This article examines the effect of specific new public management (NPM)-related characteristics to explain innovation-oriented culture within public sector organizations. According to NPM doctrines, an enhanced managerial autonomy combined with result control will stimulate a more innovation-oriented culture in such organizations. Using multi-country survey data of over 200 public sector agencies, we test for the influence of organizational autonomy, result control and their interactions, on innovation-oriented culture. High levels of managerial autonomy and result control have independent and positive effects. However, the interaction between high personnel management autonomy and high result control has a negative effect.

Public organizations were once seen as the epitome of stability and implacability. More recently, however, public organizations have been subject to fast-paced environmental change. One common response to the challenges posed by these volatile environments has been the adoption of various organizational changes to make public organizations more adaptable. However, following threat-rigidity theory, this study argues that as employees perceive multiple organizational changes, managerial support for innovative work behavior (IWB) of employees decreases. Analyses on the Australian Public Service (APS) employee census support these assertions. Our results contribute to the literatures on work behavior, organizational innovation, and human resources management, by demonstrating that multiple organizational changes negatively affect managerial support for IWB of individual employees, which may—through their negative impact on individual-level innovations—ultimately affect the very adaptability of organizations that many changes aspire to achieve.

Despite substantial evidence for the negative effect of turnover on performance, several studies also note offsetting positive effects hereby recognizing an optimal rate of turnover. These mixed results stress the need to examine under which conditions turnover is more harmful or beneficial to the organization. Using panel data from 30 divisions of the same agency, this study examines the impact of process conformance – the extent to which there are prescribed standards and rules related to the task. Results support a non-linear, inverted U-shaped relationship for those tasks with a high process conformance.

Agencification and granting public sector organizations managerial autonomy in particular is believed to change organizational cultures, away from traditional compliance- and detail-oriented bureaucratic cultures and towards organizational cultures which are more oriented towards external customers. There is however very little empirical information on the relationship between managerial autonomy and organizational culture. Using a unique data set on public agencies in Flanders, we not only test how managerial autonomy affects the strength of a customer-oriented culture within public sectors but also examine whether this culture becomes dominant over traditional public administration culture. Analysis shows that managerial autonomy positively affects a customer-oriented culture; however, it does not make it a dominant culture.

In the last decade, reforms in the public sector have been implemented at an ever‐increasing pace. Hereby, organizations are repetitively subject to mergers, splits, absorptions, or secessions of units; the adoption of new tasks; changes in legal status; and other structural reforms. Although evidence is largely missing in the literature, there is a growing belief that such intense reform sequences may be damaging to organizations. This article aims to fill this gap in the literature by empirically examining the existence of such repetitive change injury for public organizations. To do so, we employ organizational absenteeism rates as an indicator for repetitive change injury and link this to the reform sequences an organization experienced. Results indicate that intense reform sequences disproportionally increase organizational absenteeism rates, supporting the existence of repetitive change injury and suggesting that reforms remain rooted in organizational memories for a longer time than is often assumed.

Governments worldwide are relying on the COVID-19 vaccines as the solution for ending the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting crisis. Although scientific progress in the development of a vaccine has been astonishing, policymakers are facing an extra hurdle as increasingly more people appear to be hesitant in their intention to take such a vaccine. Based on a large Corona survey in Belgium, this study aims to explain the vaccination intention by linking it to trust in government and experts, while accounting for individuals’ risk perceptions and prosocialness.