Good Governance Practices in Professional Associations for Public Employees: Evidence of a Public Service Ethos?

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12264
• Date: 01 November 2014
• Author: Beth Gazley
• Published date: 01 November 2014

Beth Gazley is associate professor in

the School of Public and Environmental

Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington.

Her research addresses governance,

volunteerism, intersectoral collaboration,

coproduction of public services through

charities, and nonprof‌i t management

capacity. Since 2007 she has been

collaborating with the American Society

of Association Executives on research,

coauthoring The Decision to Volunteer

(2008), The Decision to Give (2010),

and What Makes High-Performing

Boards (2013) and coediting a special

issue of Nonprof‌i t and Voluntary

Sector Quarterly on membership

organizations.

E-mail: bgazley@indiana.edu

736 Public Administration Review • November | December 2014

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 74, Iss. 6, pp. 736–747. © 2014 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12264.

Beth Gazley

Indiana University

Professional associations and occupational societies play

an important role in educating and credentialing public

employees. Very little research has attempted to connect,

empirically, a public service ethos to the professional

memberships that public employees carry. Nowhere is that

potential inf‌l uence more likely to be seen than in the gov-

erning boards of these nonprof‌i t associations, whose behav-

ior is subject to strong normative and mimetic inf‌l uences

as a result of the public’s expectations for good governance.

 is article uses a large generalizable sample of boards of

directors, controlling for many organizational character-

istics known to inf‌l uence board behavior, to compare the

governance practices of professional and trade associations

serving public employees with those serving the private sec-

tor.  e results suggest that governance practices are shaped

by many forces but that public employees do indeed carry

their public values into the associations they join, and these

values, in turn, are positively related to board behavior.

Professionals—def‌i ned as individuals working

in a “reasonably clear-cut occupational f‌i eld”—

represent an important source of human capital

in public service (Mosher 1982, 115).  e profes-

sional and occupational societies that serve these

individuals also play an important role in educating,

training, and credentialing public service occupations

such as health, education, and law enforcement and in

advocating for member interests in the public policy

arena. Yet little is known about them and their impact

on the professions. Scholars have noted the dearth of

empirical research on associations and, particularly,

on those serving government employees, such as the

sample analyzed here (Haynes and Gazley 2011;

Knoke 1986; Tschirhart 2006).

 is article addresses the research

gap by examining one promi-

nent aspect of associations—

their governance structures—in

the context of predominantly

public employee memberships.

 e research question is this:

given the greater expectations

imposed on them by citizens, do boards of directors of

professional associations serving public sector employ-

ees perform any better than boards of associations

serving mainly private sector professionals with respect

to the adoption of “good governance” practices?  ese

practices encompass the board structures, processes, and

behaviors such as training, policies, and performance

assessment that help a board achieve desirable attributes

such as good relations with stakeholders, public trust,

and high performance.

 is line of research helps connect the research on

associational activity with ongoing discussions about

a public service ethos. Perry, Hondeghem, and Wise

(2010) posit that some individuals are predisposed to

public sector employment based on the values they

hold and that, once employed in the public sector,

they participate in ways ref‌l ective of values impor-

tant in the public sector. Professional associations are

thought to help socialize public employees into ethical

behavior (Pandey and Stazyk 2008), but the reverse

inf‌l uence has received less attention. Specif‌i cally, do

public sector employees carry those values into their

professional memberships as well? Very little research

on publicness has attempted to connect, empirically, a

public service ethos to the professional memberships

that public employees carry. Yet it is possible that in

associations in which government employees predomi-

nate, so do their public sector values.

Professional Associations

in the United States

Associations are the common name for private sector

organizations serving some collective interest. Most are

not-for-prof‌i t, including home-

owners associations, producer

cooperatives, religious con-

gregations, recreational clubs,

fraternities and sororities, and

political organizations.  ey are

recognized under the 501(c)(3),

(c)(4), (c)(5), or (c)(6) sections

of the U.S. tax code depending

Good Governance Practices in Professional Associations for

Public Employees: Evidence of a Public Service Ethos?

Very little research on

publicness has attempted to

connect, empirically, a public

service ethos to the profes-

sional memberships that public

employees carry.