Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

What role does bureaucratic reputation play in employees’ decisions to leave their organizations? Bureaucratic reputation refers to outsiders’ collective perception of an organization, and it is an administrative resource that can enhance organizations’ autonomy, performance, and recruitment of valued employees (Busuioc and Lodge, 2017; Carpenter, 2002; Maor, 2016). This study focuses on the effect of public organizations’ reputations on their retention of human capital. As losing human capital involves high recruitment and training costs and lost productivity (Moynihan and Landuyt, 2008), understanding the employees’ psychological process to decide whether to stay or leave organizations has been an important academic and managerial topic. While previous scholars have suggested that factors are associated with public employees’ turnover intention, including economic, individual, and organizational factors (Mobley et al. 1979; Seldon and Moynihan, 2000), they give limited scholarly attention to the link between employees’ perceptions of their organizations’ external reputation and their attitudes and behaviors—particularly turnover.

The focus of this study is examining the association between public employees’ perceptions of their organizations’ external reputation and their turnover intentions while accounting for the mediating role of employee engagement. Based on social identity theory, the assumption of this study is that outsiders’ reputation judgments of organizations are internalized through a meta-stereotype process, emphasizing what “we” believe others think of “us,” influencing employees’ engagement and intentions to stay at or leave organizations (Ashforth and Mael, 1989; Helm, 2012). We particularly focus on employee engagement as a mediator that explains cognitive, emotional, and behavioral attachment associated with employees’ work roles, which is a variable likely to influence turnover intention (Kahn, 1990; Schaufeli et al. 2002).

We use a structural equation model (SEM) to analyze the data from the 2016 Merit Principles Survey, which includes the survey responses of approximately 15,000 U.S. federal employees. This dataset is unique in that it asks respondents their views of public perceptions of their organizations. As anecdotal evidence, before the analysis, we merged 2015 Political Survey data from the Pew Research Center to test whether the agencies’ reputations among citizens are related to employees’ perceptions of their organizations’ external reputations. Also, results from the Merial Principles Survey data supported our hypothesis that the relationship between perceived reputation and turnover intention is partially mediated by employee engagement. From our findings, we can infer the importance of reputation as a resource that can retain employees and promote positive work attitudes.