Bilateral ESRC/FNR: Training Executives to Enhance Employee Engagement in Government: Field Experimental Evidence from Luxembourg

双边 ESRC/FNR：培训高管以提高员工在政府中的参与度：来自卢森堡的现场实验证据

• 批准号: ES/W010380/1
• 负责人: Christian Schuster
• 金额: $ 69.01万
• 依托单位: University College London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2023 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FW010380%2F1
• 关键词: Bilateral; ESRC; FNR; Training; Executives

Which management practices enhance organizational effectiveness? A vast literature in public administration, management and economics has assessed this question. However, most of it is correlational and plagued by endogeneity concerns. For instance, whether organizations see the need to change management practices - such as performance incentives or leadership practices - depends in part on how effective they are. Simply correlating management practices with measures of organizational effectiveness can thus lead to spurious associations. By contrast, evidence is scant concerning the causal effects of management practices. This holds all the more in public administration, where field experimental research remains underdeveloped more generally. As a result, governments - and bodies advising them, such as the OECD or World Bank - frequently lack an evidence base for management choices.The proposed ESRC-FNR project addresses this gap for one management practice in particular: executive training. While trainings are a default solution for a range of management challenges, there is little causal evidence on their effectiveness in government. Our project addresses this shortcoming for an executive training focused on an outcome which is central to organizational effectiveness: employee engagement.Engaged employees are in a positive, fulfilling psychological state in which they are emotionally, cognitively and physically engaged with their work. Yet, particularly in public sector organizations, employee engagement is challenging. For instance, austerity pressures and the Covid-19 pandemic have pushed up workloads, while administrative jobs with routine operating procedures disengage employees. Executive trainings are a default solution for organizations seeking to enhance engagement. Our core research question is thus: do executive engagement trainings enhance employee engagement in government? Further, we explore mechanisms: how do such trainings affect employee engagement?To provide rigorous answers, the ESRC-FNR project would partner with the Government of Luxembourg in a large-scale field experiment. Replicating standard approaches to executive engagement training, our trainings would present senior managers with an engagement diagnostic of their organization, followed by coaching them to develop and implement an action plan to raise engagement. Senior managers of half of Luxembourg's 124 civilian institutions would be randomly selected to receive the training in year 1. To evaluate training effectiveness and mechanisms, an engagement survey would be fielded with Luxembourg's 28,600 civilian government employees before and (one year) after the training. Moreover, administrative data will allow the project to assess training effects on behavioral consequences of engagement, such as turnover. As such, the project would add much needed causal evidence to scholarly debates about the effectiveness of management practices in general and executive engagement trainings in government in particular. As a further benefit of the baseline and endline survey, the project would generate the largest panel survey dataset in public administration and on employee engagement to-date, enabling a stream of longitudinal research on the effectiveness of distinct management practices to enhance engagement in government. In doing so, our project would also spur the hitherto neglected study of public administration in Luxembourg and encourage future UK-Luxembourg research collaborations. Beyond these academic contributions, the project would generate policy impact in Luxembourg - providing engagement trainings and diagnostics for 124 government institutions, and evidence to enable government-wide reforms to enhance employee engagement; next to an engagement training toolkit and policy evidence to other governments, international organizations and private sector firms seeking to improve management practices to enhance engagement.

哪些管理实践可以提高组织效率？公共行政、管理和经济学领域的大量文献对这一问题进行了评估。然而，其中大部分是相互关联的，并受到内分泌问题的困扰。例如，各组织是否认为有必要改变管理做法-如业绩激励或领导做法-部分取决于这些做法的有效性。因此，简单地将管理实践与组织有效性的度量相关联可能会导致虚假的关联。相比之下，管理实践的因果影响方面的证据不足。这在公共行政领域尤其如此，因为实地实验研究在公共行政领域仍然普遍不发达。因此，政府--以及向政府提供咨询的机构，如经合组织或世界银行--往往缺乏管理选择的证据基础。拟议的ESRC-FNR项目特别针对一种管理实践解决了这一差距：高管培训。虽然培训是一系列管理挑战的默认解决方案，但很少有因果证据表明其在政府中的有效性。我们的项目解决了这一缺陷，高管培训的重点是一个结果，这是核心的组织效率：员工敬业度。员工敬业度是在一个积极的，满足的心理状态，他们在情感上，认知和身体上与他们的工作。然而，特别是在公共部门组织中，员工的参与度是一个挑战。例如，紧缩压力和新型冠状病毒肺炎（COVID-19，即2019冠状病毒病）大流行推高了工作量，而具有常规操作程序的行政工作则使员工脱离了工作岗位。高管培训是寻求提高参与度的组织的默认解决方案。因此，我们的核心研究问题是：高管敬业度培训是否能提高政府员工的敬业度？此外，我们探讨机制：如何这样的培训影响员工的敬业度？为了提供严格的答案，ESRC-FNR项目将与卢森堡政府合作进行大规模实地实验。我们的培训将复制高管敬业度培训的标准方法，向高级管理人员提供对其组织的敬业度诊断，然后指导他们制定和实施行动计划，以提高敬业度。卢森堡124个民间机构中有一半的高级管理人员将在第一年被随机挑选接受培训。为了评估培训的有效性和机制，将在培训前后（一年）对卢森堡的28 600名文职政府雇员进行参与调查。此外，行政数据将使该项目能够评估培训对参与行为后果（例如营业额）的影响。因此，该项目将增加急需的因果证据，学术辩论的有效性，管理实践的一般和行政参与培训，特别是在政府。基线和底线调查的另一个好处是，该项目将产生迄今为止公共行政和雇员参与方面最大的小组调查数据集，从而能够对不同管理做法的有效性进行一系列纵向研究，以加强政府的参与。在这样做的过程中，我们的项目也将刺激迄今为止被忽视的公共行政研究在卢森堡，并鼓励未来的英国-卢森堡研究合作。除了这些学术贡献，该项目还将在卢森堡产生政策影响-为124个政府机构提供参与培训和诊断，并为政府范围内的改革提供证据，以提高员工的参与度;其次是为其他政府、国际组织和私营部门公司提供参与培训工具包和政策证据，以改善管理实践，提高参与度。