EMPLOYEE TURNOVER IN HYBRID ORGANIZATIONS: THE ROLE OF PUBLIC SECTOR SOCIALIZATION AND ORGANIZATIONAL PRIVATENESS
| Author | SARAH M.L. KRØTEL,ANDERS R. VILLADSEN |
| Date | 01 March 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12211 |
| Published date | 01 March 2016 |
doi: 10.1111/padm.12211
EMPLOYEE TURNOVER IN HYBRID ORGANIZATIONS:
THE ROLE OF PUBLIC SECTOR SOCIALIZATION AND
ORGANIZATIONAL PRIVATENESS
SARAH M.L. KRØTEL AND ANDERS R. VILLADSEN
Public sector reforms are increasingly blurring the boundaries between the public and private sec-
tors, making way for hybrid organizations existing between the two sectors. While research has
begun to explore organizational hybridity and how it affects employee identities and outcomes,
knowledge about employee behaviour in hybrid organizations is scarce. Public–private hybrid orga-
nizations face the challenge of balancing some degree of privateness with traditional public sector
practices and values. In this article we focus on public sector companies as an increasingly prevalent
type of hybrid organization, and how employee turnover is affected by the degree of organizational
privateness. Wesuggest that highly socialized public sector employees are more likely to leave when
their organization exhibits higher levels of privateness. In an empirical study of all employees in
public sector companies in Denmark we nd support for this theory. The article contributes new
knowledge about employee turnover dynamics and how the balance of opposing demands in hybrid
organizations has implications for employee behaviour.
Values and practices rooted in the private sector have increasingly been introduced into
the public sector with the aim of boosting efciency and quality in service delivery (Waring
2015). Following these reforms, public sector employees across a wide range of work areas
have had to adapt to new ways of doing things. Studies have described in detail the content
and prevalence of such reforms as well as the overall outcomes achieved. However, so far
less attention has been devoted to the internal side of the organizations and how increased
privateness affects employees in public organizations.
Recent research interest in organizational hybridity has increased the understanding
of individuals’ response when organizations pursue contradictory demands (Buffat
2014; Skelcher and Smith 2015). For instance, studies have shown how medical man-
agers develop new identities when managerialist thinking enters the eld of healthcare
(McGivern et al. 2015) and practices in public–private research centres (Gulbrandsen et al.
2015). This research is important as it increases our understanding of how the public sector
reacts to the introduction of values and practices traditionally associated with the private
sector of the economy. In this article we build on this research and aim to further this
line of study by exploring how employees respond to increased public–private hybridity.
We focus on two crucial dimensions. First, drawing inspiration from the dimensions of
publicness theory (Bozeman and Bretschneider 1994), we focus on the degree to which
a (public) organization is affected by elements from the private sector; and second, on
the degree to which an employee is socialized into the public sector through working
experience (Becker and Connor 2005; Petrovsky et al. 2015). We argue that the more
pronounced the organizational privateness, the more strongly is an employee’s public
sector socialization positively related to turnover.
Public sector companies are a perfect example of entities where the lines between
the public and private sectors are blurred. Despite being publicly owned they operate
in market-like conditions to various degrees. We propose three ways in which public
Sarah M.L. Krøtel and Anders R. Villadsen are at the Department of Management, AarhusUniversity, Denmark.
Public Administration Vol.94, No. 1, 2016 (167–184)
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
168 SARAH M.L. KRØTEL AND ANDERS R. VILLADSEN
organizations can embrace elements from the private sector: rst, in their degree of
market exposure; second, in their internal practices; and third, in their stafng patterns
by hiring new employees from the private sector. We hypothesize that each of these
dimensions increases the likelihood of turnover among employees with longer public
sector experience.
This article aims to make three important contributions. First, as argued by Meier and
Hicklin (2008), turnover is an understudied topic in public administration. Only a lim-
ited number of empirical studies deal with this important phenomenon and most of these
focus on turnover intention only.This is a problem as studies have suggested that turnover
intention substantially overstates actual turnover (Dollar and Broach 2006; Cho and Lewis
2012). Second, while it has been shown that employees leave organizations when their
person–organization t decreases (Moynihan and Pandey 2008), we point to how specic
organizational practices are associated with actual turnover behaviour. Finally, the study
contributes to the general debate about public and private sector blurring by illustrating
how private sector inuence along different organizational dimensions affects employees
socialized into the public sector. We provide a novel, large-scale quantitative illustration
of how organizational hybridity has tangible consequences for employee behaviour.
Westudy all public sector companies in Denmark in the period from 2005 to 2009. Using
register data we track the employment histories of all employees back to 1980 and measure
socialization by employment experience in the public sector. Our results show that social-
ization is related to a higher turnover likelihood when (and only when) organizations are
exposed to higher degrees of privateness in their environmental interactions, internal pay
structures, and stafng patterns.
PUBLIC SECTOR SOCIALIZATION AND TURNOVER
Socialization is about learning and internalizing dominant values and beliefs in a social set-
ting (Bright 2008). Research has found that employees socialized into the public sector have
different values from their private sector counterparts (Becker and Connor 2005; Meyer
and Hammerschmid 2006a) which may affect work behaviour (Petrovsky et al. 2015) and
future career choices (Jacobsen and Kjeldsen 2013). To better understand how socializa-
tion affects turnover dynamics in public sector companies, we present two lines of theory
on which we subsequently build our hypotheses. First, we explore the concept of public
sector socialization and next we focus on the literature on employee turnover.
Socialization into the public sector
Workexperience exposes individuals to the norms and values of a workplace setting. Over
time these are internalized and likely to shape attitudes and actions accordingly. On a
general level, Pache and Santos (2013) argue that work activities shape individuals’ social-
ization into that work setting as ‘they receive rewards for logic-congruent behaviors and
sanctions for logic-discrepant behavior’. Socialization happens through a self-reinforcing
process in which employees internalize specic ways of managing daily activities in accor-
dance with existing norms and values. As they gain experience with solving problems
and work challenges, individuals working in public sector organizations become increas-
ingly socialized into the norms and values underlying the public sector by drawing on a
legitimized repertoire of sector-specic responses (Petrovsky et al. 2015).
Elements of this process have been documented empirically. Becker and Connor (2005)
show that managerial value systems differ across public and private organizations due to
Public Administration Vol.94, No. 1, 2016 (167–184)
© 2015 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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