The National Organizations Study : a review and an extension emphasizing public-sector sites

Abstract

This dissertation reviews the literature on public-business comparisons. The review highlights that while there has been a general movement toward larger samples, the vast majority of these samples are from restricted populations, a limitation on the ability to generalize beyond the sample. The literature review also demonstrates that most public-business comparison research clusters around five themes: defining publicness, organizational performance, organizational structure, work-related attitudes and behaviors, and human resource management practices. The dissertation presents several hypotheses that emerge from the public-business comparison literature and then tests those hypotheses using data from the National Organizations Study (NOS). The NOS data set provides 1) a representative sample of U.S. workplaces, 2) a robust set of variables that allow for cross-sector comparisons, and 3) opportunities for replication, extension, and generalization. The hypotheses are analyzed first through a preliminary analysis using difference of means t-test and then through a multivariate logistic regression. The preliminary analysis generally supported the hypotheses in the expected direction. However, when the variables were examined concurrently, through logistic regression, the patterns of support for the hypotheses changed in interesting ways, occasionally directly contradicting the findings in the preliminary t-test analysis. Specifically, the logistic regression analysis correctly predicted the sectoral status of 88.9 percent of the cases in the NOS data set. Finally, the dissertation reviews the implications of these findings for future research.