Is calling bureaucrats lazy a self-fulling prophecy? The link between Bureaucrat Bashing and Performance

In this short discussion, we provide a background of our study. We are still waiting for the ethical approval of the study. We hope to get feedback on the design. As we value feedback early on in the process, we have decided... [ view full abstract ]

In this short discussion, we provide a background of our study. We are still waiting for the ethical approval of the study. We hope to get feedback on the design. As we value feedback early on in the process, we have decided to still discuss this particular project, and not another project that is almost fully finished. Based on your comments, we will improve the design. We will discuss this also at the PMRC conference in Washington. In between IRSPM and PMRC, we will conduct pilot tests in the lab.

This paper focuses on the Behavioral Public Administration theme ‘psychology of citizen-state relations’. We study how negative portrayals of civil servants by citizens impact the performance of these civil servants. Civil servants are often portrayed by mass media and the general public as ‘shirking’, ‘incompetent’ and ‘lazy’ (Olsen, 2006; Brehm & Gates, 1999; Goodsell, 2000). In the public administration literature, this is broadly referred to as ‘bureaucracy bashing’ or ‘bureaucrat bashing’, dependent on whether the criticism is targeted towards the administration respectively towards specific civil servants (Chen & Bozeman, 2014). Garrett et al. (2006:229) note that there is a potential for ‘substantial negative implications’ but to date, causal effects have not been studied. Most studies are cross-sectional (Jahan & Shahan, 2012) or theoretical (Garrett et al., 2006). We add to the literature by studying the effects of bashing on an important outcome: performance. We hypothesize that bureaucrat and bureaucracy bashing are detrimental to performance. If this is the case, extent bureaucrat and bureaucracy can be seen as self-fulfilling prophecies: when bureaucrats experience negative portrayals of their performance or that of their organization, they perform worse.

We study how bashing affects performance in three studies. In line with Behavioral Public Administration, we use an experimental logic to generate knowledge regarding important public administration topics (Jilke et al., 2016; Grimmelikhuijsen et al., 2017). In the lab, we test bashing effects on simple performance tasks. We will use a real effort task, known as the slider task (Gill & Prowse, 2011; 2012). We then test the mechanisms in a survey vignette experiment. Here, we will analyze why bureaucrats performance less/better when confronted with bashing (see for a similar application Rivera & Tilcsik, 2016). Finally, we focus on moderators in a lab-in-the-field experiment. We will analyze the impact of potentially important moderators such as managerial strategies and policy context.