Comparing Public and Private Organizations:

Empirical Research and the Power of the A Priori

Hal G. Rainey
University of Georgia
Barry Bozeman
Georgia Tech

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ABSTRACT

Research comparing public and private organizations and

examining the publicness of organizations represents a substantial
and growing body of empirical evidence, relevant to many inter-
national issues in political economy and organization theory such
as the privatization of public services. This article assesses
several major streams in this research over the last two decades,
which in some ways refute widely held a priori assumptions about
similarities and differences between public and private organiza-
tions but which in some ways support such assumptions. The
review covers research on goal complexity and ambiguity, organ-
izational structure, personnel and purchasing processes, and
work-related attitudes and values. The research results converge
in important ways, but they also present anomalies. For example,
in spite of virtually universal agreement among scholars that
public organizations have more goal complexity and ambiguity,
public managers do not differ from business managers in
response to survey questions about such matters. Public mana-
gers do not differ from business managers on perceptions about
organizational formalization, in spite of a chorus of assertions
that government agencies have more red tape and rules than pri-
vate firms have. Public managers do, however, show very sharp
differences in response to questions about constraints under
personnel and purchasing rules. The article concludes with an
assessment of the credibility of these streams of research through
consideration of alternative plausible hypotheses.

No enemy of empiricism, Immanuel Kant simply insisted on

empiricism's knowing its place. God, freedom, and immortality,
Kant asserted, cannot be denied. Each is an a priori category of
the mind and, as such, must necessarily be presupposed. One of
J-PART 10(2000):2:447-469 modernity's strongest candidates for the a priori, and presumed

447/Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory

 Comparing Public and Private Organizations

exemption from the hurly-burly world of empirical knowledge, is

the public organization. Persons on the street and scholars in the
academy will lecture at length on the character of public bureau-
cracies, blithely free of any concern over the need to show evi-
dence for their assertions. Less confident of our own omniscience
about this topic, we feel the need to look at evidence. Our article
assesses nearly two decades of empirical research comparing
public and private organizations with the following questions in
mind: (1) What progress has come from the past twenty-five
years or so of empirical research on differences between public
and private organizations? (2) Why is there so often discrepancy
between empirical research and a priori knowledge about public
organizations? (3) Why has empirical research been so feckless in

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the face of well-established, but unproved, assumptions about
public organizations? (4) Should this transcendence of the a priori
over the empirical matter to anyone other than academic
researchers?1 In this article we cannot resolve all these questions,
but we make a start by reviewing several points in this compara-
tive research where findings have converged on a particular con-
clusion. A second part of the article considers how much confi-
dence we should place in this convergence, in view of various
rival explanations that would suggest that the results are wrong.

Before going on, we need to clarify what we mean by

a priori views about the public-private distinction in organiza-
tional and managerial research. Here, a priori refers to untested
assertions and foregone conclusions about this distinction. As we
will elaborate below, two decades ago the literature on this topic
was dominated by observations that had received scant empirical
testing and confirmation. While empirical research has accumu-
lated, these a priori views show remarkable staying power even
though research has contradicted many of them. A striking aspect
of the a priori views, one that made it necessary to test them
empirically, is that there wereand still aretwo general a priori
positions on this topic, and they conflict with each other (see
Rainey 1997, chap. 3). Many scholars in economics and political
science have taken the position that public bureaucracies differ
from private business firms in important ways (e.g., Barton
1980; Dahl and Lindblom 1953; Dixit 1997; Downs 1967). Their
observations about the differences have coincided with the nega-
tive views of public bureaucracy in the popular culture, that
Goodsell (1994) describes, coupled with the perception of busi-
ness firms as inherently superior in efficiency and effectiveness.

Fascinatingly, the people who specialized in analysis of

'Answers: (i) quite a bit, actually; (2) the organizations and management-organizational sociologists and
unreliability of conventional wisdom; (3) psychologists, and researchers on business managementusually
passive conveying of research; (4) yes! took a diametrically opposing position. They treated such

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 Comparing Public and Private Organizations

distinctions as public vs. private and for-profit vs. nonprofit as

crude stereotypes, taken seriously only by persons poorly edu-
cated in the field of organization theory. Prominent scholars
denounced these distinctions as harmful and misleading oversim-
plifications that needed to be exorcised from the literature on
organizations and management and replaced with typologies of
organizations developed through sound empirical research. Some
of the most eminent scholars in management and organization
theory took pains to denounce the public-private distinction, or at
least to point out that public and private organizations are more
similar than they are different. This tradition continues and is
manifest, among other ways, in a recent pronunciation by no less
a social scientist than Herbert Simon (1995, 283, n. 3). Simon

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said that public, private, and nonprofit organizations are essen-
tially identical on the dimension that receives more attention than
virtually any other in discussions of the unique aspects of public
organizationsthe capacities of leaders to reward employees.

The assumption that leaders in government organizations

have less capacity to reward employees than do leaders in busi-
ness firms, and that government needs to become more like busi-
ness in this regard, has driven civil service reforms at all levels
of government in the United States and in otheT nations. Yet a
Nobel Laureate denies that such differences exist. Thus we have
a strong a priori position among many economists and political
scientists that treats a distinction between public and private
organizations as a truism, while many organization theorists have
treated this same distinction with contempt.2

This divergence among different fields complicates but also

enhances the analysis of a priori assertions and of convergence in
the research. When we refer to convergence of findings at vari-
ous points in this article, we often are referring to convergence
of findings that support one or the other of these two sides. Part
of the value of the stream of research that we review is that it
shows that both sides of this divergence were right in some ways
'Generalizations like these always involve and m c o m p i e t e in other ways. The findings indicate definite con-
injustices and oversimplifications them- , ^ .i_ i_ u *: i -J c-
selves. Exceptions abound. Among mmy vergence on the point that we have substantial evidence of unpor-
exampies are a typology developed by tant differences between public and private organizations. Yet
organization theorists Peter Biau and they also indicate convergence on evidence that some of the fre-
Richard Scott (1962) that included cate- ^ ^ y asserted differences receive little or no empirical confir-
gories for business firms and for public . , , , ... . . . . . .. . .
agencies, along with additional categories. m&tion and that the pubhc-pnvate distinction may well mvolve
and many other references to public oversimplifications and stereotypes in those cases. Happily, both
organizations by organization dworists sides can take pride in being right in certain ways.
(Perry and Rainey 1988). The Dahl and
Lindblom analysis and the Downs anal- , : . _ i_ -i
W e need
ysis are actually much more balanced and - however, to continue to sort out the similarities
carefully reasoned than the phrasing here and differences, whether or not our results please one side of the
might suggest. debate or the other. The analysis of this topic has important
449/J-PART, April 2000
Comparing PubUc and Private Organizations

implications for major current theoretical and practical issues,

including these: privatization of public services; allocation of
functions and tasks among sectors; the nature of the sectors
themselves; the dimensions that define the sectors, including their
complex overlapping and blurring with the third and nonprofit
sectors; administrative reforms and organizational change; and
the theoretical and practical analysis of major administrative
topics, such as organizational goals, structure, and individual
motivation and work attitudes.

EMPIRICAL RESULTS COMPARING

PUBUC AND PRIVATE ORGANIZATIONS

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Research that compares public and private organizations and
examines the publicness of organizations now represents a sub-
stantial body of empirical evidence. Twenty-five years ago, a
systematic empirical research base had just begun to accumulate.
In one comprehensive review of writings about public and private
organizations (Rainey, Backoff, and Levine 1976), less than ten
of the nearly one hundred papers and books cited provided
propositions based on empirical research. By contrast, nearly half
the studies cited in a later assessment (Perry and Rainey 1988)
presented some empirical evidence. The continuation of this trend
has by now resulted in scores of studies that, although widely
varied in method, quality, and influence, have presented research
evidence pertaining to differences between public and private
organizations. The stream of research also appears to be accel-
erating (e.g., Dixit 1997; Crewson 1997; Gabris and Simo 1995;
Gore 1998; Jurkiewicz, Massey, and Brown 1998; Kurland and
Egan 1999; Nutt 1999; Posner and Schmidt 1996). Clearly, too,
the issue has international relevance and attracts attention from
scholars in many nations (e.g., Antonsen and Beck Jorgensen
1997; Beck Jorgensen 1996; Dunsire, Hartley, Parker, and Dimi-
triou 1988; Ferlie, Pettigrew, Ashburner, and Fitzgerald 1996,
241-42; Kickert 1997; Pollitt 1990; Ranson and Stewart 1994;
Rhodes 1994).

By many of the standards that have prevailed in the social

sciences, research on public and private organizations can be
considered a success story. Not only are the topics covered in
these studies of great theoretical and practical importance, many
of the studies have had a result rare in the social sciencesthey
have converged in their findings. Despite use of multiple meth-
ods, infusion of few resources, limited institutional support, and
little or no coordination among many of the researchers and
research programs, these studies have in many instances pro-
vided a remarkable convergence of findings, perhaps made more
remarkable by the extent to which they sometimes challenge

450; J-PART, April 2000

Comparing Public and Private Organizations

fundamental, deeply held assumptions about the nature of public

and private organizations.

This article examines several major streams in the research

literature comparing public and private organizations, but less
with a view to articulating results than to pondering a cumulative
result. We do assess research progress and gaps, but chiefly to
determine possible next steps. The summary provides a basis for
fairing stock of progress or lack thereof in this body of research
and for planning where research and theory should go now. Most
important, now that there is a formidable research literature on
this topic, what should one make of it?

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One way to proceed is to follow the patterns of convergence
in the research. Organizations are made up of a complex of
important dimensions and issues; researchers have developed
bodies of research on these dimensions, which include those men-
tioned abovegoals, structure, motivation, and many others. The
comparisons of public and private organizations have been influ-
enced by these patterns, drawing on conceptual and methodo-
logical developments in these areas. For example, researchers
have compared business firms to public agencies on measures of
work satisfaction among members of the organization and on
their perceptions of organizational structure, using concepts and
empirical measures that organization theorists had developed to
measure satisfaction and structure. Researchers who have com-
pared public and private organizations often have extended the
more basic organizational research with additional methods, such
as measures of perceptions of personnel rules (Rainey 1983) or
measures of organizational red tape based on reports of delays or
time required to complete an administrative function (Bozeman
and Bretschneider 1994). Even these extensions, however, tend
to fall into the framework of dimensions and topics from organi-
zation theory. Following this general pattern, the empirical
research on public vs. private organizations has tended to concen-
trate on certain organizational dimensions. There is a great deal
of relevant research and theory, but here we will concentrate on
summarizing developments in research on dimensions where the
studies have produced some of the most convincing findings or
the most interesting anomalies.

Goal Complexity and Goal Ambiguity

One of the more interesting anomalies concerns the compari-

son of public and private organizations on goal complexity and
ambiguity. Briefly put, everyone says that public agencies have
greater goal complexity and ambiguity than business firms

451IJ-PART, April 2000

Comparing Public and Private Organizations

everyone, that is, except the public managers who have

responded to surveys in which they were asked about this.

The assertions that public agencies have particularly vague,

hard-to-measure, multiple, and conflicting goals are so nearly
universal among scholars and observers that they need no
description here. The assertions typically refer to the lack of
sales and profit indicators and incentives for public agencies;
complications due to political oversight and interventions by
multiple authorities and interest groups; and value-laden and
sharply conflicting mandates (for example, simultaneous demands
for efficiency and equity or for conservation and development). It

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is difficult to locate observations about the distinctive aspects of
public organizations and public policies, including those of the
most prominent scholars, that do not refer to these goal charac-
teristics (see Rainey 1993).

Questionnaire surveys, however, have produced an anomaly.

We now have several surveysspanning about fifteen years
with respondents from all levels of government, for many types
of government agencies and business firms, from different areas
of the United States, and from different levels of their organiza-
tions that ask government and business managers about the clarity
and measurability of their organizations' goals (Rainey 1983; Lan
and Rainey 1992; Rainey, Pandey, and Bozeman 1995). The gov-
ernment managers tend to give high ratings to the clarity and
measurability of the goals of their organizations, and on average
they differ little from the private-sector managers on these
ratings. Everyone appears to agree that public managers face
more complex, hard-to-measure, ambiguous goalseveryone
except the public managers themselves.

Maybe the questionnaire items asking for simple, direct

responses about the clarity and measurability of organizational
goals are too simple to assess this dimension. Perhaps the public
managers defensively claim that their organizations' goals are
clear, in a social desirability response, because they believe that
to say otherwise is to report poor management of the organiza-
tion. Many interpretations are possible. This conflict, however,
between the observations of an army of expert observers and the
testimony of the observed (who have apparently failed to read or
heed the experts' pronunciations) raises many interesting chal-
lenges for theory and research. If these questionnaire measures
are inadequate, why? What do we actually mean by the observa-
tions about ambiguous, hard-to-measure, complex goals? How do
we better analyze these characteristics of goals and gather evi-
dence of the actual influences of such goal characteristics on
other variables? How do public agencies, private firms, and other

452/J-PART, April 2000

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organizations vary among themselves on such dimensions (Leroer

and Wanat 1983)? This situation raises some intriguing issues
about the relations between issues in political economy and issues
in organizational behavior. For example, if one advantage of
economic markets for the output of an organization is that they
clarify goals and incentives for the managers of those organiza-
tions, and hence the absence of economic markets denies such
goal clarity (Barton 1980; Dahl and Lindblom 1953; Downs
1967), then why will public managers not cooperate and report
that their goals are vague?

Organizational Structure

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A number of empirical studies have compared structural
characteristics of public and private organizations. These studies
have examined a variety of structural dimensions, but one of the
most interesting issues has concerned formalization (the exten-
siveness of rules and formal procedures and their enforcement)
and red tape. The issue concerns whether, in accordance with
stereotypes and endless commentary on the topic, public agencies
have particularly high levels of rules and red tape. The issue is
surprisingly controversial, as it turns out. Although the contro-
versy is quiet and implicit, since some of the researchers have
often worked without knowledge of the others, in many cases
they were simply more inclined to try to resolve the issue than
engage in controversy.

Some researchers have found little evidence that public

agencies show higher levels of formalization, or related dimen-
sions such as red tape, than do private firms. For example, Pugh,
Hickson, and Hinings (1969), in .what became known at the
Aston studies, conducted an elaborate research project on organi-
zations in Great Britain; the study was very prominent at the time
as an effort to develop an empirical taxonomy of organizations.
Pugh et al. predicted that'government organizations in their
sample would show higher levels of formalization, but found that
they did not. Over the years, additional studies concurred.
Buchanan (1975) also sought to test the proverbial red-tape
differences by comparing federal managers to business managers
on a structure salience scale. Unexpectedly, the public managers
reported lower perceived salience of structure. Bozeman and
Loveless (1987) found that public-sector research and develop-
ment units differed only slightly from private-sector units on a
measure of red tape. Rainey, Pandey, and Bozeman (1995) found
little difference between public and private managers in their
perceptions about rule enforcement in their organizations. Kur-
land and Egan (1999) recently reported findings that respondents
in public agencies perceived less formalization of their jobs and

453/J-PART, April 2000

Comparing Public and Private Organizations

of communications with their supervisors than did respondents in

private firms.

These findings conflict sharply, not just with general

stereotypes about rules and red tape in government agencies (see
Goodsell 1994 on the history and prevalence of such stereotypes).
Commissions and professional associations have for years
lamented the excessive rules and constraints in government
agencies (National Academy of Public Administration 1986;
F.J. Thompson 1993).

Bolstering these observations, moreover, are some empirical

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findings that suggest that public agencies do indeed have high
levels of formalization and red tape, and the levels are higher
than the levels in business firms. Rainey (1983) reported such a
difference, although not a particularly sharp difference. Warwick
(1975) concluded from his case study of the U.S. State Depart-
ment that public bureaucracies inherently incline toward elaborate
hierarchy and rules, implicitly concluding that they exceed
business firms on these dimensions. Holdaway, Newberry, Hick-
son, and Heron (1975) found higher levels of formalization in
Canadian public universities than in Canadian private universi-
ties, and Chubb and Moe (1990) reported a similar finding for
public schools in the United States, compared to private schools.

Bozeman and Bretschneider (1994) asked public and private

managers to estimate the time required to complete important
administrative functions like hiring and purchasing equipment and
found that public managers reported much longer times to com-
plete some of the important functions. In summarizing eight
studies that used the same red-tape measures in a wide variety of
public and private organizations, Bozeman (2000) observed that
the relative degree of red tape varied between sectors according
to type of organizational activity. In some activities, such as
starting a new project, levels of red tape were quite similar. But
any activity related to personnel administration (hiring and firing,
for example) typically faced much longer delays and expanded
time horizons in government organizations.

An important contribution to this discussion comes from the

National Organizations Study (NOS), a study of a nationally
representative probability sample of organizations, that the
researchers presented as the first ever such national probability
sample of organizations (since almost all organizational research
has used samples of opportunity or judgmental samples). The
NOS researchers found that public organizations show higher
levels of formalization and centralization than private organiza-
tions show (Marsden, Cook, and Knoke 1994). These researchers

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were organizational sociologists who had no particular motivation

to find that public organizations show differences from private
ones; they focused instead on more general analysis of organiza-
tional structures. From their data, however, emerged the evi-
dence that a public vs. private vs. nonprofit distinction provided
one of the strongest predictors of organizational structural
characteristics.

Given this stream of evidence, one wonders what is going

on. Why do we have the studies we have mentioned that reverse
the stereotypesthat find no difference between public and pri-
vate organizations in formalizationbut then the additional find-

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ings that tend to support the typical assertion that public organi-
zations have more rules and red tape? Also, where amid these
conflicting results does one find the convergence ballyhooed in
the earlier part of this article? These questions have some reason-
able answers, but we need first to describe some evidence on a
particular type of formalization and red tapethat which governs
personnel administration and purchasing and procurement.

Formalization of Personnel and Purchasing Processes

One possible interpretation of the variations in findings

focuses on the particular type of formalization. Public and private
organizations differ more strongly on formalization of personnel
procedures, purchasing processes, and other administrative pro-
cedures that are regulated or overseen by central administrative
agencies and mandated by system-wide mandates.

Although Pugh, Hickson, and Hinings (1969) did not find

greater structuring of activities in government organizations,
those organizations had more concentration of authority at the top
of the organization or with external authorities, especially author-
ity over personnel procedures. The researchers concluded that
size and technological development act as the main determinants
of formalization and rules (they called it structuring of activities).
Government ownership, they said, exerts an influence indepen-
dent of size and technology, causing concentration of authority at
the top of the organization or with external authorities, especially
authority over personnel procedures. Tolbert and Zucker (1983),
who also indicated the effects of government auspices on person-
nel procedures, showed how federal pressures influenced the dif-
fusion of civil service personnel systems across governments in
the United States. Very large surveys of federal employees find
that a high percentage of the managers and executives say that
they do not have enough authority to remove, hire, promote, and
determine the pay of their employees. Most respondents also
think that personnel and budgeting rules create obstacles to

455/J-PART, April 2000

Comparing Public and Private Organizations

productivity (U.S. Office of Personnel Management 1979; 1980;

1983).

These studies provide increasing evidence that government

auspices influence structure in a number of ways, particularly
regarding rules and structural arrangements over which external
oversight agencies have authority, such as personnel and pur-
chasing regulations. Bozeman and Bretschneider (1994) provide
explicit evidence of these patterns. They analyzed research and
development laboratories on the basis of public and private
ownership and the amount of government funding. The govern-
ment labs had highly structured personnel rules. The private labs

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did not, even when they received high levels of government
funding. They did, however, receive more contacts and com-
munications from government officials when they received more
public funding. This suggests that governmental funding brings
with it a different pattern of governmental influence than does
governmental ownership. Government ownership brings with it
the formal authority of oversight agencies to impose the rules of
the jurisdiction, usually governing personnel, purchasing, and
accounting and budgeting. Bretschneider (1990) provided more
evidence in an analysis of decisions about computer systems in
public and private organizations. Managers in the public organi-
zations experienced longer delays in getting approval to purchase
computer equipment and in the processing of those purchases.
The delays apparently reflect the procurement rules supervised by
central procurement agencies such as the General Services
Administration. In sum, these studies provide evidence, con-
sistent with the pattern that began to emerge with the Pugh,
Hickson, and Hinings (1969) study, that government ownership
often subjects organizations to central oversight rules over such
matters as personnel, purchasing, and budgeting and accounting.

Recent survey evidence supports this observation more

strongly than ever (Lan and Rainey 1992; Rainey, Pandey, and
Bozeman 1995). Rainey, Facer, and Bozeman (1995), for
example, reported results of surveys in several states, involving
all levels of government and many organizations, at different
points across a fifteen-year period, comparing responses of public
and private managers to numerous questions about constraints
under personnel rules. The questions asked whether the rules
made it hard to fire a poor manager in their organization or hard
to reward a good manager with higher pay, and similar matters.
The differences between the responses of the public and private
managers were huge, by the standards of survey research.
Roughly 90 percent of the public managers would agree with
statements about constraints under their organizations' personnel
rulesthat they made it hard to fire and to reward with higher

456/J-PART, April 2000

Comparing Public and Private Organizations

paywhile 90 percent of the business managers would disagree.

This provided striking evidence of sharp differences in the way
public and private managers perceive the personnel rule struc-
tures of their organizations, evidently reflecting the effects of the
government personnel systems on the rules of the public organi-
zations.

This strong evidence brings us to answers to the questions

we asked earlier. We get conflicting findings on formalization
because they refer to different types of formalization, that is, to
different types of rules. A careful look at the set of studies we
have cited suggests that the evidence is converging, but in two

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opposing directions. When researchers have asked about or mea-
sured general formalizationthe intensity of rules in general and
of their enforcementthey have found either small differences
between public and private organizations or no differences at all.
Public organizations have somewhat greater levels of this, but not
strikingly higher levels. When research has focused on formaliza-
tion of personnel and purchasing rules, public agencies have
consistently shown much higher levels. When researchers have
simply asked about the level of red tape, they have often found
that public managers report higher levels of it than managers in
private firms report, but this could be because in referring gen-
erally to red tape the public managers are influenced by the high
levels of red tape in personnel and purchasing. Alternatively,
public managers may in some instances be acquiescing to their
socially ascribed role. Moreover, the relationship between per-
ceptions and the objective measures of red tape is almost always
quite complicated. For example, respondents in public and pri-
vate research laboratories tend to report high levels of perceived
red tape, but by objective indicators these laboratories have lower
levels of red tape than any of several other types of organizations
examined (Crow and Bozeman 1998). One explanation is that
laboratory managers have less tolerance for red tape, and thus
even relatively small amounts seem to them to be oppressive.

One of the most interesting indications of support for the

idea that public-sector red tape and formalism relate chiefly to
personnel issues comes from the National Organization Survey
(NOS), mentioned previously, a historically unprecedented pro-
ject that aimed for a nationally representative sample of organi-
zations. Out popped the evidence that public organizations show
higher levels of formalization and centralization than private
organizations show. If one examines the measure of formalization
used in the NOS, however, one finds that it refers almost entirely
to formalization of personnel rules. The measure consists of a
series of questions, posed to a representative of the organization,
about whether or not the organization has formal rules and

457//-PARJ, April 2000

Comparing Public and Private Organizations

procedure manuals to cover various processes in the organization.

Six of the seven questions used refer to some aspect of personnel
administrationpersonnel evaluations, fringe benefits, job
descriptions, hiring and firing, performance records, safety, and
hygiene. Thus, the measure of formalization in this major study
appears to amount to a measure of formalization of personnel
procedures.

This pattern represents convergence on the point that public

organizations differ sharply from private organizations on
formalization and red tape in processes subject to jurisdictional
rules and the authority of oversight agencies that come with

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governmental ownership, such as personnel and purchasing.
More general formalizationthe general extensiveness of rules
and their enforcementappears not to differ between the two
categories as consistently and strongly. The more general pattern
of rules, as suggested by Pugh et al. years ago (1969), appears to
be more subject to influences of organizational size, technology
and work processes, and other factors. Thus, the findings con-
verge on the confirmation of sharp differences often cited in the
literature and in popular discoursered tape in personnel admin-
istration in the public sector. Yet they also converge on evidence
that scholarly assertions and popular stereotypes about more
general formalization in public agencies appear invalid or over-
stated. This, then, is one of those happy circumstances mentioned
earlier, where both sides can claim that they were right in certain
ways.

As usual in the social sciences, the research we have cited

provides abundant ammunition for scholarly squabbles over
whether the interpretation just advanced is correct. Whether or
not it is correctand it has much supportit raises challenges for
theory and research. For example, various prominent theories or
depictions of public organizations assert that their managers tend
to create a lot of the rules and red tape in the agencies because of
the pressures to avoid political controversy and the absence of
clear performance and outcome measures (e.g., Barton 1980;
Downs 1967; Warwick 1975). This stream of evidence suggests
that this is not the case, since if it were, public organizations
would show higher levels of general formalization. Instead, they
show higher levels of formalization of processes subject to juris-
diction-wide rules, and these rules come from outside die agency,
not from inside as creations of the agency managers. Moreover,
Bozeman and Rainey (1998) report evidence that managers in
government agencies do not express strong preferences for more
rules; in fact they express lower levels of such preferences than
do managers in business firms. People who theorize about public
bureaucracy now must confront a body of evidence that makes it

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hard to support the claim that public-sector bureaucrats aggres-

sively create red tape, more so than do their counterparts in
private firms. Rather, it seems that public managers more often
receive red tape that is created for them by legislative and
political superiors.

Work-Related Attitudes and ValuesWork Satisfaction,

Motivation, Valuation of Rewards, and Work Outcomes

In public vs. private comparisons, there is now a tradition of

analyzing differences between employees and managers in public
agencies and private firms on work-related attitudes and values.

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Many of the studies have focused on work satisfaction, and most
of these studies have reported lower work satisfaction on the part
of people in public agencies, especially at managerial levels
(Buchanan 1974; Hayward 1978; Khojasteh 1993; Kovach and
Patrick 1989; Lachman 1985; Paine, Carroll, and Leete 1966;
Rainey 1983; Rhinehart and others 1969; Solomon 1986). These
results appear to support general stereotypes, as well as more
scholarly analyses, that depict the public bureaucracy as a dreary
place to work.

More recently, however, Steel and Warner (1990) and

DeSantis and Durst (1996) report that in the National Longitud-
inal Youth Survey, a very carefully designed survey of young
labor force participants, public-sector respondents actually report
somewhat higher levels of general work satisfaction than do
private-sector respondents. The apparent conflict in the findings
can be explained. On questions about general work satisfaction
such as, Do you like your job? public-sector respondents have
consistently shown high levels of satisfaction, levels comparable
to private-sector respondents (e.g., Kilpatrick, Cummings, and
Jennings 1964; Gore 1998). The studies cited above that found
lower work satisfaction among public-sector respondents used
measures of work satisfaction that refer to specific facets of
work, such as promotion prospects, autonomy in the job, pay
levels, coworkers, supervisors, and many others. These some-
what lower ratings of satisfaction by public-sector respondents,
particularly managers, tend to be concentrated on facets of their
work that appear to present particular frustrations in the public
sector, such as lack of autonomy in some work settings due to
rules and political interventions and frustration with promotion
policies for career civil servants who have reached high levels in
civil service positions and cannot go higher without a political
appointment. This suggests that the consistent findings of lower
satisfaction in the public sector are more indicative of particular
frustrations than of a general crisis in work satisfaction in the
public sector (e.g., Lewis 1991). Further analysis of these

459/J-PART, April 2000

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particular patterns in the public sector is producing evidence of

different patterns of work satisfaction there, as compared to the
private sector (DeSantis and Durst 1996).

In addition to the stream of research on work satisfaction,

there are now many studies that compare the work values and
motives of public and private employees. These studies have
consistently found that public-sector respondents, particularly
those at higher professional and managerial levels, place higher
value than do their private-sector counterparts on the rewards and
motives that one would predict they would emphasize. Public
managers place higher value on public service; on work that is

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beneficial to others and to society; on involvement with important
public policies; and on self-sacrifice, responsibility, and integrity.
Especially at the upper management and professional levels,
public-sector respondents place lower value on money and high
income as ultimate ends in work and in life (Crewson 1995b;
Hartman and Weber 1980; Khojesteh 1993; Kilpatrick, Cum-
mings, and Jennings 1964; Jurkiewicz et al. 1998; Lawler 1971;
Rawls, Ullrich, and Nelson 1975; Rainey 1983; Siegel 1983;
Sikula 1973a and 1973b; Wittmer 1991).

Conclusions from these studies are probabilistic generaliza-

tions, such that there is overlap between respondents in the two
sectors. Not all public- and private-sector respondents differ in
these ways (e.g., many people in private business place a high
value on public and community service), and the differences
between the two sectors are not always large. For example,
Jurkiewicz et al. (1998) found that respondents from two large
private firms placed a higher value on the opportunity to be
useful to society than did respondents from a variety of local
government agencies in a metropolitan area. Gabris and Simo
(1995) found that public-sector respondents were no different
from private-sector respondents in preferences for monetary
rewards or for opportunities to help others.

Of course, such mixed findings are fairly typical in the

social sciences, especially where findings come from studies that
employ different opportunity samples and where respondents
differ by organizational level, occupation and profession, organi-
zational function or mission, and other important variables. In
that context, one can justifiably look at the preponderance of
findings and other evidence. For example, Crewson (1995b)
reports differences between public and private respondents on the
General Social Survey (GSS), a survey based on a national
probability sample. On thirteen of the fourteen repetitions of the
GSS between 1973 and 1993, private-sector respondents were
more likely than were public-sector respondents to choose "high

460/J-PART, April 2000

Comparing Public and Private Organizations

income" as the most important aspect of their jobs, usually by

about a 10 percent margin. Private-sector respondents were also
consistently less likely to choose "a feeling of accomplishment"
as the most important aspect of a job by substantial marginsthat
were usually statistically significantin every one of the fourteen
renditions of the GSS between 1973 and 1993. Given that such
public vs. private differences have tended to be sharper at the
higher professional and managerial levels, and that the GSS
mixes all levels, these findings appear quite convincing about the
differences in spite of some reversals of the findings in smaller
studies. Taking such considerations into account, one can argue
that the conclusions about public vs. private differences we have
mentioned are generally consistent.

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These indications of a distinct set of values among many
public-sector employees have been much discussed, and research-
ers often point out that they suggest the need for alternative
motivational mechanisms in public organizations. Because organi-
zational psychologists never have been able to develop a satis-
factory way to measure work motivation, there have been few
direct comparisons of work motivation in the public and private
sectors. The few studies that have used questionnaire measures of
work motivation have found no differences in reported motivation
and effort among public and private-sector respondents (e.g.,
Rainey 1983). Surveys of very large samples of federal employ-
ees have found that they give high ratings to their own efforts
and to the importance of their own work and the work of their
organizations, as well as other expressions of high levels of
motivation and effort (U.S. Office of Personnel Management
1979; 1980; 1983). Obviously, social desirability responses may
account for some of these results, but the upshot is that we have
no clear evidence of lower motivation and effort in the public
sector than in the private sector.

One interpretation of this evidence is that public-sector

employees and managers encounter some particular frustrations
and disappointments in the public sector that show up in some of
the findings on work satisfaction that we have cited. Since they
are influenced by a different pattern of motives and rewards,
however, they cope with those frustrations and maintain levels of
motivation and effort that are at least comparable to those in the
private sector. The recent attacks on government and public
bureaucracy in the United States and some other countries may
cause us to overlook the considerable problems of private-sector
managers and employees and assume that things are better in
their setting. They certainly may not be, as suggested by
Crewson's (1993a) recent finding that early labor force entrants

461IJ-PART, April 2000

Comparing Public and Private Organizations

into the public sector rate higher on quality measures than young
entrants into the private sector.

Again, these studies of work satisfaction and work-related

values bring up the issues of convergence and impact on a priori
ideas. Given the bleak reputation of public bureaucracy, one
might expect lower work satisfaction there, and public servants
are supposed to value public service more than money. As we
have noted, however, the findings on work satisfaction are more
complex than that, suggesting equal or slightly higher general
satisfaction in the public sector, coupled with patterns of frustra-
tion with specific facets of the work in that setting. Together with

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other findings on self-reported motivation and effort, the evi-
dence suggests that things are not necessarily so bleak in the
public bureaucracy. In addition, while one might expect civil
servants to place less value on money and more on public serv-
ice, the dominant tendency in civil service reform and personnel
reforms have emphasized precisely the opposite priorities. Civil
service and personnel reforms in the United States and other
nations often have emphasized pay-for-performance programs and
streamlining of the procedures for firing employees. These
emphases have spread through governments at all levels in the
United States in spite of very little success and in spite of their
running contrary to much of contemporary thinking in the litera-
ture on management and organizations about how one truly moti-
vates employees (Ingraham 1993; Kellough and Lu 1993). They
have spread in spite of the studies we have cited that show no
clear evidence of a problem with motivation and effort among
public employees (or at least one that would be improved by
mimicking the private sector), especially a problem that results
from constraints on firing employees or on connecting their pay
to performance ratings. Thus, in governmental policy making
about public personnel administration, a priori assumptions once
again seem to have defeated accumulated evidence.

The National Performance Review in the United States

recently has taken some initiatives that depart from historical
personnel trends. These trends include the effort to involve
employees in the reforms and to remove red tape that frustrates
employees, as well as less emphasis on standardized pay-for-
performance schemes. The results of the NPR are still in doubt,
and only time will tell us whether NPR reforms will be signifi-
cantly different from previous efforts. In all likelihood, impacts
will be attenuated because the NPR is chock full of contradictory
priorities, such as reductions of the federal workforce concomi-
tant with the rhetoric about employee involvement. It will be
interesting in the long run to see if this and other initiatives
increasingly reflect the body of research that is reviewed here.

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Comparing Public and Private Organizations

ALTERNATIVE PLAUSIBLE HYPOTHESES:

HOW MUCH CREDENCE?

We now turn to the question of how much confidence we

place in the patterns of convergence we have described. In
assessing empirical research findings about differences between
public and private organizations, one has at least three choices.
First, one can simply ignore empirical research and cling to the
a priori. This is not a common approach, as exemplified in the
preceding section and in the obduracy of public management
scholars who assert that public organizations have more complex
and ambiguous goals. Second, one can accept the findings of the
research or consider these findings in connection with other

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sources of knowledge and opinion. Third, one can evaluate not
only the research but the research tradition and ask what set of
bizarre events (other than empirical veracity) might lead to such
consistency of findings? We begin with the third approach.

Campbell and Stanley (1963) developed an approach to con-

sidering "alternative plausible hypotheses," an approach that
focuses on threats to the internal validity of empirically based
propositions. But the approach has since been expanded well
beyond the eight primary validity threats posed by^ Campbell and
Stanley. For example, Huck and Sandier (1979) compiled a much
more detailed list to evaluate rival hypotheses in research find-
ings. More recently, practitioners of metanalysis evaluation
(e.g., Spector and Levine 1987; Cook and Leviton 1983; Bryant
and Wortman 1985) have explored rival hypotheses in sets of
interrelated studies.

Given the primary objectives of this study, we provide no

metanalysis or formal analysis of rival hypotheses. Instead of
examining the rival hypotheses for particular studies and sets of
studies, we consider rival hypotheses to the core hypothesis that
we have implicitly applied in our review of research:

If a number of empirical studies of public and private organizations

converge in their findings about differences between those organizations,
then those studies provide a valid explanation of differences (even when
those explanations diverge from strongly held views of scholars and
practitioners).

The question, then, is what conjunction of errors, misunder-

standings, or methodological artifacts might have led to empirical
findings so often at odds with our a priori knowledge about
public and private organizations? What are some of the rival
hypotheses to the one above that would lead us to lose confidence

463/J-PART, April 2000

Comparing Public and Private Organizations

in the patterns of convergence? We consider some of the most

challenging of these alternatives in the following sections.

Limitations of Questionnaires. Almost all the studies we

have discussed above are based on questionnaires. While ques-
tionnaires are the predominant source of data in a wide variety of
organizational studies, questionnaire methods, as do all methods,
present certain validity threats. Possible limitations include social
desirability responses (and other such reflexivity problems),
response bias, poor instrumentation, and weak construct validity
of items.

Certainly social desirability responses are possibile where

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one is studying such issues as organizational red tape, perform-
ance, or goal ambiguity. Socially desirable responses may inter-
act with sector or publicness; for example, persons working in
the public sector may feel a stronger pressure to report more
noble work motivations. There are, however, some arguments
against socially desirable responses as an explanation of dif-
ferences in questionnaire responses from persons working in
public versus private organizations. In the first place, some data
bases (e.g., Bozeman and Bretschneider 1994) and studies (e.g.,
Pandey 1995) have included items to test for social desirability
responses and found no reason to be alarmed. Moreover, as our
review has shown, public-sector respondents often respond
unfavorably about their work, their organizations, and other
matters. Why should they take pains to make socially desirable
responses for some matters and not for other matters that appear
equal in the degree to which they are sensitive or controversial?

Representativeness. Some early studies comparing public

and private organizations could be characterized, with only
modest overstatement, as comparisons of banks and welfare agen-
cies in one city or state. That is, some studies had samples
inadequate for valid inference about sector-related organizational
differences. Even so, such studies accumulated, and they began
to raise an interesting and potentially controversial issue in
relation to representativeness. Does an accumulation of studies,
each of which has a limited sample, enhance validity and general-
izability of a cumulative result? There can be plenty of argument
about this, but it is interesting that on some of the points we
discussed earliersuch as, for example, repeated findings of
lower satisfaction with some facets of work on the part of public-
sector managersno one reported a reversal of that finding? If
the results of the studies arc untrustworthy due to sampling error,
why are the conclusions not more randomly distributed?

464/J-PART, April 2000

Comparing Public and Private Organizations

Moreover, while representativeness remains a concern, more

recent studies have looked at a broad cross section of organiza-
tions, often drawn from multiple geographic locations, often
matching public and private organizations according to their
"core technology" (Thompson 1967), and controlling statistically
for important variables such as organizational size. Also, as we
noted earlier, we now have results from carefully designed
national surveys such as the NOS and the NYLS that contribute
to the patterns of convergence we have described. These and the
other studies support the claim that the public-private distinction
has received a more rigorous testing as to the representativeness
and generalizability of findings than most concepts in organiza-
tion theory.

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Low Response Rates, Response Bias, and Selection Effects.
Many of the studies that compare public and private organiza-
tions are based on relatively low response rates (in the range of
35-45 percent). This is not in itself troubling so long as care is
taken to assess response bias and, especially, selection effects.
The fact that much of published organization research, perhaps
the majority, is based on response rates of similar magnitude
should not reduce our anxiety about possible bias. While there is,
ultimately, no perfect means to determine whether the pool of
respondents is significantly different from the pool of nonrespon-
dents, a variety of statistical and methodological procedures are
available to help make such assessments. Some of the research
comparing public and private organizations have used these
approaches, others have not.

In Sum. One general argument against the veracity of the

empirical findings about differences between public and private
organizations is that the methods and techniques employed are
flawed and the data are unsatisfactory; thus, inferences inspire
little confidence.

On Rejecting The Null Hypothesis. Certainly, there are sig-

nificant limitations in the body of empirical research comparing
public and private organizations. Most of the studies we have
cited depend on questionnaires. Much of the research has been
performed with limited resources and thus is based on relatively
small samples, often samples of opportunity. Some studies are
rife with post hoc explanation. Despite these important limita-
tions, empirical findings on differences between public and
private organizations cannot be dismissed out of hand. Through-
out the social sciences, one criterion for findings is surviving
peer review processes (though there is some evidence that, as a
guarantor of knowledge, peer review has a different and a
weaker role in the social sciences). Ultimately, the most

465/J-PART, April 2000

 Comparing Public and Private Organizations

important reason is one that was not relevant two decades ago
the convergence of research findings.

In all sciences, convergence of research findings is one of

the most crucial criteria for certification of research (e.g.,
Hempel 1967). Among the social sciences, the problem with this
standard is simply that few bodies of work meet this standard.
While there are a few cases where organizational research has
shown reasonably convergent findings, the lack of convergent
findings is notorious. For example, studies of organizational size,
seemingly one of the research topics where organizational mea-
surement would pose little difficulty, have produced disparate
findings. Kimberly's (1976) review of more than seventy studies

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demonstrated that virtually every finding about the relationship of
size to performance that could be obtained has been obtained.
Nor is the scarcity of convergent findings confined to the softer
of the social sciences. Economists have had no more success than
have sociologists and political scientists in developing convergent
findings with respect to such straightforward questions as effects
of organizational size.

The consistency and convergence in findings of studies that

compare public and private organizations are noteworthy and, at
least in a few cases, remarkable for the social sciences. Unless
there is reason to believe that problems of measurement, logic, or
bias are systematic across a wide range of studies (a possible, but
not very probable, proposition), the convergence of findings
lends strong support to the conclusion that the results are true.
Research on the public-private distinction is establishing this
distinction as a well-founded concept in administrative research
and theory, showing a rare combination of rigorous examination,
convergent results, and both theoretical and practical signifi-
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