This study examines the role of frontline supervisors in the twenty-two largest federal agencies and explores their contributions to organizational performance and effectiveness. Specifically, this study develops a measure of federal agency performance and tests a hybrid model that predicts it. Several research questions on the nature and importance of supervisory management are tested within this framework. Data for the study come from the 2000 Merit Principles Survey, U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board. The findings show that “management matters.” Frontline supervisors play an important role in organizational performance and effectiveness, and supervisory management is an important determinant of high performance in federal agencies. In addition, high-performing agencies tend to have skillful upper-level managers, strong cultures that value employees and emphasize the importance and meaningfulness of the agency's work, and policies that empower those employees. These agencies also tend to have a strong performance orientation, and they strive for workforce diversity. These findings are explained further, and their implications are discussed.

Many scholars and policy-makers contend that social capital and management capacity are associated with better public services. It is also likely that organizations with the capacity to manage effective co-production are better able to realize these benefits. To test these assumptions, we explore the independent and combined effects of social capital and management capacity on the performance of major public services in the US states using Robert Putnam's index of social capital and the Government Performance Project's index of state management capacity. 1 The social capital index comprises indicators covering five broad dimensions of civic culture: community organizational life, engagement with public affairs, community volunteerism, informal sociability and social trust. The management capacity index is composed of assessments of five management systems: financial management, capital management, human resources, managing for results and IT. These systems are assessed quantitatively and qualitatively, and scores are tracked over time. View all notes We find that social capital is associated with higher performing public services, and that strong management capacity enhances its positive effects.

This article explores societal culture as an antecedent of public service motivation. Culture can be a major factor in developing an institution-based theory of public service motivation. In the field of organization theory, culture is considered a fundamental factor for explaining organization behavior. But our review of the literature reveals that culture has not been fully integrated into public service motivation theory or carefully investigated in this research stream. This study starts to fill this gap in the literature by using institutionalism and social-identity theory to predict how the sub-national Germanic and Latin cultures of Switzerland, which are measured through the mother tongues of public employees and the regional locations of public offices, affect their levels of public service motivation. Our analysis centers on two large data sets of federal and municipal employees, and produces evidence that culture has a consistent impact on public service motivation. The results show that Swiss German public employees have a significantly higher level of public service motivation on the whole, while Swiss French public employees have a significantly lower level overall. Implications for theory development and future research are discussed.