Resource Publicness Matters in Organizational Perceptions

• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Author: Chengxin Xu,Huafang Li
• Date: 01 March 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13369

Research Article

338Public Administration Review • March | Apri l 202 2

Abstract: Publicness theory deepens our understanding of differences and similarities of organizational behavior.

However, in areas in which public, nonprofit, and private organizations compete to serve people, it remains unclear

how the level of dimensional publicness influences individuals’ perceptions and choices of organizations. In this

study, we present evidence from two online experiments examining the way people’s perceptions of resource publicness

(operationalized as government funding, donations, and service fees) of elderly care centers in the U.S. influence

their judgment of organizations and service choices. Findings suggest that people perceive donative organizations to

be the warmest and most competent, followed by government-funded and commercial organizations. We conclude

that individuals’ perceptions of resource publicness lead to different judgment that may influence their service choice

decisions.

Evidence for Practice

• People’s perceptions of a social service organization vary according to its resource publicness: the donative

organization is perceived as the warmest and most competent, followed by its government-funded and

commercial counterparts.

• People’s perceived competence of a social service organization is affected by whether the organization’s

resource publicness aligns its instrumental or prosocial mission.

• People’s perceptions of the resource publicness are similar to that of the ownership publicness.

Theories of publicness were developed to

answer one of the most essential questions

in public organization studies: In what ways

do public and private organizations differ? Since

the 1970s, scholars’ mounting efforts in building

theory and conducting empirical examinations

have made the answer to this question increasingly

comprehensive (Andrews, Boyne and Walker2011;

Bozeman and Bretschneider1994; Bozeman and

Moulton2011; Rainey1979). While the traditional

ownership model of publicness implies that public

organizations behave differently as a consequence of

their legal status (publicly versus privately owned),

the dimensional model theorizes that the levels of

publicness in other of the organization’s dimensions,

including the funding source and political control,

will lead to significantly different organizational

outcomes (Bozeman1987). An early comparison

between the two models showed that both theories of

publicness help explain organizational performance

variations (Bozeman and Bretschneider1994). The

comparison results implied that, given any ownership

status of the organization, strategically managing

dimensional factors can harness the benefits of

publicness.

However, the publicness theory has not yet been

developed fully for people to understand the role

of publicness in organization management and

policy implementation. In particular, to date,

our knowledge about the behavioral implication

of institutional publicness has been fruitful but

insufficient. Most empirical studies of publicness theory

focus on ownership publicness (Andrews, Boyne,

and Walker2011; Hvidman and Andersen2015;

Marvel2016; Meier, Johnson, and An2019). However,

experimental examinations of the relation between

publicness and people’s judgments of the organization

largely ignored the dimensional publicness, which

captures more nuanced variations across organizations

with the same legal status. With the increasing demand

for accountability via transparency, dimensional

publicness that used to be in the black box now has

the potential to influence the public in more direct

ways than before. In a competitive market of social

service delivery, probing the behavioral implication

of organizational publicness from a dimensional

perspective will provide practitioners with more feasible

insights about managing organizations and serving

clients. For example, citizens’ reaction may vary across

organizations with different major revenues. As such,

Resource Publicness Matters in Organizational Perceptions

Chengxin Xu

Huafang Li

Seattle University

Grand Valley State University

Huafang Li is an assistant professor

in the School of Public, Nonprofit &

Health Administration at Grand Valley

State University. His research focuses

on how individuals react to policy and

organizational information.

Email: lih@gvsu.edu

Chengxin Xu is an assistant professor

of the Institute of Public Service at

Seattle University. His research focuses

on sectoral relations of the social service

market, including sector difference,

competition, collaboration, and organization

hybridization. He receives his PhD from

Rutgers University–Newark.

Email: cxu1@seattleu.edu

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 82, Iss. 2, pp. 338–353. © 2021 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13369.

Resource Publicness Matters in Organizational Perceptions 339

public organizations need to communicate strategically with citizens to

encourage effective coproduction (Li2020). Effective communications

can help avoid congestion and unequal delivery of social service by

reducing systematic bias against certain types of organizations.

In this study, we advance the publicness theory by extending the

discussion of dimensional publicness and experimentally testing

the relation between resource publicness and public perceptions of

social service organizations (SSOs). In particular, we investigated

the way the general public reacts to various levels of organizational

resource publicness. Financial resources are a fundamental

component that influences organizational strategies and practices,

and financial information is one of the most important types of

information that influences the public’s reaction (Li2020; Li and

McDougle2017). As major coordinators or contractors of public

services, SSOs in the United States have three major revenue

sources—service fees, donations, and government funding—

which represent three different levels of resource publicness

(Bozeman1987). We propose that people will judge a SSO based

on its resource publicness by using their prototypical understanding

of the revenue source. Previous theories suggest that the level

resource publicness influences organizational behavior and image

through mechanisms within organizations, such as the level of

responsiveness and enforced controls (Andrews, Boyne, and

Walker2011). In contrast, the public outside the organization may

simplify the resource information and form a quick impression of

the organization and then react accordingly.

We conducted two online experiments to demonstrate the way

resource publicness influences people’s perception of a hypothetical

elderly care center, a typical SSO in the United States, and their

subsequent service choices. This study focuses on two psychological

traits—perceived warmth and competence—to capture people’s

perceptual reactions to the focal organization’s resource publicness. As

components of stereotypical content (Fiske, Cuddy and Glick2007),

warmth and competence not only help us link the organizational image

to people’s behavior but also provide practical implications for public

and nonprofit managers to design more specific strategies to enhance

their organizational reputation and legitimacy. In Study 1, we showed

that, ceteris paribus, people’s perceived warmth, and competence of

SSOs varied according to the levels of resource publicness measured by

their major revenues. In Study 2, we confirmed the findings of Study

1 and demonstrated that SSOs’ instrumental or prosocial missions

moderate resource publicness’ effects on people’s perceived competence.

Using these two online experiments, we provided causal evidence of the

effect of the organization’s resource publicness on people’s perceptions

of the organization.

The paper proceeds as follows. After reviewing the literature on

sector differences, ownership, and resource publicness, we propose

a set of hypotheses to test experimentally. We then present two

experiments and their results. The paper concludes with a discussion

of the studies’ theoretical and practical contributions and their

limitations.

Theory

Publicness and Sector Differences

The publicness theory was developed to explain sector differences

(Bozeman1987; Bozeman and Bretschneider1994). Moving

from traditional theoretical guidelines which political economy

approaches provide, Bozeman(1987) proposed a model to address

the publicness puzzle and explain the public-private difference from

an organizational perspective. Theoretically, one organization’s

publicness determines its managerial practices, including strategic

planning, hiring, budgeting, and other related organizational

behavior, and it is argued that the level of publicness influences

organizational performance. Following Bozeman’s(1987)

dimensional framework, scholars have provided considerable

evidence that shows that the performance of public and private

organizations with similar social missions differs. Building on the

dimensional publicness model, Moulton(2009) and Bozeman and

Moulton(2011) extended the publicness framework by integrating

empirical publicness and normative publicness, which provides

a more systematic theoretical foundation to explore the relation

between various levels of publicness and the achievement of public

value.

Resource Publicness

Publicness theory contains both ownership and dimensional

perspectives (Bozeman and Bretschneider1994; Bozeman and

Moulton2011). The ownership publicness assumes that different

organizations’ ownership (public versus private) leads to various

management practices, such as goal setting, the budgetary

process, strategic decision making, organizational culture, etc.

Collectively, these differences contribute to observable differences

in organizational behavior (e.g. Brewer and Brewer Jr2011; Jilke,

van Dooren and Rys2018). Meanwhile, ownership publicness

affects organizations’ internal management and the way citizens

judge their social service delivery performance (e.g. Andrews,

Boyne, and Walker2011; Hvidman and Andersen2015).

However, other empirical comparisons between public, nonprofit,

and private organizations have demonstrated mixed findings of

the relation between an organization’s legal ownership and its

performance and organizational perceptions (Amirkhanyan, Kim,

and Lambright2008; Meier and An2020). Such inconsistencies

imply that other factors, particularly institutional elements that

organizations with different legal status share, may shape the

organizational practice in the same way, and lead to insignificant

differences among organizations (Miller and Moulton2014).

The dimensional publicness theory supplements the ownership

publicness theory. In Bozeman’s dimensional model, resource

publicness is suggested to be one of the key elements that shapes the

focal organization’s level of publicness, which, in turn, determines

its management practices and performance (Bozeman1987). Thus,

resource publicness influences the focal organization in both its

organizational motivation and external control. Organizations with

a higher level of resource publicness are less motivated to maximize

their profits and efficiency and less responsive to the public who

receives the services; instead, they are more responsive to external

controlling forces, such as politicians and governmental sponsors

(Niskanen1971). Weisbrod(1997) pointed out that the revenue

source determines organizational incentives, which influence

organizational behavior further, including the composition of labor

and the production and delivery of types of goods and services.

In addition, organizations may be subject to external controls

and therefore, act under the pressure of resource dependence. For

example, nonprofit organizations that tend to have government