A Publicness Perception Scale – a new approach to Publicness as an Employee perception

Several approaches for exploring public/private differences were suggested in the Public Administration literature all aimed at capturing the essence of the "public" in organizations. These approaches included examining... [ view full abstract ]

Several approaches for exploring public/private differences were suggested in the Public Administration literature all aimed at capturing the essence of the "public" in organizations. These approaches included examining organizational ownership (Rainey, Backoff & Levine, 1976) and public/market authority (Bozeman, 1987). Yet, it seems different conclusions are drawn depending on the proxy used, emphasizing the ambiguity of the concept "public" in organizations, and the lack of a framework providing a valid measurement of it (Boyne, 2002; Andrews et. Al., 2011,).
In recent years a normative approach was developed (Bozeman, 2007), which shows strong consensus around some core public values (Beck, Jorgensen & Bozeman, 2007), and offers public value congruence as a strategic tool to improve public services to citizens (Bozeman & Moulton, 2011). Several studies have already shown that this normative exploration of the meaning of the "public" in organizations has an ability to explain some performance differences across organizations (Amirkhanyan, 2010; Feeney & Walch, 2012; Walker et. al., 2013, Peng, Pandey & Pandey, 2015; Bullock, Strich & Rainey, 2015), and may offer an analytical tool to identify the desired public values outcome.
Hence, leaning on these streams of research, I offer a comprehensive approach that may measure all three publicness dimensions that were identified (e.g.; ownership, public/market authority and public value congruence) and propose that these dimensions be examined from the point of view of the employees working within these organizations. Because perceptions of reality (and not reality itself) are what drive individual behavior (Lewin, 1936), the use of the publicness perception scale (i.e. PPS), allows one more glance at the "black box" of organizational systems, and may serve our quest to improve the common good by identifying these perception's influence on behavior in organizations (Denhardt, 1990). This effort can also help develop public policy that sustains levels of publicness amongst stakeholders.
A new PPS has showed optimistic results in a pilot study and offers a very interesting new avenue for examining the consequences of perceptions of publicness on organizational outcomes.