Public sector reforms are increasingly blurring the boundaries between the public and private sectors, making way for hybrid organizations existing between the two sectors. While research has begun to explore organizational hybridity and how it affects employee identities and outcomes, knowledge about employee behaviour in hybrid organizations is scarce. Public-private hybrid organizations face the challenge of balancing some degree of privateness with traditional public sector practices and values. In this article we focus on public sector companies as an increasingly prevalent type of hybrid organization, and how employee turnover is affected by the degree of organizational privateness. We suggest that highly socialized public sector employees are more likely to leave when their organization exhibits higher levels of privateness. In an empirical study of all employees in public sector companies in Denmark we find support for this theory. The article contributes new knowledge about employee turnover dynamics and how the balance of opposing demands in hybrid organizations has implications for employee behaviour.Values and practices rooted in the private sector have increasingly been introduced into the public sector with the aim of boosting efficiency and quality in service delivery (Waring 2015). Following these reforms, public sector employees across a wide range of work areas have had to adapt to new ways of doing things. Studies have described in detail the content and prevalence of such reforms as well as the overall outcomes achieved. However, so far less attention has been devoted to the internal side of the organizations and how increased privateness affects employees in public organizations.Recent research interest in organizational hybridity has increased the understanding of individuals' response when organizations pursue contradictory demands (Buffat 2014; Skelcher and Smith 2015). For instance, studies have shown how medical managers develop new identities when managerialist thinking enters the field of healthcare (McGivern et al. 2015) and practices in public-private research centres (Gulbrandsen et al. 2015). This research is important as it increases our understanding of how the public sector reacts to the introduction of values and practices traditionally associated with the private sector of the economy. In this article we build on this research and aim to further this line of study by exploring how employees respond to increased public-private hybridity. We focus on two crucial dimensions. First, drawing inspiration from the dimensions of publicness theory (Bozeman and Bretschneider 1994), we focus on the degree to which a (public) organization is affected by elements from the private sector; and second, on the degree to which an employee is socialized into the public sector through working experience (Becker and Connor 2005;Petrovsky et al. 2015). We argue that the more pronounced the organizational privateness, the more strongly is an employee's public sector socialization positively related...

Performance evaluations of leadership quality and public sector leaders' absenteeismThis paper investigates the effect of performance evaluation of leadership quality on leader sickness absence. While previous research has focused on how evaluation of leadership impacts employee sickness absence, we analyse how superiors' and subordinates' evaluations of leadership quality, as well as leaders' self-evaluations, influence public leaders' own absence. A longitudinal study of 335 Danish municipal leaders, 94 superiors, and 4,449 subordinates are conducted.Findings indicate that superiors' evaluation of leadership quality compared to the leaders' self-evaluation is important for public sector leaders' absenteeism.Furthermore, findings show that leaders who are over-estimators have a higher absence frequency compared to under-estimators.

The theory of representative bureaucracy highlights gender segregation in the public sector and its detrimental implications for public policy outcomes. Focusing attention on organisational responses to this protracted problem, we provide evidence on whether organizational growth improves gender integration in the upper echelons of the public sector. An evaluation of the relationship between new hires and gender representation within the management tiers of Danish local government reveals an association between the recruitment of additional employees and improved gender integration. This is particularly pronounced for public organizations that employ fewer women. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Researchers have for a long time been interested in the consequences of creating larger public organizations. So far the outcomes of changes in the size of public organizations have been relatively widely studied, however, much less is known about the internal processes through which these outcomes are actually achieved. This paper explores whether changes in organizational size affect public management. As endogeneity is an inherent problem when studying outcomes of organizational size, we apply a quasi-experimental design in order to establish the causal linkage between size and different elements of public management. We use unique survey data collected before and after a large reform that changed the size of most Danish municipalities. Results suggest that public management related to daily operations is generic and not affected by size, whereas public management related to overall tasks such as creating a vision, servicing the mayor, and maintaining external relations is positively affected by size changes.

Studies on contracting out have provided much needed knowledge about the effect of contracting on different types of services, yet much remains unknown about the antecedents driving the adoption of new contracting practices. The focus of previous studies that have addressed the antecedents of contracting has been on the financial benefit of specific services. This study incorporates the innovation diffusion literature to explore organizational and managerial influences on a novel contracting practice: the contracting out of energy efficiency improvement services in Danish municipalities. The paper finds that the antecedents driving the adoption of contracting out may result from interorganizational influences as much as managerial factors.