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What Drives Personnel Out of Public Organizations?

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Abstract

In this article, including a state of the art on Public Service Motivation (PSM) and its relationships to Affective Organizational Commitment (AOC), the interface of PSM with Organizational Behavior constructs is analyzed. Longitudinal data has been collected in the context of French local authorities at two points in time within 1 year (N 1 = 1,152, N 2 = 81). AOC and Intention to Quit Employer (IQE) at T2 are related to several antecedent variables at T1 (Intrinsic Motivation, Perceived Superior Support, Latent Conflicts and Exhaustion) but not to PSM. The hypothesis of a causal relation between PSM and positive effects is not validated. The data does not support the idea that PSM influences commitment to, or turnover in, the organization. The influence of Age and civil service grade levels (Class) in IQE is confirmed. The analysis indicates that Exhaustion and Perceived Superior Support are strongly related to IQE, which should encourage scholars and HRM professionals to enable superiors to provide support to their employees.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Observatoire Social Territorial of the Mutuelle Nationale Territoriale.

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Correspondence to Claire Edey Gamassou.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 1 Variables at T1 (N 1 = 1,152), number of items, reliability and correlations
Table 2 Variables at T1 and T2 (N 2 = 81), number of items, reliability of variables at T2 and correlations
Table 3 Hierarchical multiple regression results: antecedents of intention to quit employer
Table 4 Chi-Square Tests with IQE as Dependent variable and Class as Independent variable at T1

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Edey Gamassou, C. What Drives Personnel Out of Public Organizations?. Public Organiz Rev 15, 383–398 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-014-0277-8

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