News — Taxpayers benefit most when job satisfaction among federal employees is high, according to a recent study conducted by a team of 14 researchers. The team identified specific strategies policymakers can implement in order to improve agency efficiency and effectiveness and increase the return on tax dollars.
“Employee performance often moves in lockstep with job satisfaction,” said research team member Jone Pearce, Dean’s Professor, organization and management, University of California, Irvine Paul Merage School of Business. “It’s up to policymakers and managers within federal agencies to take the lead driving job satisfaction to maximize the value delivered to taxpayers.”
Selected interventions and policy recommendations include: 1) Develop rapid response teams with 100-day project mandates, 2) Train managers to actively solicit employee input and reduce the fear of reprisal for disagreement, and 3) Reverse the “continued decline in cooperation” by examining union-management partnership experiments.
“The common denominator of all our recommendations is that they involve some type of change, and research indicates the need for a systematic process that builds motivation and the chance to improve the workplace and its products in positive ways,” said Pearce.
A summary of the findings, which are the result an intensive analysis of the 2015 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey involving more than 80 federal agencies, was recently published online in the journal .
Researchers have offered to collaborate with federal agencies to design and implement interventions as well as to conduct research with the synergistic goals of improving employee wellbeing, employee productivity, agency performance, and agency innovation. So far, there are no takers.
“These interventions will lead to win-win results for employees and taxpayers,” Pearce concluded.
The lead researcher is Herman Aguinis, from the School of Business at George Washington University. Other team members, listed in alphabetical order, include: Gerald F. Davis, from the ross School of Business at the University of Michigan; James R. Detert, from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia; Mary Ann Glynn, from the Carroll School of Management at Boston College; Susan E. Jackson, from the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations; Tom Kochan, from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Ellen Ernst Kossek, from the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University; Carrie Leana, from the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh; Thomas W. Lee, from the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington; Elizabeth Morrison, from the Stern School of Business at New York University; Jone Pearce, from The Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine; Jeffrey Pfeffer, from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University; Denise Rousseau, from the Heinz College and Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University; and, Kathleen M. Sutcliffe from the Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins University.
Co-author Jone L. Pearce is the Dean’s Professor of Organization and Management at The Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine. Pearce conducts research on workplace interpersonal processes such as trust and status, and how these processes may be affected by political structures, economic conditions and organizational policies and practices. Her work has appeared in over 100 scholarly publications, written numerous books and currently serves on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals. Pearce is a Fellow of the Academy of Management, the International Association of Applied Psychology, the American Psychological Association (Div 14, SIOP), and the Association for Psychological Science. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley and a Master’s and PhD in Administrative Sciences from Yale University.
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