Employee Turnover in Hybrid Organizations: The Role of Public Sector Socialization and Organizational Privateness

Abstract

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...

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