Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, 6th Edition

CHAPTER NINEUNDERSTANDING PEOPLE IN PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONS: MOTIVATION AND MOTIVATION THEORY

Obviously, the people in an organization are crucial to its performance and to the quality of work life within it. This chapter and the next one are concerned with the people in public organizations. The chapters discuss public employees' motivation and work-related values and attitudes. This chapter defines motivation and describes the most important theories of work motivation. Chapter Ten describes concepts important to the analysis of motivation and work attitudes, including concepts about people's values, motives, and specific work attitudes such as job satisfaction. It covers values and motives that are particularly important in public organizations, such as the desire to perform a public service, and values and attitudes about pay, security, and work that often distinguish public sector managers and employees from those in other settings.

These topics receive attention in every textbook on organizational behavior because of their fundamental importance in all types of organizations. In public organizations and public management they have been receiving even greater attention in recent years than in the past. For example, the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) regularly surveys very large samples of federal employees and managers about their perceptions and attitudes about leadership in their agencies and their job satisfaction. (The sample size was 687,000 in 2012 (US Office ...