Employee Motivation in the Public Sector and the Case Study of Implementing Teacher Pay for Performance as means of motivation in NY Public Schools
Employee Motivation in the Public Sector and the Case Study of Implementing Teacher Pay for Performance as means of motivation in NY Public Schools
Motivation of the employees is an important aspect in the public sector. Motivation increases the efficiency and effectiveness of the employees in the public sector by enabling them to feel that there is an appreciation in their work ("Evaluating the Effectiveness of Teacher Pay-for-Performance | RAND," n.d.). As such, they develop acceptance and positive attitudes towards their workplaces and work.
Literature Review
Bradley E. Wright presents the issue of motivation of the employees in the public service by drawing the impact of missions in the motivation of employees in the public sector. His study advances the knowledge of people concerning the motivation of employees in the public sector as well as their performance by presenting the significance of the goal theory in employee motivation and performance ("Evaluating the Effectiveness of Teacher Pay-for-Performance | RAND," n.d.). As such, Wright incorporates employee performance and motivation into a single framework affected by missions or objectives of the involved individuals.
Employees in the public sector continually place lower values on financial rewards and higher values on assisting others than their counterparts in the private sectors (Stazyk, 2012, p. 22). This study plays a significant in the issue of motivation in the public sector by using the goal theory of motivation to propose a distinct theoretical model that explains the potential impacts of the significance of organizational missions on the employees work motivation (Springer & Winters, 2009, p. 23). Thus, it suggests that the significance employees place on then existent missions improves their perceived importance on their jobs leading to enhancement of motivation. Second, this study identifies the relationship between the significance of organizational missions and employee motivation.
Pablo Alonso and Gregory B. Lewis incorporate evidence from the federal sector in discussing job performance and public service motivation. First, the authors suggest that the federal service faces numerous obstacles in the attraction, retention and motivation of the high-quality employees. They suggest that there has been slackening of the bureaucratic-bashing of the 1980s. However, the confidence in government is still low with the public office having little prestige. For the past two decades, there had been a slow rise in the federal pay schedules compared to inflation or the pay of the private sector ("Study provides evidence that the New York City bonus program did not lead to marked gains in student achievement - Education Next : Education Next," n.d.). Moreover, there is less pay for comparable work by the government in the public sector compared to the private sector.
The federal supervisors have insufficient flexibility to boost the rewards of individuals for their high performances. As such, the governments in the society including local, state, and federal governments need to reframe their motivation policies to focus more on the unique motivational grounds of public service. This study suggests that prior research on public service motivation suggested that employees in the public service have more of public service ethics compared to their counterparts in the private sector. Moreover, there are certain distinct differences been the motivation of the employees in the public service sector and the private sector in aspects such as ethical issues, compensation for comparable work and organizational environment.
Patricia W. Ingraham suggests various aspects of pay for performance in the public sectors. This study presents the rationale for adopting, diffusing and implementing pay-for-performance in the public sector. Patricia Ingraham investigates and questions the ground for the conventional perception that there has been a successful experience in the private sector concerning par-for-performance programs (Ingraham, 1993, p. 21). She also explores different problems that the systems of compensation and management pose to the motivation if employees in the public sectors. She also examines various programs of implementation of pay-for-performance in the US and other OECD nations ("Evaluating the Effectiveness of Teacher Pay-for-Performance | RAND," n.d.). In this examination, she demonstrates the existent gaps between the realities and expectations in the public settings.
Pay-for-performance is among the public policies whose diffusion across settings both public and private, state and the national government lacks a strong base in the empirical analysis and evaluation. She also talks about the pay-for-performance programs in the private sectors and relates them to theory and practice as presented in the public settings (Goodman & Turner, 2009, p. 16). She suggests that these pay-for-performance approaches and programs intend to motivate the employees to higher levels of productivity and performance. She discusses the role of organizational setting and resources base.
Adam M Grant discusses the motivational effects of prosocial impact in the public service in his study. Adam suggests that employees in the public sector often lack the opportunities to view the prosocial impacts of their jobs (Grant, 2008, p. 56). That is, they do not see how their efforts in the workplace make a difference in the lives of individuals since the core aim of the work of public service is to have significant positive differences in the well-being, safety and health of communities, groups and individuals.
Mathew G Springer and Marcus A Winters present the New York City teacher-pay-for performance program. The concept of paying teachers in various amounts depending on the performance of their students has been a continual idea with increasing support in school systems across the world (Yuan et al., 2012, p. 20). Proponents of this concept argue that the process of liking the teachers’ pay to the performance of the children was a powerful approach to encourage the highly motivated and talented individuals to enter the profession of teaching and then further motivate them inside the classrooms (Springer & Winters, 2009, p. 25).
On the other hand, critics of this concept contend that the extrinsic incentives such as paying of bonuses could have unfortunate consequences. Some of these consequences include rivalry among the teachers instead of cooperation among teachers and the excessive focus on the specific subjects used to measure the academic progress of the students ("Study provides evidence that the New York City bonus program did not lead to marked gains in student achievement - Education Next : Education Next," n.d.).
The New York City Department of Education implemented an incentive program called the School-Wide Performance Bonus in the midway of 2007 and 2008. The incentive program intended to give financial rewards to the educators in the schools serving the disadvantaged students (Gurtoo, 2009, p. 24). The program set the anticipated incentive payments as a fixed standard of performance, which meant that then schools participating in the incentive program were not competing against each other for the fixed amount of money. All the schools participating in the incentive program received a fixed amount of awards totaling up to $3,000 per each full-time member of the union working at the schools if the schools met the predetermined goals defined by the accountability program of the New York City Department of Education.
The New York City Department of Education assigned the schools qualifying for the either program randomly to control or treatment status. Since assigning the school randomly would remove the unobserved aspects that could lead to the systematic differences between the schools receiving the incentive program and those with no eligibility to do so, emergent significant differences in the future outcomes would be attributed to the to the intervention of the program rather than on the confounding factors associated with the program (Houston, 2009, p. 23).
However, the school performance bonus program in New York City did not result to the intended benefits because it did not inspire the teachers enough to work differently or harder. Additionally, it had no significant outcomes on from the students. The program did not affect the scores on the school progress report (Perry, Engbers, & Jun, 2009, p. 23). There were no significant differences between the scores of treatment and the control schools across all the years and categories of the progress report including additional credit, progress, performance and environment.
Moreover, the program did not have an effect on the teacher-reported behaviors, perceptions and attitudes. Most of the compensation committees developed egalitarian plans of award distribution, which reflected the strong preference among the members of the compensation committee that members of staff equally share the bonuses (HULLEMAN & BARRON, 2010, p. 28). As such, the program lacked positive effects. First, the incentive program did not typically develop the conditions necessary for the success of the pay-for-performance programs. Additionally, the bonuses had a limited motivational effect.
Key supporting conditions were lacking. In order to achieve anticipated results, existent and emergent programs should meet six elemental conditions. First, there has to be understanding. The educators should have a high degree of understanding the anticipated functioning of the program. From a study by Julie A. Marsh and Daniel F. McCaffrey, key findings suggested that more than a third of the teachers did not understand the key elements of the program including the bonus amount (Marsh & McCaffrey, 2012, p. 54). Others include the targets that their schools needed to reach and the distribution techniques of the compensation committees.
Second, the educators should have expectancy by believing that they can perform tasks that will enable them to attain their goals. In the third year of the program, the staff seemed to comprehend what they needed to do to earn bonuses. However, they overestimated the likelihood that their schools would receive awards. Other factors include the valence, buy-in, fairness and reasonable timeline. The bonuses had a limited motivational power relative to other incentives of accountability.
The incentive program did not produce the intended results in various ways. The program did not improve the achievement of the students at any grade levels. As such, it failed because it did not conform to the required conditions of incentive programs (Lavy, 2007, p. 28). The educators and stakeholder in the progress of the program lacked sufficient knowledge on the significance of the pay-for-performance approaches and initiative in the public sector.
The New York City incentive acts as a benchmark for other regions are practicing and extending motivational aspects and approaches in the public sector. This program of the city sought to promote the education of the region by developing good relations with the teachers by offering them bonuses based on their performance.
Analysis
Motivation of employees is an important aspect in the operations of both the public and the private sector. It has been a conventional conception that motivation varies in the two sectors with the private sectors having more of the motivational awards and incentives that their counterparts in the public sector. Motivation of employees enables them to understand the need to work hard and differently in their operations (Manolopoulos, 2008, p. 24). As such, motivation of employees promotes efficiency and effectiveness in the provision of public services including health and security.
Several factors affect the type of motivation that an employee gets in the public sector. First, missions and goals of the organization affect the motivation of the employees in the public sector. There is a distinct relationship between the goals theory and the public service motivation (Marsh & McCaffrey, 2012, p. 27). One avenue of understanding the impact of organizational goals on the performance of employees is by focusing on the role of employee commitment in the motivation.
Employee commitment translates to the performance of the employees, which in turn affects the motivation of employees based on the performance. There is a developing recognition of the significance of employee commitment in the comprehension of employee performance. Goal commitment defines the extent to which a person is accepts the prevalent performance goals and is determined to attain the goal regardless of the obstacles and setbacks.
Individuals commit themselves more to the objectives of their performance when they believe that those goals are achievable and will have beneficial outcomes to themselves (Lavy, 2007, p. 9). Therefore, an understanding of the context of motivation requires and understanding of conditions that influence the goal commitment of their performance. These conditions include job specificity, job importance, job difficulty, self-efficacy, mission valence, and extrinsic rewards.
Another form of motivation is the pay-for-performance approach. In this initiative, the employees in the public sector receive incentives and bonuses based on their performance. An example is the School-Wide Performance Bonus formulated by The New York City Department of Education to give financial rewards to the educators in the schools serving the disadvantaged students ("New York City Schools Suspend Teacher Bonus Program - NYTimes.com," n.d.). It is important to come up with effective and efficient considerations while formulating such incentives. That is, in order to make sure that the product does not fail to attain the anticipated goals, as was the case of the School-Wide Performance Bonus, which failed to attain the objectives.
Organizational setting and resource base plays a significant role in the pay-for-performance approach. There are three organizational characteristics that influence the approach including organizational structure, the nature of systems of personnel and management and the extent to which they allow for flexibility and managerial discretion (Morris, 0, p. 10). The third organizational aspect is the nature of the incentives and resources that the institution is willing to and can commit to the anticipated pay-for-performance scheme (Lavy, 2007, p. 10). In the public sector, the standardized rules of compensation and the centralized systems of the civil service strongly influence the organizations.
Many public organizations have complex personnel procedures and rules. This complexity in rules and procedures limits the flexibility of the organization and constrains individual discretion. On the other hand, the public organizations with complex structures are subject to important external influences, standards and objectives ("New York City Teacher Bonus Program Will End Permanently - NYTimes.com," n.d.). One of the consequences of the pay-for-performance is that the organizations in the public sector may employ more formal and precise performance appraisals in an attempt to make the management decisions appear more legitimate to employees and other constituents.
References
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Yuan, K., Vi-Nhuan, L., McCaffrey, D. F., Marsh, J. A., Hamilton, L. S., & Stecher, B. M. (2012). Incentive Pay Programs Do Not Affect Teacher Motivation or Reported Practices: Results From Three Randomized Studies. American Educational Research Association, 35(1), 3–22. doi:10.3102/0162373712462625
