Purpose
The aim of the study is to review the extant literature on International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) adoption in emerging economies (EEs) and low-income countries (LICs) (“what ...do we know?”), and to propose an agenda for future research (“what do we need to know?”).
Design/methodology/approach
An analytical framework that builds on diffusion theory is developed. The authors follow the “PRISMA Flow Diagram” to reduce a total of 427 articles from four databases to a final sample of 41 articles. These studies are examined, aided by the analytical framework.
Findings
The authors find that IPSASs are a relevant issue for EEs/LICs. Overall, existing research is often explorative. The authors discover that the majority of articles rely on secondary data collection. While two-thirds of the studies perform a content analysis of pre-existing material, about one-fifth of the articles each collect primary data through means of interviews and questionnaires. The findings offer a holistic understanding of where and at what stages IPSAS reforms stand in EEs/LICs, and what factors influence the progression of reforms to the next stage of diffusion.
Originality/value
The authors outline a number of avenues for further research after discussing the dominating trends and structuring the literature based on our analytical framework. These stem from looking at the blank spots and an identified need to contextualise IPSASs adoption in EEs/LICs.
Public sector accounting developments have been mainly driven by reforms and innovations developed in the private sector. There is a growing trend internationally to adapt private sector accounting ...standards to the public sector context. However, there are some transactions that simply do not resemble private criteria. This article reflects on two of these-concessionary leases and right-of-use assets in-kind. Importantly, the use of market values in these cases may result in financial statements that could mislead the user. The article provides interesting insights for practitioners and standard-setting boards, who need to be aware of the risks when adapting accrual accounting principles to public sector entities.
How citizens behave toward public sector workers is crucial for the well‐being and performance of workers. Scholars have mainly focused on understanding negative citizen behaviors, such as ...aggression. We study a positive behavior, namely compassionate behavior. We study real compassionate behavior in the form of writing positive encouragement messages that are distributed to social workers in the field. We test if showing difficulties faced by public sector workers results in citizens writing more encouragement messages. We also test if bureaucrat bashing results in less encouragement messages. Using a preregistered experiment among a representative sample of Canadian citizens (n = 1,264), we find that showing public sector workers' struggles and imperfections makes citizens almost twice as likely to write an encouragement message. Hence, showing your weakness can be a strength. Bureaucrat bashing, however, has no effect. Results show that citizens can be stimulated to act more positively toward public sector workers.
In all modern bureaucracies, politicians retain some discretion in public employment decisions, which may lead to frictions in the selection process if political connections substitute for individual ...competence. Relying on detailed matched employer-employee data on the universe of public employees in Brazil over 1997–2014, and on a regression discontinuity design in close electoral races, we establish three main findings. First, political connections are a key and quantitatively large determinant of employment in public organizations, for both bureaucrats and frontline providers. Second, patronage is an important mechanism behind this result. Third, political considerations lead to the selection of less competent individuals.
PurposeThis study examines the effects of perceived leadership styles on the perceived creativity and innovation of public servants working in a rapidly developing country while shedding light on the ...internal causal dynamics of these effects.Design/methodology/approachSurvey data are collected from 568 Qatari public servants working in a variety of public sector organizations. Data are analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM) employing SmartPLS.FindingsA significant relationship between perceived leadership styles and public servants' self-perceived creativity is found, with psychological empowerment as a mediating variable. Public servants that perceive their leaders as conveying transformational, transactional and servant leadership styles are found to have significantly higher self-perceived creativity, whereas authentic leadership does not have a significant positive effect. This finding indicates that transformational, transactional and servant leadership styles appear to impact public servants' creativity. This impact corresponds with findings from research on the relationship between leadership styles and creativity in the private sector. The results of this study confirmed the mediating effect of psychological empowerment, apart from authentic leadership.Originality/valueThe findings shed light on the relationship between perceived leadership styles and the self-perceived creativity of public servants working in a rapidly developing country, its causal dynamics and how these effects relate to corresponding findings in the private sector. The ensuing practical implications offer guidelines on how to organize leadership to maximize creativity and innovation in the public sector, especially in rapidly developing countries.
This qualitative longitudinal digital diary study explores public sector creativity in practice, analysing public servants' ideas, in terms of type and magnitude, and what practices public servants ...apply in coming up with these ideas and what initially triggered their creativity. Contrasting with extant research and assumptions, the findings indicate that public servants working in public executive agencies are creative, generating a diversity of ideas by applying a range of practices including expressions of autonomous and radical creativity. However, the findings also underscore the pragmatic nature of public sector creativity that is focused on keeping things running: incremental, practical and reactive.
This article advances our understanding of the effects of monetary rewards on public employee performance and of the contingencies that may moderate these effects. In a randomized control-group ...experiment with nurses working at a local health authority in Italy, performance-related pay (PRP) had a larger effect on task performance when the rewards were kept secret than when they were disclosed. The negative interaction between PRP and visibility was stronger among participants who were exposed to direct contact with a beneficiary of their efforts, which heightened their perception of making a positive difference in other people's lives. These results are consistent with theoretical predictions that monetary incentives for activities with a prosocial impact may crowd out employee image motivation. There were no crowding-out effects when a symbolic reward was substituted for the monetary incentive.
Following on from the success of the editors' previous book, New Public Management: The Transformation of Ideas and Practice, which examined the public reform process up to the end of the last ...decade, this new volume draws on the previous knowledge both theoretically and empirically. It examines and debates the post-new public management reform development in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand. The ideal follow-up to the previous volume, this book includes many of the same contributors in addition to some fresh voices, and is a must for anyone looking for an integrated framework of analysis. Comprehensive and analytical, it is an important contribution to the study of public administration and particularly to the reform of public management.
Tom Christensen is from the University of Oslo and Per Lægreid is from the University of Bergen, both in Norway.
Contents: Preface; Introduction - theoretical approach and research questions, Tom Christensen and Per Lægreid; Still fragmented government or reassertion of the centre?, Tom Christensen, Amund Lie and Per Lægreid; Reform design and performance in Australia and New Zealand, John Halligan; Types of state organisations: arguments, doctrines and changes beyond new public management, Paul G. Roness; Convergence and standardization in telecommunications regulation: trajectories of change and reform in the Asian Pacific regulatory state, Martin Painter; Organizing immigration - a comparison of New Zealand and Norway , Tom Christensen, Per Lægreid and Richard Norman; Central banking reform across the world: only by night are all cats grey, Martin Marcussen; Quests for transparency: signs of a new institutional era in the health care field, Maria Blomgren and Kirstin Sahlin-Andersson; Public-private partnerships: a comparative perspective on Victoria and Denmark, Carsten Greve and Graeme Hodge; (The difficult art of) outsourcing welfare services: experiences from Sweden and New Zealand, Anders Forssell and Lars Norén; New public management and the ghost of Max Weber: exorcised or still haunting?, Robert Gregory; Bibliography; Index.
The past two decades have seen a proliferation of large- and small-scale experiments in participatory governance. This article takes stock of claims about the potential of citizen participation to ...advance three values of democratic governance: effectiveness, legitimacy, and social justice. Increasing constraints on the public sector in many societies, combined with increasing demand for individual engagement and the affordances of digital technology, have paved the way for participatory innovations aimed at effective governance. Deepening legitimation deficits of representative government create opportunities for legitimacy-enhancing forms of citizen participation, but so far, the effect of participation on legitimacy is unclear. Efforts to increase social justice through citizen participation face the greatest obstacles. The article concludes by highlighting three challenges to creating successful participatory governance: the absence of systematic leadership, the lack of popular or elite consensus on the place of direct citizen participation, and the limited scope and powers of participatory innovations.
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