Government Employees: Working Hard or Hardly Working?

Parece que hay temas que son recurrentes en los distintos paises, pero los norteamericanos lo estudian todo, y tambien esto. ¿a que conclusión han llegado? Sorpréndete (se siente, toca ingles):

Government Employees Working Hard or Hardly Working?

Are government employees lazier than private-sector employees? Drawing from theories of work motivation and public service motivation, this article examines three public-private differences that might produce different levels of work effort in the two sectors. First, government and business may offer different extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. Second, public and private workers may seek different rewards. Third, public and private workers may differ in personal characteristics that predict work effort. Using 1989 and 1998 data fromthe General Social Survey, we find that government employees reported slightly higher work effort than those in the private sector. Public- and private-sector workers differ in the value they place on extrinsic and intrinsic motivators, in the rewards their jobs offer, and in some personal characteristics. Government jobs offering interesting work and opportunities to help others, combined with the greater age of public employees, explain most of the sectoral differences in self-reported work effort.

Termina el informe con la siguiente conclusión:

CONCLUSION Despite the strong cultural stereotype that government workers are lazier than those in the private sector, nearly two thirds of the public servants in the GSS reported doing the best work they could, even if it sometimes interfered with the rest of their lives. They were more likely than those in the private sector to report working this hard despite having lower pay, fewer advancement opportunities, and greater job security. In both sectors, interesting work and jobs that offer opportunities to help others were more strongly related to work effort than were pay and promotion chances. This is good news for public agencies, because GSS respondents in government jobs were more likely than those in private-sector jobs to say their jobs offered interesting work and opportunities to help others and to be useful to society, but they were less likely to say their jobs offered high pay and good advancement prospects. Wanting job security was the only extrinsic motivator that even approached statistical significance, and government jobs are widely recognized to be more secure than those in the private sector. These advantages of government jobs, plus the facts that public servants tend to be older than private-sector workers and that older employees report working harder, essentially explain the public-private difference in reported work effort. Does this mean that governments should not use pay to motivate workers? Public employees value intrinsic motivators more than private-sector employees, but the rewards jobs offer seem to matter more than the rewards workers seek (job security is the exception). Interesting jobs that help others are likely to inspire both public- and private-sector workers, and pay and advancement opportunities appear to have no greater impact in the private than in the public sector. Governments have an advantage in providing interesting and useful work, but many private companies can make use of intrinsic motivation. The absence of sectoral differences in the motivational effects of high pay and advancement opportunities suggests either that (a) the link between performance and reward is not appreciably stronger in the private than in the public sector, (b) these extrinsic motivators have little impact on work effort in either sector, or (c) these variables are measured too crudely in this study to capture the size of their effects. To the extent that higher pay and pay for performance have positive effects on motivation, they should have as much effect in the public as in the private sector. Finally, our findings support the widely held belief that the work ethic has declined in recent years—older employees reported working harder than younger ones, and comparable workers were less likely to report the highest level of work effort in 1998 than in 1989. The work ethic has not declined more rapidly in the public sector,18 but federal agencies may be doing more harm than good by offering early retirement and buyouts to their oldest employees. Government must make the most of the motivational rewards it has to offer to attract and retain the hardest working public servants.

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