Adaptation to Externally Driven Change: The Impact of Political Change on Job Satisfaction in the Public Sector

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12204
• Author: Hong T. M. Bui,Fabian Homberg,Vurain Tabvuma
• Published date: 01 May 2014
• Date: 01 May 2014

Vurain Tabvuma is senior lecturer

(associate professor) in the Surrey Business

School at the University of Surrey. His

research focuses on public service motiva-

tion, job satisfaction in the public sector,

and adaptation in organizations. His work

has been published in journals such as

Journal of Public Administration

Research and Theory, Human

Resource Management, Journal of

Vocational Behavior, and Kyklos.

E-mail: v.tabvuma@surrey.ac.uk

Hong T. M. Bui is lecturer in organi-

zational behavior and human resource

management at Southampton Business

School. She completed her doctorate at the

University of East Anglia in 2010. She has a

wide background in economics, education,

and management. Her research interests

cover organizational behavior, learning

organizations, and systems thinking. Her

research has been published in Group

and Organization Management,

Management Learning, International

Journal of Human Resource

Management, Strategic Change, and

The Learning Organization.

E-mail: hong.bui@soton.ac.uk

Fabian Homberg is senior lecturer

at Bournemouth University. He holds a

doctorate from the University of Zurich. His

current research interests are motivation

and incentives in private and public sector

organizations, top management team

diversity, and decision-making biases.

E-mail: fhomberg@bournemouth.ac.uk

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 74, Iss. 3, pp. 384–395. © 2014

The Authors. Public Administration Review

published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on

behalf of The American Society for Public

Administration. DOI: 10.1111/puar.12204.

This is an open access article under the

terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-

NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which

permits use and distribution in any medium,

provided the original work is properly cited,

the use is non-commercial and no modif‌i ca-

tions or adaptations are made.

384 Public Administration Review • May | June 2014

Vurain Tabvuma

University of Surrey, United Kingdom

Hong T. M. Bui

Southampton University, United Kingdom

Vietnam National University, Vietnam

Fabian Homberg

Bournemouth University, United Kingdom

 is article uses a quasi-natural experiment to investigate

the adaptation of job satisfaction to externally driven

political change in the public sector.  is is important

because democratic government bureaucracies often expe-

rience changes in leadership after elections.  e analyses

are based on data drawn from a large longitudinal data

set, the British Household Panel Survey. Findings indi-

cate that the impact of political elections is largely weak

and temporary and is only present for men. For women,

the internal processes of the organization tend to be more

important.  ese f‌i ndings suggest that changes in politi-

cal leadership may not be associated with fundamental

changes in policy.

A

growing literature has begun to investigate

how employee job satisfaction adapts to

events.  ese studies have looked at how

both work-related and non-

work-related events impact job

satisfaction. For example, with

regard to non-work-related

events, job satisfaction has

been shown to respond dif‌f er-

ently over time to life events

such as marriage and having a

f‌i rst child (Georgellis, Lange, and Tabvuma 2012).

Personality, disposition, and work–life conf‌l ict are

non-work-related factors shown to af‌f ect job satisfac-

tion (Dormann and Zapf 2001; Eby et al. 2005; Eby,

Maher, and Butts 2010).

In contrast, studies exploring how job satisfaction

responds to work-related events over time have

focused mainly on job changes and workplace reor-

ganization (Boswell et al. 2009; Chi, Freeman, and

Kleiner 2006; Georgellis and Tabvuma 2010; Nelson,

Cooper, and Jackson 1995; Pollard 2001). Other

studies focusing on work-related factors have analyzed

earnings, working hours, working environment, work-

place socialization, autonomy, organizational control,

and participation in training schemes with respect

to job satisfaction (Agho, Mueller, and Price 1993;

Arthur et al. 2003; Georgellis and Lange 2007).

 ese studies have carried out direct, causal exami-

nations, but they do not explicitly investigate how

job satisfaction adapts to external shocks. While

some research has investigated the impact of external

shocks, such as disability on well-being, these stud-

ies have exclusively focused on life domain and life

satisfaction (Oswald and Powdthavee 2008). Although

the impact of individual factors on job satisfaction is

well known (Davis 2013; Fernandez and Moldogaziev

2013; Liu and Tang 2011; Pitts 2009; Pitts, Marvel,

and Fernandez 2011), evidence on the direct, dynamic

impact of organizational external events on workers’

job satisfaction is virtually nonexistent, especially for

the public sector.

A fundamental determinant of employee job satisfac-

tion is the f‌i t between the employee and his or her

organization. Compatibility of

employees’ values and beliefs

with those of the organization

can result in increased job satis-

faction (Kim 2012; Moynihan

and Pandey 2008).  eories

related to person–organization

(PO) f‌i t cover a wide spectrum

of approaches, including selection and socializa-

tion with PO f‌i t (Chatman 1991), mediation of the

relationship between works attitudes and motivation

(Kim 2012), work values and job choice decisions

(Judge and Bretz 1992), conceptualization and opera-

tionalization of PO f‌i t (Kristof-Brown 1996), and

the f‌i t of employee identity and organizational values

(Johnson and Jackson 2009). However, these stud-

ies largely rely on data that are contemporaneous in

nature instead of direct and causal examinations over

time (Kristof-Brown 1996).

We advance theory on PO f‌i t and approaches to job

satisfaction in the public sector by answering two

questions: (1) How does job satisfaction in the public

sector adapt to external random shocks? And (2) how

does political preference, a form of PO f‌i t, af‌f ect job

satisfaction in the public sector? Whereas the second

Adaptation to Externally Driven Change:  e Impact

of Political Change on Job Satisfaction in the Public Sector

A fundamental determinant of

employee job satisfaction is the

f‌i t between the employee and

his or her organization.