Impact of “U.S. Veterans' Access, Choice and Accountability Act of 2014” on employee morale and work behavior: Does “creating an at‐will workplace” lead to better outcomes?

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1916
• Author: Hyunkang Hur
• Published date: 01 May 2019
• Date: 01 May 2019

ACADEMIC PAPER

Impact of “U.S. Veterans' Access, Choice and Accountability

Act of 2014”on employee morale and work behavior: Does

“creating an at‐will workplace”lead to better outcomes?

Hyunkang Hur

Department of Public Administration and

Health Management, School of Business,

Indiana University Kokomo, Kokomo, Indiana,

USA

Correspondence

Hyunkang Hur, Department of Public

Administration and Health Management,

School of Business, Indiana University

Kokomo, Washington Street, Kokomo, IN

46902‐9003, USA.

Email: hyunhur@iuk.edu

This study estimates the impact of job security rule changes on federal civilian

employees' work attitudes and behavior (i.e., job satisfaction and turnover intention)

by looking at recent U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)'s Veterans' Access,

Choice and Accountability Act (VACAA) of 2014. The data for the analysis are derived

from the 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014, and 2015 U.S. Federal Employee Viewpoint

Surveys. A difference‐in‐differences quasiexperimental methodology was used to

examine the effect of a job security rule change on VA employee job satisfaction

and turnover intention. This study's results indicate that the overall effect of the

introduction of a new job security rule at VA is a decrease of approximately 7

percentage points in employee job satisfaction and 8 percentage points in employee

turnover intention, which are a substantial effect. This study contributes to both

the theoretical and the empirical understanding of at‐will employment systems and

public employee work morale and attitudes.

1|INTRODUCTION

In the recent past, a new generation of civil service reforms has been

witnessed in both federal and state governments. At‐will employment

(AWE) systems are one the most of notable of these new reforms.

AWE was first established in Georgia during the mid‐1990s and later

in Florida as well as some selected federal agencies (the most notable

being the Transportation Security Administration). This change has

already been enacted by other departments, such as the Department

of Homeland Security, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Inter-

nal Revenue Service, and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

According to Coggburn et al. (2010, p. 190), recent reforms

involve restraining the employees' procedural due process rights by

limiting their access to mechanisms of presenting grievances and

appeals or by completely removing those rights and making employ-

ment “at will.”

All of these new state and federal civil service reforms differ from

traditional civil service in one crucial respect: They eliminated long‐

standing job security rules (i.e., traditional civil service job protections).

By the 1970s, job security diffused almost universally throughout the

U.S. public sector. Equally important, it was a practice that had

persisted for almost a century in many jurisdictions. Job security for

public employees had become institutionalized; that is, it had under-

gone “the process through which components of formal structure

become widely accepted, as both appropriate and necessary, and

serve to legitimate organizations”(Tolbert & Zucker, 1983, p. 25).

By contrast, the elimination of job security in the recent reforms

in the VA, as well as in Georgia and Florida, has caused apprehension

among employees of this new era. Recent developments, at least in

the United States, indicate that we are at the beginning of a process

that will reverse long‐standing job security rules (Condrey & Battaglio,

2007). In 2007, Condrey and Battaglio observed that AWE practices

have diffused significantly in the United States, tempered by the

strength of public employee unions. However, research focusing spe-

cifically on the consequences of different job security arrangements

and their effects on employees is limited (Jordan & Battaglio, 2014).

This study estimates the impact of job security rule changes on federal

civilian employees' work attitudes and behavior (i.e., job satisfaction

and turnover intention) by looking at recent U.S. VA's Veterans'

Access, Choice and Accountability Act (VACAA) of 2014. Although

the VA's VACAA occurred 4 years ago and no longer exists, creating

at‐will workplace system at the VA created an opportunity for a natu-

rally occurring experiment that could significantly advance our under-

standing of the effects of AWE and job security rule change.

Received: 20 December 2018 Accepted: 3 January 2019

DOI: 10.1002/pa.1916

J Public Affairs. 2019;19:e1916.

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1916

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa 1of7