" theories in recruitment (Keppeler & Papenfuß, 2022). Second, existing studies primarily focus on HR managers, overlooking the crucial perspectives of line managers (Bromber & Charbonneau, 2020). However, understanding the implicit preferences driving managerial selection decision making is crucial for ensuring transparency in the selection process and for fostering an effective dyadic relationship between the leader and the new recruit, both key priorities for public HRM.

To address this, we apply Implicit Followership Theories (IFTs), which examine individuals' inherent assumptions about follower traits and behaviors (Sy, 2010, p. 74). This lens, grounded in implicit categorization, explains how leaders may base decisions on pre-existing ideal (“how followers should be”) or central tendency (“how followers are”) follower prototypes (Schyns & Meindl, 2005). Given that these prototypes are socially constructed and context-dependent (Junker & van Dick, 2014), we define an ideal follower within the public sector context. We examine how candidate signals related to: (i) personality (Big 5: openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness); (ii) psychological needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness); and (iii) motivation (extrinsic, intrinsic, prosocial) influence manager decision making in selection procedures. Using a discrete choice experiment (DCE) with 395 Italian social security managers, we found that managers give priority to type of motivation (pro-social), followed by psychological needs (relatedness) and ultimately by personality traits (openness).

This study contributes both to the theoretical and practical discourse within public HRM. Theoretically, it advances our understanding of public sector selection through an environmental processing theoretical lens, specifically examining implicit managerial decision-making. Additionally, to our knowledge, this study is the first to apply the theoretical lens of IFTs, traditionally rooted in private sector HRM, to the public sector, showing how its peculiar institutional context affects managers' implicit preferences.

Practically, this research provides public employers and policymakers with actionable insights for optimizing selection processes by highlighting the candidate characteristics most valued by public managers.

In an era of intensified competition to attract and retain workers, employer branding has emerged as a strategic priority for public sector organizations. This article explores how the Canadian federal public service has shaped its employer image over time through official discourse. Drawing on 33 years of annual reports from the Clerk of the Privy Council (1992-2024), we examine how job demands and job resources are represented in institutional narratives. To do so, we develop and fine-tune a multi-label BERT-based classifier capable of detecting twelve psychosocial dimensions derived from the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model. Trained on over 30,000 annotated sentences from peer-reviewed academic literature, our classifier is applied at the sentence level to the whole corpus of Clerk’s reports, enabling a granular, diachronic mapping of the discourse on working conditions in Canada's federal public administration. The results reveal both a predominance of job resources over demands and temporal variations linked to major reforms and crises. Beyond contributing to the literature on public employer branding, our study demonstrates the potential of deep learning models for theory-driven content analysis in public management research.

Both more mature (Vandenabeele, 2007) and recent (Micacchi & Ritz, 2024, Ripoll & Breaugh, 2025) endeavors have suggested that PSM may be more accurately conceptualized as a social identity rather than a motivational construct. This reconceptualization opens promising pathways for examining the elements that comprise this social identity, or, as framed in identity theory (McConnell et al., 2012), the attributes rooted in an individual’s affiliation with the informal social group that shares a public service identity (PSI).

Moreover, according to more recent strands in identity theory such as identity work (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002) and identity-based motivation theory (Oyserman et al., 2017), this conceptual reshaping paves the way for a novel (more dynamic) understanding of the role of context in PSM theory. These perspectives suggest that the context is not only influencing the activation or salience of the PSI (former PSM), but rather that environmental stimuli actively mold the meanings associated to this identity, i.e. what possessing PSI implies in terms of individual behaviour. Therefore, being PSI socially construed across different institutional contexts, its meanings might diverge from those traditionally associated with PSM, categorized as rational, normative, and affective (Perry, 1996). Based on these premises, we pose two intertwined research questions: (i) What attributes characterize PSI across various institutional (organizational) contexts? and (ii) how do they relate to traditional PSM’s motives?

To explore that, we employ a multiple case study design, examining PSI content variation across varied institutional settings, using a diverse case study selection (Seawright & Gerring, 2008) and leveraging an exploratory Y-centered approach (Gerring, 2006). Organizations serve as cases, with individuals as the units of analysis due to their ability to act as key informants regarding their own public service identity.

By adopting this micro-level perspective, we aim to advance PSM theory in several significant ways. First, we seek to refine its conceptual tenets, aligning them with an identity-based framework. Second, we aim offering a novel interpretation of PSM theory's institutional embeddedness by dynamically exploring the relationship between PSI and context and moving beyond previous approaches that tested the cross-contextual applicability of PSM’s motives developed in a single institutional setting.

Ultimately, this study offers a crucial bridge between PSM theory and practice, providing actionable guidance for HR managers across diverse sectors and national contexts. By illuminating the specific meanings employees ascribe to PSI, it empowers HR professionals to strategically shape practices that capitalize on its positive behavioral implications.

This paper focuses on how administrative expertise influences public service performance from the perspective of the human resource system.

The Japanese central government has been promoting the recruitment of PhD holders since March 2024, and is also considering revising the personnel system in order to utilize PhD-holding officials with high-level expertise and transferable skills. The use of expert knowledge in public administration enhances the effectiveness and the efficiency of public policies and the quality of public service delivery. However, the degree of expertise required policy formulation depends on the specific field of public policy, and the extent to which expert knowledge is utilized is influenced by political factors (Esterling 2004, Tetlock 2017). Furthermore, previous studies show that ideological preferences and benefits are key factors determining whether public officers’ make use of administrative expertise. In addition, administrative expertise in the Japanese central government can be classified into three categories (Fujita 2008). The first is frontier scientific insight (Akiyoshi 2008). The second category is scientific literacy, which integrates experts’ frontier scientific insight into administrative practice. The third category is administrative management, wherein public officers oversee the process, and coordinate relevant departments (Theakstone 1999). This paper conducts an empirical analysis based on institutional arrangements to derive implications for the human resource system, aiming to utilize PhD-holding officials with high-level expertise and transferable skills.

This paper adopts a mixed-methods empirical approach using vignettes. Vignette-based questionnaire surveys make it possible to control the conditions under which respondents make judgments, thereby allowing for the measurement of their preferences and perceptions (Harrits and Møller 2021). We design two types of vignettes: the first illustrates how the roles of PhD-holding officials differ from those of others in the policy formulation process, and the second focuses on the relationship between expertise and individual preference. We present the two types of vignettes to respondents, assess their perceptions of decision-making in specific situations using a four-point Likert scale and conduct quantitative analysis to identify the factors that shape these responses. In addition, open-ended responses regarding the reasons behind their choices are collected and subjected to text analysis. This survey is scheduled to be conducted in May via a web-based form, targeting career-track officials responsible for science and technology policy at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). Approval to carry out the survey has been obtained from the Personnel Division of MEXT.