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Employee empowerment practices have been widely adopted in public organizations in Europe, the Pacific Rim, and North America. In this study, employee empowerment is conceptualized as a multifaceted approach composed of various practices aimed at sharing information, resources, rewards, and authority with lower level employees. Self-Determination Theory is used to theorize about the effects of these different empowerment practices on job satisfaction. The results of the empirical analysis, based on 2010 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) data, indicate that empowerment practices aimed at promoting self-determination (i.e., sharing information about goals and performance, providing access to job-related knowledge and skills, and granting discretion to change work processes) have positive and sizable effects on job satisfaction. Conversely, empowerment practices that undermine autonomy (i.e., offering contingent-based rewards) have no meaningful effect on job satisfaction.

Employee empowerment programs have been widely adopted in the public sector as a way to improve organizational performance. Empowered employees improve performance largely by finding innovative ways of correcting errors in service delivery and redesigning work processes. Failure to encourage innovation can seriously undermine the effectiveness of empowerment programs. Based on Bowen and Lawler's conceptualization of employee empowerment as a multifaceted management approach, this study explores how different empowerment practices can be used to encourage US federal government employees to seek out new and better ways of doing things. The empirical results show that while employee empowerment as an overall approach can increase encouragement to innovate, empowerment practices have divergent effects, and some may even discourage innovation. Adapted from the source document.

The last three decades have witnessed the spread of employee empowerment practices throughout the public and private sectors. A growing body of evidence suggests that employee empowerment can be used to improve job satisfaction, organizational commitment, innovativeness, and performance. Nearly all previous empirical studies have analyzed the direct effects of employee empowerment on these outcome variables without taking into account the mediating role of employee attitudes. This article contributes to the growing literature on employee empowerment by proposing and testing a causal model that estimates the direct effect of employee empowerment on performance as well as its indirect effects as mediated by job satisfaction and innovativeness. The empirical analysis relies on three years of data from the Federal Human Capital Survey/Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey and a structural equation modeling approach, including the use of lagged variables. The results support the hypothesized causal structure. Employee empowerment seems to have a direct effect on performance and indirect effects through its influence on job satisfaction and innovativeness, two key causal pathways by which empowerment practices influence behavioral outcomes.

For more than a decade, public organizations have been adopting employee empowerment with the aim of improving performance and job satisfaction and promoting innovativeness. Our understanding of employee empowerment has been hindered by a dearth of empirical research on its uses and consequences in the public sector. Based on Bowen and Lawler's conceptualization of employee empowerment, this study explores the link between various empowerment practices and perceived performance in federal agencies. It is found that empowerment practices aimed at providing employees with access to job-related knowledge and skills and at granting them discretion to change work processes have a positive and substantively significant influence on perceived performance. Other empowerment practices geared toward providing employees with information about goals and performance and offering them rewards based on performance are found, however, to have little bearing on perceptions of performance.

AbstractWe offer evidence that public sector corruption has an inverse association with evaluations of performance at both the local and central government levels. Consistent with ex ante expectations, perceptions of corruption among local government officials are directly and negatively related to performance evaluations at the local government level and relatively less so at the central government level. Conversely, perceptions of corruption among overall government officials have a stronger negative association with performance evaluations of central governments relative to performance evaluations of local governments. These results confirm that individual evaluations of public sector corruption affect perceived government performance evaluations, with local–local, local–central, central–local, and central–central level variances. Regressions by country groups—such as European Union membership, or geographic clusters, such as Southeastern Balkan or the former Soviet Union states—continue to support the core findings with one caveat. Results from two‐level random intercepts and slopes regression models show that the negative association between perceived corruption and government performance evaluation is weaker in contexts with relatively higher levels of public corruption.

The study examines "through‐the‐cycle" stability of S&P and Moody's state credit ratings to national and state level business cycles during 1977–2010. Additionally, the study evaluates the associations between economic concentration and credit quality in a long panel of state credit ratings. The findings suggest that, with other temporal effects held constant, the ratings of S&P and Moody's are not procyclical and are robust to ups and downs in national or state‐specific business cycles. Economic concentration is inversely associated with state credit quality and remains significant for the period of an average business cycle, controlling for national and state economic expansions and contractions.