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

哪些管理实践可以提高组织效率？公共行政、管理和经济学方面的大量文献对这个问题进行了评估。然而，其中大部分是相互关联的，并受到内生性担忧的困扰。例如，组织是否认为有必要改变管理做法--如绩效激励或领导做法--在一定程度上取决于它们的有效性。因此，简单地将管理做法与组织有效性的衡量标准联系起来，可能会导致虚假的联系。相比之下，关于管理实践的因果关系的证据很少。这在公共管理中尤其适用，因为在公共管理中，实地实验研究总体上仍然不发达。因此，各国政府以及为它们提供咨询的机构，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。尽管培训是一系列管理挑战的默认解决方案，但几乎没有因果证据表明培训在政府中的有效性。我们的项目解决了高管培训的这一缺陷，该培训侧重于对组织有效性至关重要的结果：员工敬业度。受聘员工处于积极、满足的心理状态，他们在情感、认知和身体上都投入到工作中。然而，尤其是在公共部门组织中，员工敬业度是具有挑战性的。例如，紧缩压力和新冠肺炎疫情推高了工作量，而拥有常规操作程序的行政工作则让员工不堪重负。高管培训是寻求提高参与度的组织的默认解决方案。我们的核心研究问题是：高管敬业度培训是否能提高员工对政府的敬业度？此外，我们还探讨了机制：这样的培训如何影响员工敬业度？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的现场试验。我们的培训将复制高管敬业度培训的标准方法，向高级经理提供对其组织的敬业度诊断，然后指导他们制定和实施提高敬业度的行动计划。卢森堡124所文职机构中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，卢森堡将在培训前和培训后一年(一年)对卢森堡28,600名文职政府雇员进行敬业度调查。此外，管理数据将使该项目能够评估培训对参与的行为后果的影响，如离职。因此，该项目将为关于总体管理实践、特别是政府高管参与培训的有效性的学术辩论增加亟需的因果证据。作为基线和终点线调查的另一个好处，该项目将产生迄今为止公共行政和员工敬业度方面最大的小组调查数据集，从而能够对不同管理做法加强政府参与度的有效性进行一系列纵向研究。通过这样做，我们的项目还将促进迄今为止被忽视的卢森堡公共行政研究，并鼓励未来英国和卢森堡的研究合作。除了这些学术贡献外，该项目还将在卢森堡产生政策影响--为124个政府机构提供敬业度培训和诊断，并提供证据支持政府范围内的改革，以提高员工敬业度；其次是向寻求改善管理做法以提高敬业度的其他政府、国际组织和私营部门公司提供敬业度培训工具包和政策证据。

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.