Employee Engagement as Administrative Reform: Testing the Efficacy of the OPM's Employee Engagement Initiative

• Published date: 01 May 2019
• Date: 01 May 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13033

Employee Engagement as Administrative Reform: Testing the Eff‌icacy of the OPM’s Employee Engagement Initiative 355

Abstract: Researchers have long recognized administrative reform as a constant feature of American public

administration. The employee engagement initiative of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has

become one of the most prominent administrative reforms underway in the federal government. Like many reforms,

the veracity of claims about this reform have gone untested. This article addresses this gap by testing the relationship

between the OPM’s employee engagement initiative and agency performance. After establishing the psychometric

validity of the OPM’s Employment Engagement Index, the authors use a five-year panel data set of federal agencies

and two-way fixed-effects regression to test the efficacy of this prominent reform. The analysis shows that efforts to

encourage employee engagement generally have the expected relationship with performance, but the relationship varies

according to the components that make up the index and the organizational level at which these efforts are expended.

Evidence for Practice

• Administrative reforms are being adopted throughout the world with the aim of increasing employee

engagement and, in turn, improving organizational performance.

• Supportive managerial practices aimed at getting employees to become more engaged with their work—such

as listening to employees, treating them with respect, communicating expectations, and promoting growth

and development—can lead to higher performance.

• In the U.S. federal government, efforts to engage employees have culminated in the Office of Personnel

Management’s Employee Engagement Index (EEI). While the EEI is not a measure of psychological

engagement, scores on this index do relate positively to measures of organizational performance.

Taha Hameduddin

Indiana University Bloomington

Sergio Fernandez

University of Pretoria

University of Johannesburg

Indiana University Bloomington

Employee Engagement as Administrative Reform:

Testing the Efficacy of the OPM’s Employee

Engagement Initiative

Sergio Fernandez is associate

professor in the School of Public and

Environmental Affairs at Indiana University,

extraordinary professor in the School of

Public Management and Administration

at the University of Pretoria, and visiting

professor in the Centre for Public

Management and Governance at the

University of Johannesburg. His research

focuses on organizational behavior in the

public sector, representative bureaucracy,

and government outsourcing.

E-mail: sefernan@indiana.edu

Taha Hameduddin is a PhD candidate

in the School of Public and Environmental

Affairs at Indiana University. His research

interests include administrative reform,

employee attitudes and behavior, and

their relationship with organizational

performance and the external environment

of public organizations.

E-mail: hamt@iu.edu

Research Article

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 79, Iss. 3, pp. 355–369. © 2019 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13033.

Kettl (2005) argues that if there is a constant in

today’s globalizing world, it is the rapid

pace of government reform. Researchers

have long recognized reform and reorganization as

a central theme of American public administration.

Stillman (1990) argues that the stateless origins

of public administration in the United States and

elements of its constitutional design, including

its relative silence on administrative matters, have

necessitated an inductive and experimental approach

to public administration (see also Waldo 1948). Over

the course of the nation’s history, administrative

practices and structures have risen and fallen in

response to the needs of the state. In this spirit,

the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM)

recently began championing a government-wide

initiative to engender organizational conditions

that foster employee engagement. By encouraging

organizational leaders to create a positive

organizational climate that engages employees, the

OPM believes that federal agencies can improve

performance, increase job satisfaction, and reduce

voluntary turnover (OPM 2015a).

It is important to consider the OPM’s employee

engagement initiative and explore its efficacy for

several reasons. First, this initiative has moved to the

front and center of the OPM’s efforts to enhance the

capacity and performance of the federal bureaucracy

and is now among the most prominent administrative

reforms underway in the federal government.

Since 2010, the OPM has included the Employee

Engagement Index (EEI) in its highly publicized

Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) and

emphasizes the importance of improving agency scores

on this index. In addition, the OPM and other large

agencies offer training programs and guidance on how

to use the EEI to create an engaged federal workforce.1

Agency scores on the index have made for popular

press and have also become key topics of consideration

at both U.S. House and Senate hearings,2 pointing to

the significance of this initiative. Indeed, considering

the relative lack of performance data on federal

agencies since the discontinuation of the Program

Assessment Rating Tool (PART), the OPM’s EEI has

emerged as an important proxy for the effectiveness of

federal agencies.