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Keywords
- Panel data; Methodology for collecting, estimating, and organizing microeconomic data; Infrastructures; Other Public Investment and Capital Stock; Comparison of Public and Private Enterprises; Privatization; Contracting out; Natural Resources; Energy (1)
- corporatization, public corporate governance, state-owned enterprise, executive director pay, politicization (1)
- public human resource management, performance-related pay, public service motivation, employer branding, recruitment, vertical pay dispersion, public administration, state-owned enterprises (1)
Employees of public sector organizations serve as the backbone of democratic societies, making decisions that shape how and for whom vital public services are delivered. Public employees influence the realization of political goals and provide basic public goods as well as critical infrastructure. They are of high societal relevance as they represent the “human face of the state” and should incorporate public values to enable, serve, and protect the democratic system and the rule of law. According to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 16, effective public institutions must pay attention to employees as their most critical resource.
The public sector––the largest or among the largest employers in most countries––faces a looming human resource crisis. Public employers face the need to replace a wave of baby boomers retiring and a decline in the number of people interested in working in the public sector. The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the shortage of professionals and leaders in the example of critical infrastructure such as public health authorities, hospitals, and social services.
As a major field of research and practice, public human resource management (HRM) aims to understand these challenges and develop adequate coping strategies. However, the field faces relevant research gaps. Among other factors, the current scientific understanding is limited regarding the role of differences amongst organizational types in the public sector. Although previous research indicates the role of organizational goals and publicness dimensions for human resource practices in general, there is a lack of understanding to what extent the effects of motivation and pay dispersion differ, for example, between public administrations and state-owned enterprises (SOEs).
The goal of this dissertation is to enhance the theoretical understanding of the role of motivation and pay dispersion for performance and recruitment focusing on differences amongst organizational types in the public sector, to derive theoretical perspectives on an integrated steering of human resources of public administration and SOEs.
Overall, this dissertation highlights three contributions of the four included articles. First, it shows the important conceptual role of SOEs as research objects and offers approaches to further integrate SOEs as research objects in public HRM, taking into account the different institutional arrangements of public service provision, as organizational goals and publicness can be crucial and insightful determinants for motivation and pay dispersion. Second, the presented work offers new theoretical approaches and field-experimental insights for the under-researched public sector recruitment literature. Third, it derives theoretical perspectives on an integrated steering of human resources of public administration and SOEs as well as implications for future research on motivation and pay dispersion as major factors for performance and recruitment in public sector organizations.
Die wirtschaftliche Betätigung der öffentlichen Hand erfolgt vorwiegend mithilfe von öffentlichen Unternehmen. Diese erhalten damit ihre praktische Relevanz für die Forschung und auch evidenzbasierte Praxis durch ihre wirtschaftliche Bedeutung. Privatisierungen und Rekommunalisierungen wiederum sind ein Teil dieses Themenkomplexes und beleuchten nicht weniger als die Frage, wie sich diese öffentliche Leistungserbringung im Zeitverlauf verändert. Wenngleich zu den verschiedenen Aspekten der Privatisierungsforschung bereits ein umfassender Beitrag existiert, ist zu Rekommunalisierungen bisher wenig bekannt, begonnen bei Daten zur Einschätzung des Umfangs dieses Phänomens, aber auch zu deren Wirkung, d.h. welche Effekte mit diesen Veränderungen der öffentlichen wirtschaftlichen Betätigung einhergehen.
Die Kernanliegen der vorliegenden Arbeit sind damit einerseits ein erstmaliger systematischer Überblick zum Umfang von Rekommunalisierungen und andererseits auch ein umfassender quantitativempirischer Beitrag zu Wirkungen von Rekommunalisierungen am Beispiel der Stromversorgung in Deutschland.
Die vorliegende Arbeit vergrößert damit das empirische Wissen zu Rekommunalisierungen, zum einen dadurch, dass sie einen empirischen Beitrag zur Abschätzung des Umfangs von Rekommunalisierungen in Deutschland schafft, hierdurch bisherige Beiträge fortschreibt und den Blickwinkel durch einen systematischen Erhebungsansatz und die Einbeziehung von Anteilserhöhungen als weitere Form der Rekommunalisierung vergrößert. Das hierauf aufbauend erhobene Panel stellt zum anderen ein Alleinstellungsmerkmal dar, es verknüpft erstmals Daten des Sachziels zur öffentlichen Leistungserbringung mit dem Finanzziel und auch der Public Corporate Governance. Außerdem werden mithilfe des Panels Entwicklungen im Zeitverlauf sichtbar und deren Effekte analysiert. Ergänzend erfolgt durch die Erhebung erstmalig eine systematische Auswertung der finanziellen Verfasstheit der Rekommunalisierungen, was Abschätzungen zu Wechselwirkungen und potenziellen Belastungen für öffentliche Haushalte zulässt. Die Arbeit kann damit auch einen konzeptionellen Ankerpunkt für zukünftige Forschung darstellen, z.B. hinsichtlich der Fortführung der Erhebung und Analyse oder der Erweiterung um ergänzende Fragestellungen.
Abschließend vergrößert die vorliegende Arbeit das theoretische Wissen dahingehend, dass zur Betrachtung der Frage nach den Auswirkungen der Veränderung der öffentlichen wirtschaftlichen Betätigung eine Unterscheidung zwischen Kommunalisierungen und Rekommunalisierungen irrelevant ist und eine Zusammenführung dieses Forschungsstrangs mit denen zu Nationalisation sowie Reverse Privatisation und auch der Corporatisation im Kontext der Neuen Institutionenökonomik gewinnbringend wäre. Rekommunalisierungen und Privatisierung sind demnach nicht als zwei gegensätzliche Pole oder Phänomene zu betrachten, sondern stellen vielmehr zwei Seiten desselben Phänomens dar.
Ergänzend zu dem Beitrag für die Forschung, liefert die Arbeit auch Ableitungen für die evidenzgestützte Steuerung von und den Umgang mit Rekommunalisierungen.
Public sector reforms have made the corporatization of public services a global phenomenon. Worldwide, public corporations provide critical services and infrastructures for citizen’s daily lives. In many countries, public corporations represent a substantial portion of both gross domestic product and employment. The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the high societal relevance of public corporations in areas such as social/health care, mobility, and digitalization. The United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development emphasizes public corporations as key actors with role-model functions in the promotion and implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Standing midway between in-house provision and privatization, the corporatization of public services has high potential to improve public service performance by enhancing managerial autonomy and professionalism while maintaining political control. However, the independent corporate status of public corporations and their operations outside the traditional administrative system induce far-reaching governance challenges.
Being a substantial research and practice area, public corporate governance aims to provide perspectives on how public authorities could exercise their ownership function in order to ensure that public corporations act in accordance with public interest. It is executive directors in particular—occupying positions of great autonomy, power, and discretion—who play a key role in the governance of public corporations. This field, however, still has significant research gaps—one of which is the significant lack of theoretical understanding about how far different governance mechanisms could effectively mitigate critical issues in public corporate governance that are associated with the higher autonomy of executive directors operating in either profit-making or not profit-making public corporation forms.
The overarching research connections of this dissertation aims to enhance the theoretical understanding of instrumental and personnel governance of executive directors in corporatized public service provision and to derive theoretical perspectives on governance differences between profit-making and not profit-making public corporation forms.
Overall, this dissertation makes three key contributions. First, it elaborates novel perspectives of different governance mechanisms in the public corporation context by introducing a conceptual differentiation of instrumental and personnel governance. In this context, the dissertation enhances theoretical understanding and provides empirical findings on the effects of self-regulation and law as well as on the role of executive director characteristics in recruitment, pay, and turnover. Second, the presented work broadens the theoretical understanding of the interdependencies between different personnel and instrumental governance mechanisms, providing insights regarding their critical impact on the realization of policies and good public corporate governance at the executive director level. Third, this dissertation enriches the recent theoretical debates about the governance of decentralized public sector organizations by focusing on the increasingly relevant but still widely neglected organizational type “public corporation” and by accounting for governance differences between profit-making and not profit-making public corporation forms.
