How a demanding employment relationship relates to affective commitment in public organizations: A multilevel analysis
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12378 |
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| Author | Mieke Audenaert,Bert George,Adelien Decramer |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
SYMPOSIUM ARTICLE
How a demanding employment relationship
relates to affective commitment in public
organizations: A multilevel analysis
Mieke Audenaert
1
| Bert George
2
| Adelien Decramer
1
1
Department of Human Resource
Management and Organizational Behaviour,
Universiteit Gent, Gent, Belgium
2
Department of Public Administration,
Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, Rotterdam,
The Netherlands
Correspondence
Mieke Audenaert, Department of Human
Resource Management and Organizational
Behaviour, Universiteit Gent, Henleykaai
84, Gent 9000, Belgium.
Email: mieke.audenaert@ugent.be
It has recently been recognized in the public administration litera-
ture that multiple reforms coexist in public organizations, ranging
from the Weberian bureaucracy to New Public Management and,
more recently, new public governance. This study develops a
typology of the employment relationship with features of these
macro-level changes and tests their impact on the civil servant's
affective commitment by including the individual-level social
exchange relationship. This multilevel model is tested with data
from 936 employees in a public organization. The findings confirm
the existence of different approaches to the employment relation-
ship: overdemanding, mutual investment and moderately demand-
ing. Civil servants in a mutual investment employment relationship
are most affectively committed, and civil servants in a moderately
demanding employment relationship benefit most from a positive
social exchange relationship. Implications for public management
theory and practice are discussed.
1|INTRODUCTION
Public organizations have been subjected to several macro-level changes, typically conceptualized as moving from
traditional public administration (i.e., Weberian bureaucracy) to New Public Management (NPM) and, more recently,
new public governance (Osborne 2006). These evolving changes have placed different demands on civil servants,
ranging as follows: from (a) standardized job procedures, rules and lifetime employment of Weberian bureaucracy
(Hughes 2012) to (b) efficiency, accountability and results of NPM (Hood 1991) to (c) inter-organizational gover-
nance, trust and long-term relations of new public governance (Osborne 2006), which ‘runs from public demands at
the front end to stakeholder satisfaction at the other end’(Walker et al. 2010, p. 7). Although these changes appear
sequential, several components of each change endure, and the Weberian model continues to strongly influence
Western public organizations (Koppenjan 2012; Hammerschmid et al. 2016).
These macro-level changes have influenced the job demands of civil servants (Osborne 2006) and resulted in
the breaking of the old traditional deal: ‘a lifelong job with mutual loyalty between the employer and the employee’
Received: 28 November 2016 Revised: 12 September 2017 Accepted: 2 October 2017
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12378
Public Administration. 2019;97:11–27. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 11
(Tsui and Wu 2005, p. 115). In public organizations, a new kind of unbalanced job has developed with high demands
relative to what is offered (Wright 2004). Such unbalanced jobs are required to deal with flexibility needs such as
expandable work roles (Tsui et al. 1997; Tsui and Wang 2002). However, at the same time, increasing job demands
may have detrimental side-effects for civil servants (Wright 2004) as well as for public organizations. Rather than
being committed to the organization, public servants may be narrowly committed to achieving their work goals
(Ordóñez et al. 2009). This behaviour is problematic because affective commitment implies an emotional attachment
with the organization in which employees identify themselves, enjoy membership and feel involved; this is linked to
a whole range of positive outcomes for the employee and the organization (Meyer and Allen 1997).
The current article addresses the lack of research on the changing structure of jobs in the public sector and its
possible detrimental effects for employees' affective commitment. The job demands-resources (JD-R) literature rec-
ognizes that organizations structure jobs, which impacts employee outcomes, including affective commitment
(e.g., Demerouti et al. 2001). Although studies have mainly examined the effects of how individual public servants
experience job demands (e.g., Gould-Williams et al. 2014; Bakker 2015), the higher structural level that affects job
demands and job resources deserves more research focus because ‘multilevel constructs result in a better under-
standing of psychological phenomena unfolding within organizations’, and it ‘can help guide the development of
more effective interventions’(Demerouti and Bakker 2011, p. 5). The job forms the higher-level ‘conditions under
which the job holders/incumbents execute their tasks’(Bakker and Demerouti 2014, p. 55). Therefore, this study
explores the multilevel effect of how public organizations structure jobs. The employment relationship relates to
how organizations structure jobs through different levels of expected contributions and offered inducements (Wang
et al. 2003).
By addressing the changing structure of the employment relationship and its possible detrimental effects for
employees' affectivecommitment, this article makes two important contributions. First, we contribute to public admin-
istration theory by buildingon the employment relationship model (Tsui et al. 1997) to develop and test a typologyof
the employment relationship specifically for public organizations. Second, we add to the Human Resource Manage-
ment (HRM) literature by studying the joint role of resources at multiple levels (Buch 2014; Audenaert et al. 2017a).
We draw on JD-R theory (Bakker andDemerouti 2007) to develop expectations of how the employment relationship
relates to affective commitment and how individual-level resources function as a buffer against increasing demands.
Thus, our multilevel examination addresses a call to study the interaction of individual-level resources with job
demands and job resources of the structural work environment (Demerouti and Bakker 2011). We explore the
employee's social exchange relationship with the organization as an individual-level resource. This exchange relation-
ship is based on the trust that the organizationwill invest in the employee in the longer term (Shore et al. 2006). Some
employees with overly demanding jobs may continueto obtain resources from a social exchange relationship and thus
be in an advantaged situation comparedto their colleagues. We thus address the insight that employees ‘do not per-
form their tasks in a vacuum’and that the social exchange relationship matters for affective commitment (Caillier
2017, p. 640) by functioning as a buffer. Figure1 shows the multilevel model testedin this study.
2|CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
Theorizing on the employment relationship proposes‘ideal forms even though actual practices may depart in varying
degrees from these ideal forms’(Tsui and Wang 2002, p. 80). Below, we first provide the theoretical background on
the employment relationship;subsequently, we treat the employment relationship specifically for public organizations.
2.1 |Job-level employment relationship
Based on the inducement-contribution theory put forward by Barnard (1938), the employment relationship consists
of two dimensions: offered inducements and expected contributions. On the one hand, expected contributions
12 AUDENAERT ET AL.
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