Organizational loyalty is “the willing and practical dedication of a person to” an organization (de Graaf, 2011, p. 289), and it is regarded as “an essential condition of organization” (Barnard, 1968. p. 84). In... [ view full abstract ]
Organizational loyalty is “the willing and practical dedication of a person to” an organization (de Graaf, 2011, p. 289), and it is regarded as “an essential condition of organization” (Barnard, 1968. p. 84). In declining organizations, loyalty, according to Hirschman (1970), plays a critical role for organizational members to decide whether to stay or exit. Despite the importance of its role in managing organizations and people in them, loyalty has been paid less attention in public management and few empirically studied what drives one’s loyalty. This study aims at investigating predictors for organizational loyalty in the context of a public organization.
To the best of our knowledge, only a few investigated determinants of organizational loyalty. For instance, Farrell & Rusbult (1992) found that greater job satisfaction and direct and indirect employee investment of the organization positively influence loyalty behavior of employees. Golden (1992) also provided five factors that determine resistant or cooperative behavior of bureaucrats, including loyalty, in both organizational and individual levels. She suggested that careerist ideology, careerist confidence, dominant agency profession, agency esprit de corps (power of agencies), and agency history were important factors of bureaucratic behaviors in the Civil Rights Division and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration during the Reagan Administration. Naus, Iterson, and Roe (2007) examined assertiveness and rigidity as personal characteristic variables and autonomy and role conflict as situational variables associated with loyalty behaviors. They found that job autonomy was positively associated with loyalty while role conflict was negatively related with loyalty.
In this study, we investigate the level of civil servants’ loyalty to their organization with attention to civil servants’ political (in)congruence with their overhead political leader and the object to whom the civil servants hold their accountability. Ryu & Chang (2016) theoretically propose four different behaviors of civil servants based on political congruence and their accountability. Ryu and Chang contend that if civil servants hold their accountability toward their political overhead more than the public and civil servants share the similar political ideology with their overhead political leader, then civil servants are more likely to show loyalty to their organization. Based on Ryu and Chang’s proposed framework, this study aims at empirically testing whether political views and accountability determine the level of civil servants’ loyalty. To do so, data from randomly selected civil servants of Korea’s Seoul Metropolitan Government will be analyzed.
By analyzing and understanding civil servants’ behaviors, this study expects to contribute to the literature of political views, accountability, and loyalty in the field of public management.
H1 - Management and Organizational Performance (PMRA-Sponsored panel)
