Employee Engagement Among Public Employees: Exploring the Role of the (Perceived) External Environment

• Date: 01 September 2021
• Author: Taha Hameduddin
• DOI: 10.1177/02750740211010346
• Published date: 01 September 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/02750740211010346

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DOI: 10.1177/02750740211010346

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Article

The study of public employees and their behavior draws from

a variety of rich research streams. Some of these include the

study of bureaucratic behavior, political control, and deci-

sion-making, derived from the field of political science

(Waterman et al., 1998; Weingast & Moran, 1983), while

another concerns the motivations and psychological attitudes

of public employees, derived from the study of employees in

the workplace (Demircioglu & Berman, 2019; Fernandez &

Moldogaziev, 2013; Hameduddin & Lee, 2021). The latter

has borrowed heavily from the study of business manage-

ment, applied psychology, and human resource management

(Boselie et al., 2019), although more recently, scholars have

developed models uniquely grounded in the context of public

organizations (Perry, 2000; Vigoda-Gadot et al., 2013).

What is missing, however, is an examination of how

forces in the external environment and their perceptions (such

as, citizens, recipients of public services, and the media)

influence the attitudes and motivation of public employees.

Instead, a great deal of research has focused on internal orga-

nizational factors such as human resource management prac-

tices, organizational support, leadership, job design, and

individual employee behavior (Bellé, 2014; Demircioglu &

Chowdhury, 2020; Jin & McDonald, 2017). Relatedly, while

a rich body of research on citizen-state interactions (Jakobsen

et al., 2016) has devoted attention to citizen coproduction, use

of performance information, and how public organizations

respond to reputational threats in media (Maor & Sulitzeanu-

Kenan, 2015), to date this research has not “connect[ed]

the dots” (Pandey & Wright, 2006, p. 511) between external

environmental forces and employee motivation and morale.

Existing research on external environmental factors and

attitudes has paid limited attention to factors such as politi-

cal support, i.e., monitoring, budget cuts, and/or increased

administrative burdens (Davis & Stazyk, 2015). This study

expands on this work but also considers the roles of public

opinion and media representation, the more diffuse, sym-

bolic, and general sentiments toward public agencies that

employees consume (Purcell et al., 2017). These sentiments

influence both organizational reputation and media framing,

which are important sources of legitimacy for public organi-

zations (Carpenter, 2010; Wæraas & Byrkjeflot, 2012).

To address this gap, this article explores how perceptions

of public support influence employee engagement, and the

moderating influences of three external organizational fac-

tors: public opinion, media representation, and political

salience. In doing so, it leverages both primary and secondary

1010346ARPXXX10.1177/02750740211010346The American Review of Public AdministrationHameduddin

research-article2021

1Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore

Corresponding Author:

Taha Hameduddin, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National

University of Singapore, 469B Bukit Timah Road, Singapore 259771.

Email: taha@nus.edu.sg

Employee Engagement Among Public

Employees: Exploring the Role of the

(Perceived) External Environment

Taha Hameduddin1

Abstract

While previous public management research has focused on how leadership, managerial behavior, job characteristics, and

human resource management policies influence employee attitudes and behavior, we know little about the role of the external

environment (both perceived and actual). By comparison, research on the external environment of public organizations has

mostly focused on performance, organizational structure, and goal ambiguity. This article connects these two streams of

research, develops a theoretical model to examine whether perceived environmental support (PES) influences employee

engagement and considers the moderating roles of public opinion, media, and political salience. The findings suggest that PES

does matter for the level of employee engagement and that this influence is moderated by political salience. This in turn has

implications for how public organizations motivate their employees, manage their external reputations, and navigate their

external environments. The paper ends with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of the findings and

limitations of the study.

Keywords

employee engagement, public opinion, media, reputation, support, environment

2021, Vol. 51(7) 526–541

data on news media, public opinion, and public employee

attitudes. An ordinary least squares regression revealed that

while perceptions of public support do positively predict

employee engagement, greater levels of political salience

weaken this relationship. In addition, media representation

positively predicted employee engagement.

The paper proceeds as follows: I first review the literature

on employee engagement, articulate the construct of per-

ceived environmental support (PES), and then present ways

in which it may influence engagement. I then turn to the

moderating influence of three factors in the external environ-

ment. The paper then discusses the methodology and results,

and concludes with implications for public administration

research, theory, and practice.

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement, defined as “. . . the harnessing of

organization members’ selves to their work roles . . . physi-

cally, cognitively, and emotionally” (Kahn, 1990, p. 694),

has emerged as a construct of importance for a number of

reasons. First, recent scholarship has linked higher levels of

employee engagement to desirable organizational outcomes,

such as higher profitability, productivity, customer satisfac-

tion, and lower employee turnover (Harter et al., 2002); task

and organizational performance (Hameduddin & Fe rnandez,

2019); and organizational citizenship behavior (Rich et al.,

2010). Second, engagement efforts have spread through

the governmental and private sectors (Welch, 2011) and

gained a foot hold in the public sectors of the United States,

United Kingdom, Canada, and other advanced economies

(Hameduddin & Fernandez, 2019; Organisation for Economic

Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2016).

However, management scholars and practitioners have

diverged on the definition of engagement. Practitioners—

most notably Gallup—have conceptualized it as a set of

manipulatable managerial behaviors representing the ante-

cedents or drivers of employee engagement, as a way to offer

managers practical guidance (Harter et al., 2002). However,

as Christian et al. (2011) noted, these measures represent

assessments of features of the job and the workplace, and

are thus not rooted by Kahn’s (1990) conceptualization of

employee engagement.

Scholarly research, on the contrary, has considered

engagement as constituting dimensions of vigor or energy

that one brings toward their job roles, absorption in particu-

lar work tasks, and task dedication in spite of failure

(Schaufeli et al., 2002). This conceptualization—the one

used by this study—centers engagement around a height-

ened and energetic state in which individuals are able to

express themselves fully in the performance of work tasks,

thus leading to flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997) and absorp-

tion (Christian et al., 2011; Kahn, 1990).

However, given the decontextualized nature of employee

attitudes research (Fletcher et al., 2020), we know very little

about how employee engagement in either public or private

organizations is influenced by factors in the external envi-

ronment. As Pandey and Wright (2006) note, while organi-

zational behavior examines individual-level behavior at the

expense of external considerations, public management,

drawing from political science, has focused on democratic

control of bureaucracy through external actors, without

determining how such control translates into individual-

level behavior.

It is important to connect these two into a single stream of

research. Evidence shows that public organizations do face

unsupportive external environments (Garrett et al., 2006;

Goodsell, 2003), and that this affects the morale of public

employees (Melton, 2011). These environmental influences

may make their way down to individual attitudes of employ-

ees, informing subsequent decision-making and behavior.

The following section reviews these sources of influence in

the external environment and hypothesizes how these may

influence employee engagement.

PES

Although public administration scholars have examined

support from within the organization, there is a paucity of

research on broad public support emerging from the external

environment (Melton, 2017 is an exception). Instead, schol-

ars have tested whether political support matters for how

public managers behave, and whether they influence organi-

zational performance through network management behav-

iors. Pandey and colleagues explored the effects of political

environment on goal ambiguity and the behavior of public

managers (Pandey & Wright, 2006; Yang & Pandey, 2009),

finding that public managers interpret political support by

elected officials as a signal of trust, which drives them toward

their organization’s goals and influences organizational and

individual-level outcomes (Yang & Pandey, 2009). O’Toole

and Meier (1999) argued that organizational/program out-

comes are determined by past performance, as well as mana-

gerial actions designed to buffer shocks from the external

environment, exploit the external environment, and aid in

organizational stability. This model was supported by subse-

quent research on the impact of management networking

(Meier & O’Toole, 2003) and validates the findings of

research on the impacts of public management networking

and collaboration (Agranoff & McGuire, 2003).

Although these examples apply the external political

environment to the performance of public organizations,

they do not consider whether public managers actually feel

supported in the external environment or connect this

support to motivation or performance. In this context, PES

refers to whether public employees feel supported by actors

in the external environment, including citizens and politi-

cians (Melton, 2017). These feelings of support, Melton

(2017) argues, would influence legitimacy and resource

dependence and subsequently inform organizational

Hameduddin 527