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November 2009 2010 30: 20 originally published online 16Review of Public Personnel Administration

James L. PerryA Strategic Agenda for Public Human Resource Management Research

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A Strategic Agenda for Public Human Resource Management Research

James L. Perry1,2

Abstract

This article develops a strategic research agenda for public human resource management. The agenda originates from the perception that research about public human resources has matured during the Review of Public Personnel Administration’s 30 years of publication and now is an appropriate juncture to initiate an intentional and strategic agenda. The author identifies criteria for developing a strategic research agenda that seeks to advance useable knowledge about public human resource management, build theory, and mark out content distinctive to public institutions. The article inventories research as reported by the Review of Public Personnel Administration and two other leading human resource management journals. These inventories help to anchor the agenda in timely issues and to triangulate on distinctively public issues. The article concludes with five priority research agenda based on the criteria the author developed and the inventory of research: direct compensation, motivation, culture and political context, efficacy and effectiveness, and training and development.

Keywords

human resource management, strategic research agenda, public administration theory

As we recognize the 30th anniversary of the Review of Public Personnel Administra-tion (ROPPA), this is an appropriate time not only to reflect on the journal’s past but also to look ahead. What research is strategic for development of public human resource management? By “strategic” I essentially mean “important.” What research

1Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA2Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea

Corresponding Author:James L. Perry, Distinguished Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, Room 410E, 1315 E. Tenth Street Bloomington, IN 47405-1701, USAEmail: [email protected]



Perry 21

questions are most important for building theory about the field? What research questions are most important for uncovering information practitioners need to know? What research is most important for identifying what is public, what is distinctive, about the institutional contexts that we study? Having answers for these questions would go a long way toward enhancing the value of public human resource management research in years to come.

Although ROPPA has published a good deal of important research in its first 30 years, much of it has been in reaction to developments unfolding in public administration and policy arenas. During its first decade, much of ROPPA was occupied by attention to civil service reform, public sector labor relations, and equal employment opportunity. Similar to adolescents, we experimented widely, but were not necessarily intentional about our choices. But just as adolescents develop a sense of their identities in early adulthood, I believe ROPPA and its contributors today have a stronger sense of their identities. Now is an appropriate time for a call to developing knowledge that will have broad and enduring value for the 21st century. The time has come for being more intentional about our agenda and the goals we pursue from public human resource management research.

I will build a strategic research agenda in three steps. First, I identify criteria for developing a strategic research agenda. These criteria are attentive not only to the subject matter of human resource management but also to building theory and identifying public institutional ties. Second, I inventory what research has been conducted, as reported by the ROPPA and two other leading human resource management journals. These inventories help both to anchor the agenda in timely issues and triangulate on distinctively public issues. Finally, I present five priority research agenda based on the criteria I develop and the inventory of research.

Criteria for a Strategic Research AgendaWith regard to developing criteria, I draw on ideas I first developed in “Strategies for Building Public Administration Theory,” which appeared in the 1991 volume of Research in Public Administration (Perry, 1991). The criteria I developed in the 1991 article are relevant today and can be applied for research about public human resource management. In somewhat modified form they include (a) focus on research questions that promote developing middlerange theories, (b) pay attention to issues grounded in the history of public personnel administration, and (c) select phenomena that have good prospects of making meaningful theoretical connections to the concept of “public.” These criteria can be helpful for framing questions and providing guidance for what types of questions should be included and excluded from a strategic research agenda.

Probably the two most important of the criteria above involve focusing on research questions to promote middlerange theory and selecting phenomena that enhance our theoretical understanding of what is public. Middlerange theory is a form of theory midway between unified theories that seek to explain all uniformities at one end of the



22 Review of Public Personnel Administration 30(1)

theory spectrum and working hypotheses at the other end (Merton, 1967). Among middlerange theory’s attributes are that it represents clearly formulated, verifiable statements of relationships among variables, is derived from data, but is more abstract than empirical generalizations (Gilfillian, 1980).

One reason for originally developing the criteria was my argument that public administration needed not only to import theory and knowledge from other disciplines, but also export theory and knowledge. I view contributions to middlerange theory as a vehicle for facilitating the import–export relationships between our field (i.e., public administration broadly or public human resource management more specifically) and allied disciplines. More importantly, middlerange theories also have some advantage for helping public administration scholars to articulate what is distinctive about the field. The extent to which we can identify attributes of public institutions (e.g., transparency) that influence relationships in theories spanning disciplines, for example, increases the prospects for building a body of knowledge distinctive to “public” administration or “public” human resource management.

Trends in Human Resource Management ResearchThe criteria described in the preceding section provides heuristics for selecting research questions and issues with good prospects for building theory, informing practice, and framing a distinctively public research agenda. What the criteria do not provide is a substantive and concrete agenda that deserves our attention. What issues are timely from the perspective of theory development and practical need? Are there timely issues whose study is likely to inform us about the meaning and distinctiveness of “public”?

Although framing an agenda entails a variety of subjective judgments, patterns of past human resource management research can be helpful for guiding agenda formation and anchoring an agenda in objective details. I pursue this goal in the present study by inventorying issues that have been studied in public, business and generic human resource management journals in recent years. I inventory research published during the past 30 years in ROPPA, Human Resource Management (HRM), and Inter-national Journal of Human Resource Management (IJHRM). The inventory provides insights into what is topical, what issues have appeared most frequently in ROPPA, and how research issues vary across journals and sectors. The inventory will be helpful not only for establishing what topics have been addressed in ROPPA in the past, but also what issues are being addressed in other journals and not in ROPPA. The inventory facilitates asking and answering questions relevant for developing systematically a strategic research agenda.

The Journals InventoriedThe choice of journals to inventory was relatively straightforward. Because this article is about a strategic agenda for public human resource management research on the 30th anniversary of Review of Public Personnel Administration, ROPPA was



Perry 23

obviously included in the inventory, representing public sector scholarship. The journal’s publisher, Sage (2008), describes the journal as presenting

[T]imely, rigorous scholarship on human resource management in public service organizations. The journal provides research for scholars and professionals to stay abreast of advancements and innovations in the field. The journal publishes articles that reflect the varied approaches used in the study and practice of human resource management in the public sector. (http://www.sagepub.com/journalsProdDesc.nav?prodId=Journal201617)

A second journal was selected to represent content in a generic or non–public sector journal. HRM, published by Wiley, has appeared quarterly since 1972. HRM is described by Wiley (2008) as

Covering the broad spectrum of contemporary human resource management, this journal provides practicing managers and academics with the latest concepts, tools, and information for effective problem solving and decision making in this field. Broad in scope, it explores issues of societal, organizational, and individual relevance. Journal articles discuss new theories, new techniques, case studies, models, and research trends of particular significance to practicing managers. (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/32249/home/ProductInformation .html?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0)

Although HRM does not target particular sectors, most of its articles and contributors are affiliated with businesses, and schools of management or business.

The third and final journal inventoried is the IJHRM, which has been published quarterly by Routledge of the Taylor & Francis group since 1990 and monthly since 2005. IJHRM (Taylor & Francis, 2008) is

[T]he forum for HRM scholars and professionals worldwide. Concerned with the expanding role of strategic human resource management in a fastchanging global environment, the journal focuses on future trends in human resource management, drawing on empirical research in the areas of strategic management, international business, organizational behaviour, personnel management and industrial relations. (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/09585192.asp)

The international focus of IJHRM adds another dimension to the variety of the research inventoried.

The three journals collectively provide breadth in research inventoried. They represent human resource management research conducted in the business and government sectors. The three journals also offer a good range of research in the United States and other countries.




Methods

The threejournal inventory was developed in two steps. First, we created an EndNote database composed of the title, abstract, and keywords1 for all articles published in the three journals since the founding of ROPPA. This resulted in a database on 2,456 entries. Articles from ROPPA and HRM covered the period 1978 to fall 2008. Because IJHRM initiated publication in 1990, the database for it began in 1990. IJHRM’s publication on a monthly basis since 2005 meant that it accounted for 1,229 records in the database. ROPPA had the smallest number of records, 432; HRM accounted for 795.

To facilitate comparisons across the journals, the individual records were aggregated in two ways, one by time period and another by search terms included in titles, abstracts, and keywords. These aggregations of the individual records for each journal by time period and search terms are presented in Table 1. Keywords were grouped together under major themes as shown in the appendix. Searching titles, abstracts, and keywords alone overlooks detailed, withinarticle content, but omissions are likely to be very modest. A few keywords overlapped categories (e.g., supervision was included in both the “leadership” and “management structure” categories) to reflect its relevance to both categories. The time periods used to aggregate records coincided with the first (19791988), second (19891998), and third decades (19992008) of ROP-PA’s publication. IJHRM did not begin publication until 1990 so it appears in only the second and third decades aggregated in Table 1.

ResultsThe information in Table 1 was used to explore three general sets of questions intended to inform development of a strategic research agenda for public human resource management. The three sets of questions are

• What topics gets the most attention? What topics get the least attention?• How similar are the topics addressed by the three journals? How different are

they?• Can “leading” and “lagging” relationships be identified in research reported

across the journals?

What research gets the most and least attention? A wide disparity exists between the most and least popular topics in the three journals. Training and development, which includes content about training, education, and career development, is the largest grouping at 56%. Culture (36%), effectiveness (28%), motivation (27%), recruitment and selection (19%), accountability (19%), and communication (18%) are the next most frequent research topics. At the opposite end of the spectrum, ethics, attendance, and human resource management policy appear in only 2% of the total articles. Creativity and postemployment benefits appear in only 1% of the articles.



Tabl

e 1.

Com

pari

sons

of t

he C

onte

nt o

f Thr

ee H

uman

Res

ourc

e Jo

urna

ls b

y M

ain

Sear

ch C

ateg

orie

s an

d T

ime

Peri

od

19

79-1

988

1989

-199

8 19

99-2

008

Ove

rall

RO

PPA

HRM

IJH

RM

Tota

l RO

PPA

HRM

IJH

RM

Tota

l RO

PPA

HRM

IJH

RM

Tota

l To

tal

No .

of a

rtic

les

80

210

—

290

171

282

349

802

181

303

880

1364

24

56A

ccou

ntab

ility

16

40

—

56

20

74

68

16

2 32

65

15

2 24

9 46

7

20%

19

%

—

19%

12

%

26%

19

%

20%

18

%

21%

17

%

18%

19

%A

t-w

ill e

mpl

oym

ent

—

0

0 7

7

—

4%

Att

enda

nce

1 3

—

4 3

7 8

18

5 8

14

27

49

1%

1%

—

1%

2%

2%

2%

2%

3%

3%

2%

2%

2%Be

nefit

s (in

dire

ct)

4 19

—

23

11

20

16

47

17

28

64

10

9 17

9

5%

9%

—

8%

6%

7%

5%

6%

9%

9%

7%

8%

7%Be

nefit

s (p

oste

mpl

oym

ent)

1

7 —

8

6 2

3 11

5

2 7

14

33

1%

3%

—

3%

4%

1%

1%

1%

3%

1%

1%

1%

1%Be

st P

ract

ice

2 15

—

17

5

17

41

63

19

49

96

164

244

3%

7%

—

6%

3%

6%

12

%

8%

10%

16

%

11%

12

%

10%

Bure

aucr

acy

—

0 14

24

34

72

25

19

57

10

1 17

3

—

8%

9%

10

%

9%

14%

6%

6%

7%

7%

Car

eers

0

8 —

8

4 6

10

20

5 11

40

56

84

0%

4%

—

3%

2%

2%

3%

2%

3%

4%

5%

4%

3%

Com

mun

icat

ion

5 52

—

57

7

62

72

141

20

64

150

234

432

6%

25

%

—

20%

4%

22

%

21%

18

%

11%

21

%

17%

17

%

18%

Com

pens

atio

n (d

irec

t)/

18

18

—

36

17

25

30

72

25

32

92

149

257

pa

y/w

ages

23

%

9%

—

12%

10

%

9%

9%

9%

14%

11

%

10%

11

%

10%

Con

flict

5

16

—

21

15

18

20

53

20

16

39

75

149

6%

8%

—

7%

9%

6%

6%

7%

11

%

5%

4%

5%

6%C

reat

ivity

0

3 —

3

0 2

2 4

1 2

4 7

14

0%

1%

—

1%

0%

1%

1%

0%

1%

1%

0%

1%

1%

(con

tinue

d)

25 at INDIANA UNIV on May 16, 2012rop.sagepub.comDownloaded from


Tabl

e 1.

(co

ntin

ued)

19

79-1

988

1989

-199

8 19

99-2

008

Ove

rall

RO

PPA

HRM

IJH

RM

Tota

l RO

PPA

HRM

IJH

RM

Tota

l RO

PPA

HRM

IJH

RM

Tota

l To

tal

Cul

tur e

9

82

—

91

20

118

160

298

41

98

358

497

886

11

%

39%

—

31

%

12%

42

%

46%

37

%

23%

32

%

41%

36

%

36%

Div

ersi

ty

6 25

—

31

28

37

57

12

2 35

55

18

0 27

0 42

3

8%

12%

—

11

%

16%

13

%

16%

15

%

19%

18

%

20%

20

%

17%

Effe

ctiv

enes

s 13

64

—

77

26

10

6 96

22

8 37

91

25

3 38

1 68

6

16%

30

%

—

27%

15

%

38%

28

%

28%

20

%

30%

29

%

28%

28

%Eq

ual e

mpl

oym

ent/

11

13

—

24

30

12

18

60

30

21

55

10

6 19

0

Affi

rmat

ive

Act

ion

14

%

6%

—

8%

18%

4%

5%

7%

17

%

7%

6%

8%

8%Et

hics

0

5 —

5

2 6

8 16

2

11

21

34

55

0%

2%

—

2%

1%

2%

2%

2%

1%

4%

2%

2%

2%H

uman

res

ourc

e 0

1 —

1

0 2

7 9

4 3

25

32

42

m

anag

emen

t po

licy

0%

0%

—

0%

0%

1%

2%

1%

2%

1%

3%

2%

2%

J ob

desi

gn

5 32

—

37

8

41

31

80

13

43

139

195

312

6%

15

%

—

13%

5%

15

%

9%

10%

7%

14

%

16%

14

%

13%

Lead

ersh

ip

0 26

—

26

2

61

33

96

11

86

95

192

314

0%

12

%

—

9%

1%

22%

9%

12

%

6%

28%

11

%

14%

13

%M

anag

emen

t st

ruct

ure

5 11

—

16

12

17

21

50

21

62

11

6 19

9 26

5

6%

5%

—

6%

7%

6%

6%

6%

12%

20

%

13%

15

%

11%

Mot

ivat

ion

15

55

—

70

18

76

105

199

46

72

265

383

652

19

%

26%

—

24

%

11%

27

%

30%

25

%

25%

24

%

30%

28

%

27%

Org

aniz

atio

nal

22

23

—

45

12

28

46

86

45

28

93

166

297

de

velo

pmen

t

28%

11

%

—

16%

7%

10

%

13%

11

%

25%

9%

11

%

12%

12

%

(con

tinue

d)



Tabl

e 1.

(co

ntin

ued)

19

79-1

988

1989

-199

8 19

99-2

008

Ove

rall

RO

PPA

HRM

IJH

RM

Tota

l RO

PPA

HRM

IJH

RM

Tota

l RO

PPA

HRM

IJH

RM

Tota

l To

tal

Out

sour

cing

0

1 —

1

2 6

7 15

9

12

29

50

66

0%

0%

—

0%

1%

2%

2%

2%

5%

4%

3%

4%

3%Pe

rfor

man

ce a

ppra

isal

10

14

—

24

12

48

32

92

17

58

85

16

0 27

6

13%

7%

—

8%

7%

17

%

9%

11%

9%

19

%

10%

12

%

11%

Polit

ics

18

6 —

24

36

14

33

83

45

11

90

14

6 25

3

23%

3%

—

8%

21

%

5%

9%

10%

25

%

4%

10%

11

%

10%

Rec

ruitm

ent

and

sele

ctio

n 9

41

—

50

22

51

58

131

48

71

174

293

474

11

%

20%

—

17

%

13%

18

%

17%

16

%

27%

23

%

20%

21

%

19%

Ris

k 1

5 —

6

1 2

2 5

5 13

19

37

48

1%

2%

—

2%

1%

1%

1%

1%

3%

4%

2%

3%

2%

Team

wor

k 0

6 —

6

0 25

21

46

5

19

45

69

121

0%

3%

—

2%

0%

9%

6%

6%

3%

6%

5%

5%

5%

Tech

nolo

gy

0 22

—

22

2

33

32

67

10

50

91

151

240

0%

10

%

—

8%

1%

12%

9%

8%

6%

17

%

10%

11

%

10%

Trai

ning

and

dev

elop

men

t 27

13

5 —

16

2 52

18

6 21

8 45

6 76

20

1 47

7 75

4 13

72

34%

64

%

—

56%

30

%

66%

62

%

57%

42

%

66%

54

%

55%

56

%Tu

rnov

er

1 17

—

18

8

22

23

53

18

31

75

124

195

1%

8%

—

6%

5%

8%

7%

7%

10

%

10%

9%

9%

8%

Uni

ons

8 16

—

24

9

5 55

69

15

9

83

107

200

10

%

8%

—

8%

5%

2%

16%

9%

8%

3%

9%

8%

8%

Not

e: R

OPP

A =

Revie

w o

f Pub

lic P

erso

nnel

Adm

inist

ratio

n; H

RM =

Hum

an R

esou

rce

Man

agem

ent;

IJHRM

= In

tern

atio

nal J

ourn

al o

f Hum

an R

esou

rce

Man

agem

ent.




How similar and different are topics across journals? Although we might expect significant differences across three human resource management journals that diverge by sector and geographic audiences, the journals share striking similarities. Topics ranging from accountability, attendance, benefits (indirect and postemployment), compensation, diversity, outsourcing, recruitment and selection, turnover, and unions garner similar amounts of attention across the journals in each of the time periods studied.

A smaller number of topics reflect wide divergence across the journals. Culture, for example, gets strikingly less attention in ROPPA than in the other two journals. The pattern is repeated for job design, leadership, and training and development. Effectiveness, which is grouped with other keywords such as efficiency, productivity, profit, and quality, also receives far less attention in ROPPA than the other journals.

Can leading and lagging relationships be identified? Information that may have a direct bearing on future research is whether any leading or lagging relationships can be identified across journals and time periods. Research on issues may start in one journal and subsequently diffuse to other journals. For instance, a search of the database indicates that generic research about strategic human resource management was first published in HRM in the early 1980s (Devanna, Fombrun, Tichy, & Warren, 1982) and did not appear in ROPPA until 1993 (Perry, 1993).

An area where ROPPA content leads trends in HRM and IJHRM is the topics of equal employment and affirmative action. In each of the three time periods, the portion of ROPPA content related to articles in this group was, on average, about 10% greater than HRM and IJHRM. The fact that the relative differences in content remained relatively stable over time suggests, however, that the level of emphasis given to equal employment research in ROPPA is not diffusing to business or international contexts.

In several areas, ROPPA lags the volume of content given several topics, but the gap with HRM and IJHRM appears to be closing. Research appearing in the culture cluster increased across the three time periods in ROPPA, but culture received a higher portion of attention in the other two journals in each time period. The pattern for research in the effectiveness group followed a similar, but less pronounced pattern over time. The percentage content ROPPA devotes to leadership, management structure, motivation, technology, and training and development also lags the volume of attention given to these same topics in HRM and IJHRM.

It is important not to draw sweeping conclusions about the volume of attention each journal gives to different research areas. The fact that ROPPA gives more attention than the other journals to equal employment may reflect the centrality of social equity in government contexts. Similarly, the consistently greater attention given to culture in HRM and IJHRM could reflect editorial dispositions rather than anything fundamental about business or international human resource management. At the same time, the differences across journals and time periods are useful triggers to speculate about reasons behind variations. To the extent that this speculation informs insights about directions for future research, it supports the goals of the present study.



Perry 29

An Agenda for Strategic Public Human Resource Management Research

So what does the preceding indicate about topics ripe for future strategic public human resource management research? Using both the criteria associated with strategies for building public administration theory and empirical differences across ROPPA, HRM, and IJHRM, I propose five research agenda as high priorities for a strategic public human resource management research. These research questions involve direct compensation, motivation, culture and political context, efficacy and effectiveness, and training and development. The agenda items I present below are not likely to exhaust important areas for future research, but they merit priority because of their prospects for closing gaps in knowledge, leveraging public sector research to inform the broader understanding of human resource management, and simultaneously contributing to an understanding of what is public.

Direct CompensationAs the research inventory showed, the volume of attention given to direct compensation in ROPPA is comparable with generic and international journals. Public sector research has a good opportunity, however, to inform middlerange theory about both marketbased and contingent pay and identify the role played by public institutions.

Research outside of public administration suggests some theoretical and empirical puzzles that public human resource management scholars can be instrumental in solving. An intriguing analysis of wage structures was reported by George Borjas (2003), a labor economist at Harvard University. Borjas suggests that as public–private wage structures have evolved, the relative skills of “marginal” persons who moved across sectors also changed significantly. Increasing compression of wages in the public sector has made it progressively harder for the public sector to attract and retain highskill workers. Widening wage inequality in the private sector coupled with a relatively more stable wage distribution in the public sector “created magnetic effects that altered the sorting of workers across sectors, with highskill workers becoming more likely to end up in the private sector” (p. 52). Quite obviously, macro–wage structures are consequential for the public sector’s ability to attract and retain a quality workforce. The effects of macrostructures, however, are poorly understood and have had little or no influence on public policy, especially the dispersion and structure of government wages.

Intriguing puzzles also surround contingent pay. Both economists and organizational behavior scholars have begun to question conventional wisdom about pay structures (Frey & Osterloh, 2005), compensation and contingent pay (Frey, 1997; Pfeffer, 1998). These arguments from disciplines outside the public human resource management field lend credibility to what public administration scholars have argued for some time—performancerelated pay is less likely to work in government and quasigovernmental organizations (Kellough & Nigro, 2002; Perry, Engbers, & Jun,




2009; Perry, Mesch, & Paarlberg, 2006). Highquality research on public compensation could help to clarify existing puzzles and contribute to theory development.

Two recent studies provide ancillary support for the importance of compensation research. Whitford (2006) calls attention to a fundamental question that has received little attention in debates about public performancerelated pay. The two main components of pay—namely, base pay and contingent pay—jointly contribute to signaling the importance of, and create incentives for, high performance. Thus, base pay is an integral part of “performance pay” and merits future research attention. Both the market competitiveness of an organization’s salaries and the ways in which it rewards promotions send important signals about how performance is rewarded. Based on his research on tournaments, Whitford (2006) argues that promotion tournaments in public organization hierarchies might be more efficient than contingent pay systems.

Another intriguing prospect is raised by Colella, Paetzold, Zardkoohi, and Wesson (2007) in a review of research on pay secrecy. The transparency constraint that public institutions face contrasts with the secrecy (Colella et al., 2007) that prevails in many private organizations. Research on pay secrecy is inconclusive, but it does suggest private organizations that successfully use performancerelated pay rely on secrecy to sustain their systems (Colella et al., 2007). The transparency–secrecy continuum is conceivably a critical mediating variable affecting the efficacy of performancerelated pay. Pay transparency, therefore, could threaten the efficacy of performancerelated pay and explain differential success rates across sectors.

One symbol of direct compensation’s strategic role in future public human resource management research is that the December 2008 issue of ROPPA was devoted to publicsector compensation. The special issue was the outgrowth of a large number of recent manuscript submissions about compensation (Ledvinka, 2008), which led the editorial board of the journal to conclude “that compensation issues are becoming increasingly important in the public sector” (p. 304). I agree with this assessment.

Strategic agenda #1: Direct compensation, encompassing wages, salaries, and contingent pay, deserves high priority to assess effects of public institutions and pay policies, how pay structures influence attraction, retention, and motivation, and how pay openness affects the efficacy of performancerelated pay.

MotivationA theme closely related to compensation is motivation. Salary and wages affects motivations to join and stay with an organization, and contingent pay is linked theoretically to the motivation to perform. Financial remuneration, however, is just one of many factors affecting motivation—and perhaps not the most important in public settings. Although I noted above that research on motivation in ROPPA has been increasing, the volume of attention lags what is given by HRM and IJHRM. Similar to compensation research, public motivation research has a good prospect of informing middlerange



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theory development about intrinsic rewards, altruism, prosocial behavior, and otherregarding behavior.

Two factors make motivation strategic for a public human resource management research agenda. First, several prominent middlerange theories, including self determination (Deci & Ryan, 2004) and jobdesign theory (Grant, 2007, 2008), incorporate concepts such as intrinsic motivation and task or social significance of work that have long been salient to both public practitioners and scholars. These middlerange theories serve as bridges between scholars in organizational behavior, social psychology, and public human resource management. Quality research by public human resource management scholars has the prospect for informing both the base of empirical knowledge about public settings and the wider development of theory.

The second factor is the recent explosion in otherregarding motivation research that has occurred across several fields. Within public administration, the volume of research on public service motivation has increased significantly in the last decade (Perry & Hondeghem, 2008a, 2008b). Complementary research emanates from economics, organizational behavior, sociology, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, developmental psychology, social psychology, and political science (see Koehler & Rainey, 2008, for a review of this literature).

Job and work design. Although job design has long been recognized as an important mediator of employee motivation and performance, it has not received the scholarly attention it merits (Grant, 2007, 2008), particularly among public human resource management scholars (Perry et al., 2006; Perry & Porter, 1982). As Table 1 shows, jobdesign research, which occupies an entry in the table independent of the motivation entry, accounts for 13% of the content of the three journals, but only 6% to 7% of the content of ROPPA.

Several recent and ongoing research and professional developments bear on the need for greater attention to job design as a factor in the motivation equation. One is the increasing attention being given to research on emotional labor (Guy, Newman, & Mastracci, 2008), a theoretical perspective that closely touches on jobdesign research. A practical development is the growth of outsourcing and how this growth affects the nature of the work that is left “behind” in public organizations (Coggburn, 2007; Light, 1999). Two other longer term developments, government reform and technological innovation, also have significant consequences for motivation in general and work design specifically (Donahue, 2008; Perry, 1994; Perry & Kraemer, 1993). Moynihan (2008) argues, for instance, that new public management reforms have had the effect of substituting weaker extrinsic rewards for more powerful intrinsic motivators.

Strategic agenda #2: Motivation research, including job and work design research, deserves high priority to more clearly link individual dispositions to institutional context and exploit opportunities to tie public human resource management to welldeveloped motivational theories of the middle range.




Culture and Political Context

The keyword comparisons across journals reveal that one area where ROPPA content has consistently lagged in comparison journals is culture. Although culture has been given increasing attention in ROPPA in each of the three decades tracked in the database, HRM and IJHRM have consistently devoted greater percentages of their content to culturerelated themes. The lag may be the product of the keywords we grouped with culture, but several of the culturerelated keywords, such as participation, values, and responsibility, have strong traditions in public administration. An aspect of culture that was grouped independently of culture was “politics,” an important cultural and contextual element of public organizations. Thus, the disparities across the journals are less than they appear initially.

An irony associated with the results is that culture research, broadly construed, has historically made important contributions to public administration and public human resource management research. Herbert Kaufman’s The Forest Ranger (1960) is a classic case study highly influential in subsequent research (Luton, 2007). Culture plays a prominent role in James Q. Wilson’s (1989) widely cited Bureaucracy. John DiIulio’s (1994) analysis of culture in the U.S. Bureau of Prisons makes a central point that rational choice models may explain and predict certain behaviors quite successfully, but they are unable to explain many behaviors with which we are familiar from public service.

Job security and at-will employment. In the early 1980s, many American scholars and business leaders looked with envy at the success of Japanese enterprises (Ouchi, 1981; Pascale & Athos, 1981). One of the hallmarks of the Japanese system of management was lifetime employment. At the same time that lifetime employment was touted as key to high performance in Japan, the system of job security in U.S. governments was being attacked as contrary to both high performance and democratic accountability (Campbell, 1978; Savas & Ginsburg, 1973).

Turning the clock forward to today, we know that, judging by subsequent performance of their economy, too much may have been made of the Japanese system of management and implicit lifetime employment contracts. The attack on the job security of government employees continues unabated, with states such as Georgia and Florida and federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security, leading the way in promoting atwill employment as an alternative to traditional job tenure systems (Kellough & Nigro, 2006; Williams & Bowman, 2007). Reviews of atwill employment systems have been largely negative. Williams and Bowman (2007) write,

In summary, Service First was a poorly conceived initiative that was quickly pushed through the legislature, a process that yielded “chaos.” It is another example of an overreaching attempt to solve a perceived government problem with a simplistic panacea promoted by a wellknown public figure. (p. 73)



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With as much attention as has been given to the centrality of property rights rules in organizational culture in both the public and private sectors, theory and empirical research about this subject is woefully underdeveloped. We tend to rely largely on anecdote and ideological preferences when assessing how job security contributes to culture and its role as both an independent and dependent variable in middlerange theory. Highquality research in this area could advance middlerange theory and our understanding of the uniqueness of public institutions in American and other societies.

Discretion. Increasing the discretion of public managers is considered a key element in much of current reform rhetoric, presumed to aid in increasing agency efficiency and effectiveness. However, many public agencies already allow for a large amount of discretion to be wielded by managers (Hays & Sowa, 2006). This is another facet of organizational and public agency culture that is not studied extensively.

Strategic agenda #3: Highquality studies on culture and politics would be helpful for contextualizing public human resource management research and would give us better foundations for answering what human resource initiatives are most appropriate to a particular context, why they succeed and fail, and what types of change need to occur to increase probabilities for achieving intended outcomes.

Efficacy and EffectivenessThe reference in the preceding agenda item to “success” and “failure” triggers attention to the ancillary issues of effectiveness and performance. As more attention is given to the output side of public organizations, in contrast to inputs, more research needs to turn to assessing efficacy, effectiveness, and performance. The field of public human resource management research has been attentive to evaluating the efficacy and effectiveness of specific personnel policies (e.g., Rodgers & Hunter, 1992; Perry et al., 2006; Perry et al., 2009; Thompson, 2008), but lags in making broader connections to human resource management and organizational strategy and performance.

The shortfall of public human resource management research to establish connections to macroperformance is a deficit shared with the larger field of public administration. Boyne (2003) acknowledges the research deficit in the theory behind evaluating public service improvement. Forbes and Lynn (2005) also note the lack of research on public management in evaluating the contribution it has to governmental performance both in the American and international contexts.

Research about public human resource management and performance also has the prospect of contributing to middlerange theory across organizations generally. Fleetwood and Hesketh (2006) argue that human resource management–performance research is undertheorized and understudied. In the same vein, Elling and Thompson (2006) delve into the relationship between human resources management and public performance.

Despite the dearth of past research, there are some precedents for holistic assessments of human resource management and performance. Perry and Angle (1980) studied labor relations in the heavily organized mass transit industry in California in




the late 1970s. Their study followed protocols for research on private labor relations dating to the late 1940s and early 1950s. The focus of the mass transit study was to assess how a range of workplace issues affected overall transit agency effectiveness. Recently, O’Toole and Meier (2009) formally modeled the relationship between human resource management practices and Texas school district performance.

Strategic agenda #4: Research is needed that compares the efficacy of human resource practices across contexts, including sectors, using metaanalysis, research synthesis, and other appropriate quantitative and qualitative methods. Rigorous, theorybased research needs to assess human resource management practices and performance holistically at the agency, organizational, and program levels.

Training and DevelopmentAnother content area where ROPPA lags HRM and IJHRM is what is grouped in Table 1 as training and development. This category touches on keywords, such as training, career development, education, and learning. In the first decade of ROPPA’s publication, 34% of all articles included these and other training and development keywords. In its third decade of publication, 42% of ROPPA’s content included these keywords. This contrasts, however, with 66% of HRM and 54% of IJHRM’s content.

The differences across the three journals are not, by themselves, a basis for including training and development on the research agenda. Several other considerations, however, elevate the importance of research about training and development. The first consideration is sheer demographics—and the imminent wave of retirements and generational changes in public service. The second consideration is the shifting institutional rules where more employees are attached to public service in ways quite different from traditional, lifetime career systems (Perry, 1994, 2007). A third consideration is the lack of theoretical guidance to help navigate implications of the changing makeup of the public workforce with human capital development in public organizations.

Although the largest share of the training and development category involves training, much of this research is instrumental and focuses relatively narrowly on specific training programs. Other streams of research must be explored to increase both theory development and likelihood that the research will shed light on what is distinctively public. Research on emotional labor (Guy et al., 2008), referred to above in conjunction with motivation, represents one prospective line for future research. Research in the tradition of Adams and Balfour’s (2004) work on administrative evil, Colby and Damon’s (1992) analysis of moral exemplars, Moynihan and Pandey’s (2007) analysis of organizational socialization and public service motivation, and Youniss and colleagues studies of service and identity development (Yates & Youniss, 1996; Youniss, McLellan, & Yates,1997) merit future attention.

Leadership development. Table 1 shows a large deficit between ROPPA, HRM, and IJHRM in the area of leadership research. The deficit is one piece of evidence suggesting a need for more research on leadership development. Other compelling reasons for



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increasing the volume of research in leadership development are the generational turnover in public organizations and the need to better understand executive development processes. Research on executive and leadership development should therefore be among the training and development issues given high priority.

Strategic agenda #5: Future research should give high priority to cognitive, emotional, and moral development of prospective and incumbent participants in public service, with particular attention to linkages between this research and robust theories of the middle range. Although this research can be directed to all participants in public service, special emphasis needs to be given to leadership development.

ConclusionThis article has developed a strategic agenda for future public human resource management research. I began by presenting several criteria for judging important research for building the field. These criteria were supplemented by an inventory of the contents of ROPPA and two other leading human resource management journals. The journals collectively provided broad coverage of human resource management research across sectors and between domestic and foreign contexts. The process resulted in five strategic agenda, encompassing direct compensation, motivation, culture and political context, efficacy and effectiveness, and training and development.

In the strategic research agenda, I resisted the temptation to be all inclusive. I also tried to avoid dwelling on an instrumental, temporally bound agenda in favor of issues with longer term relevance. The selection criteria I proposed, however, can be used in the future to pose questions for a changing agenda. The agenda I presented may not exhaust all the important areas for future research, but they merit priority because of their prospects for closing gaps in knowledge, leveraging public sector research to inform the broader understanding of human resource management, and simultaneously contributing to an understanding of what is public.

AppendixSearch Term Results

Category With Search Terms No. of Hits

Accountability Total: 467• Accountability 21•Cost 154• Evaluation 149• Forecasting 14• Shareholders 9• Stakeholders 27


• Standards 102•Total quality 38

At-will employment Total: 7•At will employment 7

Attendance Total: 49•Absenteeism 13•Attendance 1

(continued)




Appendix (continued)Category With Search Terms No. of Hits

•Discipline 40•Tardiness 1•Time management 7

Benefits (indirect) Total: 179• Benefit 160•Cafeteria benefit 2•Child care 6•Defined benefit packages 0•Dependent care 1• Employee benefits 6• Family-friendly 11• Flexible scheduling 3• 4-day work week 0• Fringe benefits 40•Health insurance 6•Health plans 2• Insurance 19

Benefits (postemployment) Total: 33• Early retirement 2•Retirement 17• Pension 16• Severance pay 5

Best practice Total: 244• Best practice 62•Models 112• Paradigm 29•Trends 62•Uniform guidelines 4

Bureaucracy Total: 206•Authority 36• Bureaucracy 20•Discipline 40•Hierarchy 16•Middle managers 26•Organization theory 3• Patronage 4• Procedures 59•Representative 2

bureaucracy•Resistance to change 10

Careers Total: 84• Brain drain 2• Burn out (psychology) 5•Career advancement 12•Career plateau 6•Careers 64


Compensation (direct) Total: 257 /pay/wages• Bonuses 6• Broadbanding 1•Compensation 131•Compensation 46

management• Equal pay 10• Increases 31•Market-based pay 2•Merit pay 42•New pay 2• Pay for performance 13• Performance-based 12•Overtime 10•Raises 16• Salary 30• Skill-based pay 6•Wage differentials 7

Communication Total: 432•Communication 166•Cooperation 36• Informal 34• Employee participation 86•Miscommunication 0•Oral 150• Partnerships 16

Conflict Total: 151•Arbitration 17•Complaints 12•Conflict 78•Dispute 24•Dispute process 1•Dispute resolution 5•Grievance procedures 13•Grievance rights 1•Harassment 21• Labor disputes 3•Mediation 17•Role conflict 10•Whistle blowing 2

Creativity Total: 14•Creativity 11•Creative ability 6

Culture Total: 866• Behavioral modification 0

(continued)



Perry 37


•Competition 106•Culture 381• Loyalty 61• Intangible assets 3• Interprofessional 3

relations•Management styles 110•Mentoring 18•Mission statement 1•Office politics 3• Participation 153• Personality 34• Professionalism 9•Responsibility 46•Trust 69•Values 162•Workplace discipline 1

Organizational development Total: 297•Administrative reform 5•Civil service reform 41•Decentralization 34•Devolution 6• Innovation diffusion 2•Organizational 18

development•Organization theory 3•Reform 143•Restructuring 51• Succession planning 19•Trends 62•Ambition 4• Biofeedback training 0• Business education 22•Career development 150•Certification 11•Decision making 127• Educationa 155• Empowerment 55• Learning 134• Personalb 70• Professional developmenta 13•Retraining 8• Self-managed learning 3•Traininga 343


Diversity Total: 423•Ability, influence of age on 2•Age employment 1•Age differences 2•Age discrimination in 3

employment• Baby boomers 3• Barriers to diversity 1• Bisexuals 1•Diversity 117•Gay and lesbian 2•Gender 124•Group identity 11• Individuality 1• Integration 88• Intercultural 12

communication•Married women 2•Multiculturalism 16•Older people 6•Race 70• Sex 95• Stereotypes 12•Young workers 4

Effectiveness Total: 686• Business metrics 0• Effectiveness 290• Efficiency 76• Productivity 140• Profit 75•Quality 267

Equal employment Total: 190 affirmative action•Affirmative action 34•Age discrimination 8•Americans with 4

Disabilities Act•Civil rights 15•Civil Rights Act 10•Disability 5•Discrimination 97• Equal employment 14• Equal employment 9

opportunity

(continued)





• Equal protection 3• Equality 39•Gender equity 4• Job discrimination 1•Harassment 21•Hostile work 1

environment•Minorities 17•Minority 30• People with disabilities 5•Race discrimination 4•Reverse discrimination 0• Sex discrimination 30

Ethics Total: 55•Corruption 3• Ethical behavior 1• Ethical judgment 0• Ethics 36•Moral 14• Social norms 7

Human resource management Total: 42 policy•Discipline strategies 1•Human capital management 2•Human resource policy 9•Human resource 1

management policy• Strategic HRM 29

Job design Total: 312•Advancement 39•Alternative work 4

arrangements• Expectations 63• Flex time 0• Flexible time 0• Job description 24• Job design 7• Job rotation 11•Occupational segregation 5•Quality of work life 74•Roles 105• Shift work 4•Upward mobility 2•Work design 13•Working hours 2


Leadership Total: 314•Catastrophic events 1•CEOs 15•Charismatic authority 1•Delegation 12•Human capital officers 1• Leader–member exchange 3• Leaders behavior 0• Leadership 257• Leadership development 1

programs• Leadership style 13•Mentoring 18• Strategy officers 1• Supervision 105

Management structure Total: 265•Credibility 9• First-line supervisors 5•Management structure 2•New public management 10• Performance management 26• Supervision 105• Supervisors 70•Trust 69

Motivation Total: 652•Achievements 4•Altruism 3• External 104•Human-capital 1• Internal 138• Job satisfaction 173•Mission attachment 1•Motivation 180•Needs assessment 9•Occupational achievement 10•Two-factory theory 0• Public service motivation 7• Self-actualization 2• Self-determination 3•Values 162•Work ethic 13

Outsourcing Total: 66•Consulting firms 4•Contingent employees 1•Contingent employment 3

(continued)



Perry 39


•Contract labor 3•Contracting 30•Outsourcing 21• Privatization 22•Temporary workers 4

Performance appraisal Total: 276• 360 degree feedback 0• Behavioral assessment 2• Benchmarking 13•Competencies 84• Evaluation methodology 2• Feedback 60• Job performance 76•Measurement 43• Performance appraisal 75• Self-evaluation 7•Task performance 7

Politics Total: 253•Doctrines 2• Political behavior 0• Politics 40• Public sector 129•Regulation 90

Recruitment and selection Total: 474•Ability 361•Applicants 21•Assessment centers 7•Availability 21• Behavioral event interview 1• Employability 10• Fairness 24•Hiring 34• Job description 24• Job fairs 1• Job hunting 8• Job offers 2•Merit system 23•Recruitment 85•Recruitment and selection 16• Screening 9• Selection 173•Workforce planning 3

Risk Total: 48•Risk 48•Risk exposure 1•Risk management 6


•Risk taking 3Teamwork Total: 121•Collaboration 12•Collaborative 9•Team building 6•Teams 95•Teamwork 30

Technology Total: 240•Automation 5•Computers 4•Cyber-management 1• E-government 1•Human–computer 1

interaction•Human error 1• Information technology 49• Internet 12•Technology 219•Telecommunication 15•Video conferencing 0•Web portals 1•Web sites 6

Turnover Total: 195•Dismissal 28• Exit interview 3•Retention 73•Termination 29•Turnover 97

Unions Total: 200•Collective bargaining 50• Labor unions 108• Labor–management 12

relations• Labor policy 20• Public employee unions 3•Trade unions 48•Union growth 3•Union membership 6•Union organizing 2•Union representation 3•Unionization 18•Unions 153

a. Searched in the fields: “abstract,” “keywords,” and “title.”b. Searched in the fields: “keywords” and “title.”

Appendix (continued)




Author’s Note

This article was prepared for the 30th Anniversary Symposium of the Review of Public Personnel Administration, Jonathan West (Ed.).

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Mehmet Demircioglu and Ryan Graf for their assistance in the preparation of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

Note

1. The information downloaded for each journal varied to some extent. For example, ROPPA did not provide keywords during the early years of its publication so they could not be included in the database for every ROPPA entry.

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Bio

James L. Perry is a distinguished professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, and World Class University Distinguished Professor, Department of Public Administration, Yonsei University. He is recipient of the 2008 Dwight Waldo Award and coeditor of Motivation in Public Management: The Call of Public Service (2008).



Documents

Review of Public Personnel Administrationjlpweb/papers/A Strategic Agenda for Public HR... · Review of Public Personnel Administration 2010 30: 20 originally published online 16