Civil Servant Perception and Behavior in Various Settings

I am leading this project with Soonae Park and have been involved in a series of annual survey experiment projects with South Korean civil servants since 2015 to investigate how bureaucrats' perceptions change in diverse institutional and organizational contexts.

South Korea provides an excellent case for examining how civil servants' perceptions vary in given contexts, because its civil service corps is ranked as one of the most effective in the world. By employing experimental designs, including survey, field, and natural experiments, we contribute new approaches to research on the impact of institutional and organizational contexts on public employees' perceptions and new findings indicating the importance of such contexts in the policy implementation process.

1. Ministerial Leadership and Endorsement of Bureaucrats: Experimental Evidence from Presidential Governments (published in Public Administration Review)

Scholars have debated over what constitutes effective ministerial leadership regarding administrative competence versus political influence. We contribute experimental evidence to this debate through a unique survey design of endorsement experiments. Using original data from 949 national civil servants in South Korea, we examine civil servants’ assessment of ministerial leadership in three central dimensions of public management: internal management, interbranch coordination, and policy formulation/implementation. Furthermore, we use existing variation in characteristics of agencies to test whether such variation induces systematic differences in civil servants’ responses. We find that civil servants’ attitudes toward ministerial leadership are asymmetric in nature. Ministers with civil service backgrounds are endorsed in all three dimensions, whereas ministers with legislative backgrounds receive increased support only for interbranch coordination skills. The levels of support faced by ministers with different backgrounds also vary across agency types. Our analysis has implications for public management practice and agency control in presidential governments.

2. Civil Servants’ Perceptions of Agency Heads’ Leadership Styles: The Role of Gender in Public Sector Organizations (forthcoming in Public Management Review)

In this article, we examine public employees’ perceptions of agency heads’ leadership styles by focusing on the role of gender in organizational management. Employing an original survey experiment with over 800 national civil servants in South Korea, we find that female employees have more positive perceptions of transformational leadership than male employees; however, female and male employees’ perceptions of transactional leadership are not significantly different. Moreover, employee gender, when investigated along with gender representation in organizations, produces more nuanced results. An increase in women’s representation in public sector organizations leads to more positive perceptions of transformational leadership behaviors among female than male employees, but it does not change perceptions of transactional leadership behaviors among female and male employees. Our findings suggest a clear gender gap in perceptions of leadership styles among public employees, and these differences are further unpacked with variations in gender representation in public sector organizations.

3. Bureaucratic Responsiveness in Times of Political Crisis: The Case of Presidential Impeachment (forthcoming in Public Administration)

The question of who controls the bureaucracy has been widely debated in the politics and public administration literature. However, to whom bureaucrats are responsive and to what extent are relatively unknown, particularly outside the U.S. To understand how organizational behavior changes according to external political environments, we leverage a unique setting, that of the 2016 presidential impeachment in South Korea. We analyze original experimental data from more than 1,000 civil servants, gathered as part of a nationally representative survey, in order to estimate the degree to which civil servants choose to incorporate the president’s preferences into their policy decisions before and after her impeachment. We find that presidential impeachment has a differential impact on the responsiveness of civil servants across the formal ranks of the personnel, controlling for their political views and several other individual characteristics. While bureaucrats were similarly responsive to the president before impeachment regardless of their grades, senior civil servants were significantly more responsive to the president after impeachment than were lower-ranking bureaucrats. Our study contributes to the literature on organizational theory and public management the evidence that civil servants’ attitudes are shaped by the structure of bureaucratic organizations and change with external settings involving elected principals.

4. What Motivates Street-level Bureaucrats to Implement the Reforms of Elected Politicians? (forthcoming in Policy & Politics)

The aim of this article is to explore the motivations of street-level bureaucrats when implementing change initiated by elected politicians. We analyse experimental data on more than 1,800 local civil servants from all 243 local governments in South Korea and find that street-level bureaucrats are more likely to implement change instigated by local elected politicians when their own policy positions are reflected in the reforms. Moreover, the degree to which street-level bureaucrats are likely to execute reforms instigated by local politicians is greater when bureaucrats perceive themselves as having more freedom to exercise discretion. These findings reveal a behavioural insight into the conditions in which bureaucrats are more likely to respond to change championed by elected politicians versus conditions where they are more likely to follow existing rules in the policy implementation process.

5. Regulatory Reform in the Era of New Technological Development: The Role of Organizational Factors in the Public Sector (forthcoming in Regulation & Governance)

What is the role of organizational factors in fostering regulatory reform under new technological development? Existing studies provide useful frameworks to understand regulatory reform in rapidly changing circumstances. However, the literature lacks a systematic analysis of how organizational factors affect regulatory reform in the public sector. To fill this gap, we examine informal institutional components of public sector organizations that are central to define organizational identity, such as tasks relevant to science and technological development, bureaucratic autonomy, and organizational culture. We theorize that regulatory reform is more likely when organizational identity is more receptive to external changes, which are determined by several organizational factors. We leverage original surveys from more than 1,000 civil servants in South Korea, one of the front runners in new technological development. Our findings give strong support to our predictions. Our study makes clear contributions to the literature on public management and regulatory governance, and has important implications for regulatory reform under new technological development.

6. Causes of Intergovernmental Tensions: The Case of Central-Local Government Relations (R&R)

Much research on intergovernmental tensions has focused on the central government’s perspective and are concerned about how to control the local bureaucracy. Despite the increasing importance of the local government’s role in intergovernmental relations, little research has been conducted from the perspective of local bureaucrats, particularly outside the U.S. To understand the causes of intergovernmental tensions, we explored several civil servant characteristics that can impact local bureaucrats’ policy implementation, including local bureaucrats’ discretion, their commitment to the local government organization, and their career backgrounds. Our analysis of original experimental data from more than 2,200 local civil servants in South Korea shows that such elements do play a role in distinguishing local bureaucrats’ perceptions of intergovernmental tensions. Our study contributes to public management literature and professionalism theories by proving that individual bureaucrats’ civil servant characteristics can strongly shape their perception of intergovernmental relations.

7. Crisis in Central Government and Local Civil Servants’ Responsiveness (under review)

Scholars have debated the question of what influences local bureaucrats’ decision making, some taking the top-down and some the bottom-up approach. However, less well understood in this debate is the role of governors and mayors, particularly at a time of national crisis. Given that their characteristics have been proven important for the performance of local governments, this is a significant oversight. To fill this gap, we examine the effect of governors’ political characteristics on local bureaucrats’ responsiveness to the central government by leveraging a unique setting, that of presidential impeachment in South Korea. Using original survey data on 655 civil servants from all 17 provincial governments, gathered as part of a representative survey, we find that governors’ political ideology, tenure in office, and term limits strongly affect local bureaucrats’ responsiveness to the central government after impeachment. Our findings imply the importance of governors’ intermediary role in the hierarchical structure of intergovernmental relations and have practical implications for the management of local governments’ performance.