Empowerment in the Public Sector: Testing the Influence of Goal Orientation

• Date: 01 December 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0091026018819020
• Published date: 01 December 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0091026018819020

Public Personnel Management

2019, Vol. 48(4) 443 –470

© The Author(s) 2018

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DOI: 10.1177/0091026018819020

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Article

Empowerment in the Public

Sector: Testing the Influence

of Goal Orientation

Beatriz García-Juan1, Ana B. Escrig-Tena1,

and Vicente Roca-Puig1

Abstract

Empowerment has emerged as an important new issue in the public sector organization

setting in the wake of mainstream new public management (NPM). Nevertheless,

few studies in this frame have combined structural (managerial) and psychological

(individual) approaches in an integrative study of empowerment. There is also a need

to examine the moderating variables involved in this relationship, as well as to extend

research on work motivation in public management. This study explores the effect

of structural empowerment on psychological empowerment, and it also draws on

goal orientation (GO) theory to examine the moderating role of employees’ GO in

this link. The model is tested on a sample of 521 Spanish local authority employees.

The results do not confirm the direct link between structural and psychological

empowerment, but show that learning GO has considerable moderating power in

this relationship, and its interaction with structural empowerment affects employees’

psychological empowerment levels.

Keywords

structural empowerment, psychological empowerment, goal orientation, moderating

effect, public administration

Introduction

Empowerment is a key element within new public management (NPM; Fernandez &

Moldogaziev, 2013), the new orientation in the public sector that aims to provide a

better service for citizens (Nicholson-Crotty, Nicholson-Crotty, & Fernandez, 2017).

1Universitat Jaume I, Castelló de la Plana, Spain

Corresponding Author:

Beatriz García-Juan, Department of Business Administration and Marketing, Universitat Jaume I, Av. de

Vicent Sos Baynat, s/n, Castelló de la Plana 12071, Spain.

Email: bjuan@uji.es

819020PPMXXX10.1177/0091026018819020Public Personnel ManagementGarcía-Juan et al.

research-article2018

444 Public Personnel Management 48(4)

In many countries, the public sector has undergone reforms attempting to change the

structure, way of management, and even the culture of public administration

(Üstüner & Coşkun, 2004; Worthington & Dollery, 2001), as well as the manage-

ment of people (Truss, 2013). Peters and Savoie (1996) describe how the current

form of government proposes more decentralized organizations and more empow-

ered employees at all levels of the hierarchy. Thus, empowerment has reemerged as

a component of significant government reforms around the world (Brewer &

Kellough, 2016). It is closely linked to the drive to enhance organizational effective-

ness through the wise use of human resources (Siegall & Gardner, 2000), and in this

sense, many studies have found positive effects of implementing empowerment

(see, for example, Maynard, Gilson, & Mathieu, 2012). Overall, as Dimitriades

(2005) notes, it “is essential to the constant change and learning that characterize

today’s global organizational environment” (p. 80).

Nevertheless, and despite the numerous studies on the subject and the importance

attributed to empowerment, it “is a tricky concept to grasp” (Matthews, Diaz, & Cole,

2003, p. 315), and no single definition has been agreed on (Petter, Byrnes, Choi,

Fegan, & Miller, 2002). Empowerment has, therefore, been examined from several

separate perspectives (H.-F. Chen & Chen, 2008; Dimitriades & Maroudas, 2007;

Mathieu, Gilson, & Ruddy, 2006), although two main approaches can be distin-

guished: structural and psychological. The structural perspective views empower-

ment as a set of practices, conditions, policies, and structures that enable the transfer

of power and authority from higher levels of the organization to lower levels, increas-

ing access to information and resources (Bowen & Lawler, 1992; Mathieu et al.,

2006). It is “a managerial-initiated, socio-structural phenomenon” (Biron &

Bamberger, 2010, p. 164); hence, it refers to empowering managerial practices.

Overall, it constitutes the “macro” approach to empowerment (Biron & Bamberger,

2010). The psychological perspective, in contrast, is based on Bandura’s (1977) work

on self-efficacy (Maynard et al., 2012), and defines empowerment as “a process of

enhancing feelings of self-efficacy among organizational members through the iden-

tification of conditions that foster powerlessness and through their removal by both

formal organizational practices and informal techniques of providing efficacy infor-

mation” (Conger & Kanungo, 1988, p. 474). Following this idea, Thomas and

Velthouse (1990) describe empowerment “as increased intrinsic task motivation” (p.

666). This perspective considers the individual employee level, representing the

“micro” approach to empowerment (Biron & Bamberger, 2010),

Many authors (e.g., Laschinger, Finegan, & Shamian, 2001; Mathieu et al., 2006;

Maynard et al., 2012; Menon, 2001) argue that these two perspectives must be linked

to arrive at a broader understanding of the empowerment process. The few recent

studies that have dealt with this issue have positioned structural empowerment prac-

tices as antecedents of psychological empowerment (e.g., Hempel, Zhang, & Han,

2012; Seibert, Silver, & Randolph, 2004). However, public sector scholars have paid

little attention to the study of empowerment in general, calling for more studies in

this field (Carless, 2004), and pointing to the lack of research on the relationship

between structural and psychological empowerment (Cho & Faerman, 2010).