• Login
    View Item 
    •   Athenaeum Home
    • University of Georgia Theses and Dissertations
    • University of Georgia Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    •   Athenaeum Home
    • University of Georgia Theses and Dissertations
    • University of Georgia Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    An examination of personnel instability in public organizations

    Thumbnail
    Date
    2014-08
    Author
    Stritch, Justin Michael
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Abstract
    There have been relatively few studies examining how personnel instability affects the management and performance of public organizations. In this dissertation I examine the organizational consequences of two sources of personnel instability: 1) managerial succession; and 2) collective employee turnover. I consider personnel instability’s theoretical relationships with performance, organizational human capital, social climate, and management. Additionally, I integrate the current public administration research and theory with literature from education policy, general management, and sociology to theoretically explore multiple causal paths among the variables. I formulate hypotheses on the nature of the relationships between the variables over time. I use approximately 1,000 New York City elementary, intermediate (K-8), and middle schools over five years (2006-2011) to test my hypotheses with Generalized Estimating Equations. The advantages of using GEE models in this situation are three-fold: 1) The technique addresses unobserved school-level effects; 2) I can estimate a population average effect without using the degrees of freedom needed to estimate unit specific effects (random or fixed); 3) I can leverage the data to adjust for the error correlation structure that actually exists—not the one I assume exists and impose on the model. This dissertation makes a considerable number of theoretical and empirical contributions to current public management scholarship. First, while I find evidence that collective employee turnover has a nonlinear relationship with performance; I find that performance has a negative relationship with both collective teacher turnover and managerial succession in future time periods. Second, contrary to existing scholarship, I find evidence that the effect of principal succession on performance is contingent on past performance and that a change in principal at a low performing school negatively affects performance, while a succession in a high performing school provides a boost to performance. Third, I find evidence that schools with high-levels of collective teacher turnover will turn to inexperienced teachers to staff the organization, but that these are the employees that are most likely to leave in the future. Finally, I find evidence that managerial succession can undermine the organization’s social climate and management.
    URI
    http://purl.galileo.usg.edu/uga_etd/stritch_justin_m_201408_phd
    http://hdl.handle.net/10724/31315
    Collections
    • University of Georgia Theses and Dissertations

    About Athenaeum | Contact Us | Send Feedback
     

     

    Browse

    All of AthenaeumCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    About Athenaeum | Contact Us | Send Feedback