Affecting Factors of Public Employees’ Organizational Commitment

Purpose – The aim of this chapter is to shed some light on the antecedents of organizational commitment, the mediating role of job engagement and job satisfaction as determinants of organizational commitment within the public sector environment, and the effects that national cultural values may have on these relationships. Approach – This paper presents a review of the works that, from both theoretical and empirical points of view, explore the affecting factors of public employees’ organizational commitment in an international setting. Findings – A comprehensive model has been developed, detailing the expectations on the inluence that these factors might have on public employees’ level of commitment, either as mediators or moderators. Research limitations/implications – The main limitation is the paper’s theoretical nature; the subsequent implication is a future empirical research that may prove or disprove these theoretical indings. In addition, there are some other possible mediating factors and antecedents which may be of interest for future researchers. Originality/value – This comprehensive review of the extant literature may provide academics and public managers with a deeper comprehension of how organizational commitment might be achieved, and why some practices may or may not be transferrable from one country to another.


Affecting Factors of Public
Employees' Organizational Commitment

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training needed to do their jobs effectively (IPMA, 2012).In addition, the perception of the employee on the above mentioned variables of his/her work environment and conditions might affect their levels of job engagement and satisfaction.These perceptions may be in turn affected by the country's cultural values, so it is to be expected that public employees from different cultures will display different levels of job satisfaction and job engagement (Hu, 2014;Matheson and Kwon, 2003).This provides an opportunity for academic research, looking to understand why this happens.
The aim of this research is to study the existing literature exploring the relationships between a public employee's organizational commitment and his/her level of job engagement and satisfaction, its antecedents, and the national cultural factors affecting it, and developing a model that may explain these relationships.Our contribution is offering a comprehensive perspective on the relationship between organizational commitment, its antecedents and its determinants, by clarifying this relationship and its expected effects so that managers and academics may improve public decision making in regards to HRM, thus generating more public value, as well as future academic research projects.
The structure of the paper is as follows.In the next section, a number of previous works have been analyzed to understand how organizational commitment in the public sector might be determined by employee engagement and job satisfaction, and what the latter two have in common.In addition, since the need for improving organizational commitment is a common challenge for many countries with different cultural values, it is interesting to provide a context to discuss if these different cultural values may have an effect on these determinants.The third part of this paper presents a hypothetical model where the expectations of the researchers are presented, and it ends with some inal thoughts regarding how to relate public sector employees' commitment and its antecedents.

Antecedents of organizational commitment in the public sector
If public sector performance is to be improved, there is a need to identify the factors playing a key role in engaging its employees and providing them with suficient motivation and satisfaction.In this section, we proceed to introduce our research object, organizational commitment, and its relation to job satisfaction and employee engagement in public sector organizations.
Particularly, organizational commitment refers to an individual's psychological attachment to the organization, as follows (Hallberg and Schaufeli, 2006, p. 602): "organizational commitment differs from engagement in that it refers to a person's attitude and attachment towards their organization.Engagement is not an attitude; it is the degree to which an individual is attentive and absorbed in the performance of their roles".Organizational commitment may be understood as a strong sense of identiication with a particular organization, acceptance of its values and goals, and, most importantly, its readiness to stay and/or take an extra action when it is needed.According to Schneider (1987), commitment is what "makes a person assume or continue a course of action when dificulties or positive alternatives would lead them to give it up".
One on the most popular deinitions of organizational commitment was developed by Meyer and Allen (1991).These authors distinguish three components of organizational commitment: affective commitment (positive emotional attachment to the organization), continuance commitment (gains verses losses of working in an organization, also considered as intention to quit), and normative commitment (feelings of obligation).
Most of the studies in the area of organizational commitment shows that employees working in private organizations are more likely to be committed than public sector employees (Goulet and Frank, 2002;Cho and Lee, 2001).Those works that have tried to ind if there is a relationship between the performance of a public employee and their organizational commitment, have achieved diverse results.For Seppala et al. (2009); Harter et al. (2009), Vandenabeele (2009) and Turkyilmaz et al. (2011), among others, there is a clear and direct relationship, while for Sinclair et al., (2005) there seems to be no deinite evidence that supports this hypothesis.
The concept of employee engagement was introduced by Kahn (1990).According to this author (1990, p. 964) employee engagement can be described as the harnessing of organizational members' selves to their work roles".Kahn's idea of engagement focused on the employee being able to express him/herself at work.Much of today's research refers to Kahn's work as the theoretical underpinning of employee engagement.Employee engagement can also be deined as a positive, fulilling, task-related state of mind characterized by "vigor" (energy, resilience, and a commitment to work hard), "dedication" (involvement, enthusiasm, pride, and challenge), and "absorption" (concentration and well-being during work) (Bakker et al., 2008).Saks et al. (2004, p. 601) state that "employee engagement has been deined in many different ways and the deinitions and measures often sound like other better known and established constructs like organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior".The Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (Schaufeli and Bakker, 2003) is also widely used as a measure of employee engagement.Some authors claim that age and work experience may inluence the level of engagement.For instance, among USA nurses of 45 years and older with at least 10 years of experience -34% of participants were engaged, 47% content, 12% ambivalent, 4% disengaged (Kuykendall et al., 2014).This conclusion seems to be interesting in the context of an aging European society.
As for job satisfaction, it can be understood as "a pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from appraisal of one's job or job experiences" (Locke, 1976(Locke, , p. 1300)).Job satisfaction is one's affective response to the job, viewed either in its entirety (global satisfaction) or with regard to particular aspects (facet satisfaction) such as pay and supervision (Smith et al., 1963;Tett and Mayer, 1993;Kinicki et al., 2002).

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Considering aspects of job satisfaction, one can notice that there it could be any aspect of the job such as pay, interpersonal relations, and work environment (Coombe and Barriball, 2007).For Turkyilmaz et al. (2011), the satisfaction construct may contain ive main factors: empowerment, participation, working conditions, reward and recognition, teamwork and training and personal development.They also proved that employee satisfaction is correlated with loyalty, understood as commitment, in the Turkish public sector.
As of today, there is no consensus about their relations and the causal order the organizational commitment inluences the work satisfaction or vice versa.In some studies, the organizational commitment appears as a predictor of job satisfaction while in others, the work satisfaction is the predictor of the organizational commitment.Some authors have found empirical evidence for correlation between that job satisfaction and organizational commitment (Cooper, Hakim and Viswesvaran, 2005) such as that of Mathieu and Zajac (1990), who found that the mean correlation between the two constructs was 0.53.Rusu (2013) found that the higher the work satisfaction is, the higher the organizational commitment; whereas Akomolafe and Olatomide (2013) established that job satisfaction signiicantly predicted organizational commitment.Similarly, according to Addae and Parboteeah (2006), job satisfaction mediated the relationship between organizational commitment and turnover intentions.On the other hand, there is a current that posits that it is the organization's commitment that exerts a positive and signiicant effect on job satisfaction and employee performance (Caricati et al., 2012;Susanty and Miradipta, 2013).Salanova and Schaufeli (2009) studied the relationship between job engagement and organizational commitment, and explained why there are only moderate correlations between the two: it is partly because job engagement is centered on workers' attitudes at work, while work satisfaction deals with attitudes towards or about work, which includes an evaluative component (cognitive) which is not present in engagement (Salanova and Schaufeli, 2009).Also, a conirmatory factor analyses undertaken by Huynh et al. (2012) showed that organizational connectedness (a variable conceived by the authors), commitment and engagement were separate constructs and that connectedness and engagement each shared unique variance with job satisfaction and intention to continue.Vecina et al. (2012) studied engagement in group volunteers and noticed that the relationships between job engagement and satisfaction depended on the time of service.Their model shows that job engagement inluences the participant's commitment to the organization, while organizational commitment predicts intention to continue.In this model, engagement inluences job satisfaction and an intention to remain an average period of 2 years in the organization.
It can be concluded that despite the myriad of works describing relations between engagement, commitment, and satisfaction, there are still reservations as to the role of job engagement, job satisfaction and organizational commitment.
In addition, literature often discusses the role of two other types of commitment, namely organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and job involvement.OCB deines the contribution of employees to the organization above and beyond the oficial demands of the job (Smith et al, 1983).It refers to behavior that is not formally recognized by the organization's reward system.In general it refers to support of the organizational goals and members through voluntary actions that promote the organization and go beyond the oficial duties.OCB plays an important role in organizational success (Finkelstein and Pobrane z czasopisma International Journal of Synergy and Research http://ijsr.journals.umcs.plData: 02/04/2024 19:20:21 Penner, 2004).Particularly, since public employees play a role of public servants a higher OCB than in private organizations is to be expected, as evidenced by Sharma et al. (2011).This study also showed that job satisfaction increases or decreases in a direct relation to changes in OCB; although Sangmook (2006) could not conirm such relationship in his work, indicating instead a relationship between organizational commitment and OCB.
Job involvement is considered to be a critical job attitude in industrial and organizational psychology, although there is a lack of conceptual clarity (Brown, 1996).According to Lodahl and Kejner (1965), job involvement is the internalization of values about the goodness of work or the importance of work in the worth of the individual.Kanungo (1982) redeined the concept, and concluded that job involvement is the state of mental or psychological identiication with a speciic job which depends on both the importance of one's needs (intrinsic and extrinsic), and the perception of work as satisfying those needs.Researchers contend that job involvement is largely affected by the employee's personality traits and values, and less by organizational factors (Rabinowitz and Hall, 1977;Riketta and Van Dick, 2009).
There are studies proving that greater job involvement was found to be related to higher work satisfaction and organizational citizenship behavior, which are then manifested in greater commitment and diligence (Podsakoff et al., 2000;Shragay and Tziner, 2011).Job involvement could signiicantly predict the level of OCB displayed by employees.As they explain it job involvement relects a positive attitude toward the job, therefore it seems clear why people with high job involvement will display more OCB than those with low job involvement.However, the relationship between job involvement and job satisfaction is not so clear (Buka and Bilgic, 2010).While Buchanan (1975) concludes that managers in public sector are less involved than their private companies' counterparts, Mirvis and Hackett (1983) found that the private sector employees were the less involved subjects.

Effects of job satisfaction and employee engagement on the antecedents of organizational commitment
As the concept of organizational commitment is relatively new to public management, consequently, there is limited empirical research about its antecedents.In order to better understand the relationship between employee engagement, job satisfaction and organizational commitment, it is necessary to explore the common features that organizational commitment concepts have in common.
Research suggests that there are several antecedents to employee engagement.Among them are effective leadership and co-worker relationships, interesting work tasks and the resources to perform their jobs well, instead of just rewards (May et al., 2004).The main responsibility for creating a working environment that makes people engaged deinitely has the management and the reward system and climate it creates.Saks (2006) noticed that perceived organizational support predicts both job and organization engagement and procedural justice predicts organization engagement.He also concluded that job engagement mediated the relationships between these factors and job satisfaction, organizational commitment and intention to quit (described as

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how often an employee frequently thinks of quitting his or her job during the next 12 months).Following his work, these factors have been found as common contributors to job satisfaction and employee engagement.

Reward system and recognition
When employees receive needed resources and/or recognition from their organization, they feel obligated to repay the organization.According to Kahn's (1990) concept of engagement, employees feel obliged to bring themselves more deeply into their role performances as repayment for the resources they receive from their organization.Cameron and Pierce (1997) found out after an extensive qualitative research that generally people enjoyed their job more when they received a reward, enhancing their interest and performance, linking rewards and job satisfaction.Poling (1990) argues that the best predictor of work satisfaction is the it between the employee's values and the rewards provided by the organization.This level of satisfaction can be inluenced by a number of factors, namely personality; intrinsic and extrinsic values; work conditions; and social inluence -the inluence of other individuals or groups (colleagues, family, cultural environment, etc.) on the employee's attitudes and behavior (George and Jones, 2002).
There is an intense discussion about what motivates public sector employees and a number of studies support the notion that public employees are motivated less by monetary rewards than their private counterparts (Frey et al., 2013).One of the instruments is recognition by organization and manager.Awards are able to send signals of recognition to the employee.Public sector organizations may issue awards at the individual, group, or organizational level, since they also play an important role in inluencing the levels of engagement, satisfaction and commitment.Rhoades et al. (2001) conclude that organizational reward has a positive inluence on affective commitment by the mediation of perceived organizational support.
Empirical research shows that, in general, the satisfaction levels of private organization employees are signiicantly higher than those of public employees (Buchanan, 1975;Bourantas and Papalexandris, 1999;Buka and Bilgic 2012, p. 234).This is also supported by the results study of Bordia and Blau (1998), which proved that pay satisfaction increases the overall job satisfaction, but public employees have less room for managing their pay levels.On the other hand, public employees may have a higher degree of intrinsic motivation and a greater interest in altruistic activities and socially desirable outcomes (e.g.Crewson, 1997;Houston, 2005).Or they may not (Borins, 2002).A discussion on this topic can be found in Milne (2007), who offers arguments for both sides, reaching the conclusion that it is quite a controversial relationship, particularly when studying individual commitment, satisfaction and performance.

Perceived Organizational Support
A deinition of POS was irst introduced by Eisenberger et al. (1986), according to whom employees feel secured by the organization when the organization values their colleagues and their welfare.Perceived organizational support (POS) can be understood as a workplace relationship.It is assumed that, when the organization treats the employee well, the employee reciprocates by working hard to improve organizational effectiveness (Brunetto et al., 2013).Perceived support of the organization means for employee that the organization values him/her as an employee and also values his/her welfare.Organizational support has aided in several cases to bring about successful innovations that promoted job satisfaction and employee engagement, such as in Malhan (2006).
There is evidence supporting the claim that both organization and manager support inluence job engagement and organizational commitment (Saks 2006;Guerro and Herrbach, 2009;Morrow, 2011;Brunetto et al. 2013).Getting recognition and awards from the organization strengthens employees' loyalty to the organization as long as they are consistent with fairness concerns.These instruments are perceived as supporting and not as controlling since ex-ante criteria are not speciied.

Managerial Support
In line with the previous item, there is quite a body of work supporting the claim that, if managers show their support to their employees, these tend to increase their organizational commitment levels (Eisenberger et al., 2002).Furthermore, trust is gained when employees perceive that they are treated fairly by their supervisor (Macey and Schneider, 2008).Managerial coaching or those effective managerial practices that improve employee effectiveness and learning also plays a relevant role in the level of satisfaction and commitment of the employee (Ellinger et al., 2010), even for public sector employees from culturally different countries (Kim et al., 2014).
Likewise, it works the other way around: poor managerial support leads to lower levels of organizational commitment (Rhoades et al., 2001, Shanock andEisenberger, 2006).This relationship is found in both private and public sector organizations; although some evidence shows public sector employees are less strongly affected by this relationship than employees of proit and non-proit organizations (Emhan, 2012).

Perceived justice and fairness of organizational procedure
Organizational justice refers to the employees' perception of fair treatment by an organization and its agents (distributive justice and procedural justice).Distributive justice has its roots in Adams' (1965) equity theory and it relates to the preoccupations expressed by employees considering the distribution of outcomes and resources.
Procedural justice deals with the criteria used in allocation decisions and there is outstanding evidence of its effect on organizational commitment (Rhoades et al., 2001, Demirel andYücel, 2013;Gupta and Kumar, 2013).Procedural justice is a universal and low-cost measure to improve performance when output or process control is not feasible.Fairness of organizational procedures may also have an impact Considerable research has also shown that perceptions of fairness are associated with positive organizational commitment (Folger and Konovsky, 1989;Konovsky and Cropanzano, 1991;Kim and Mauborgne, 1993) and job satisfaction (Clark et al., 2009).
Finally, intention to quit has also been a common antecedent when studying job satisfaction, employee engagement and organizational commitment (Saks, 2006;Seppala et al., 2009, Linz andSemykina, 2012), but the fact that we are dealing with public employees, who are on tenure or at least aspire to be, makes this antecedent redundant.

The effect of national cultural values on employee engagement and satisfaction
Finally, the context of business culture and national culture may be taken into account when talking about job engagement and organizational commitment.An organization is established at a speciic point in history and hence is shaped by speciic cultural contexts or norms and values.In fact, it is well acknowledged that national culture has a signiicant inluence on behavior of employees, as well as on consumer behavior and technology diffusion (Dwyer et al. 2005, Tiferet & Herstein 2010;Srite & Karahanna, 2006), as well as on the choice for a particular profession (Malach-Pines & Kaspi- Barcu, 2008).Additionally, individual demographic features, such as age, tenure, education, sex, work experience, and ethnic and geographical background, can also be signiicant for the organizational culture (Christensen et al., 2007), but not always (Malach-Pines & Kaspi- Barcu, 2008).
Public institutions are characterized by a special culture, called "bureaucratic culture" (e.g.managers trying to evoke change, risk avoidance), different from that of private sector organizations (Schraeder et al., 2005;Christensen et al., 2007).Members of public organizations stand in a dynamic and reciprocal relation to their organizational culture, and usually have similar attitudes and interests (Vandenabeele, 2008).There is also evidence that national culture inluences change management in the public sector (Fang, 2013;Ruin et al., 2014), since it was found that there are signiicant correlations between e-government development and the cultural dimensions as deined by Hofstede (2010).
Therefore, it is expected that these cultural dimensions exert a mediating inluence between the actions of the organization and the degree of public employee job satisfaction and engagement.Under this premise, we propose the cultural dimensions of Hofstede (2011) as mediating variables between the rewarding system, organizational and managerial support, and procedural and distributive justice on the one hand and job engagement and public employee job satisfaction on the other.These dimensions are described below.1.Power Distance Index (PDI): This dimension relects the degree to which the less powerful members in a given society accept the fact that power would be unequally distributed.In the context of an organization a high rate of this cultural dimension emerges in rigid hierarchical structures, mainly unidirectional communication systems, in which subordinates have a high dependence on their superiors in scheduling their work, granting certain privileges and views of the upper are not usually questioned and the ideal leadership is the benevolent autocrat.Therefore, it would be expected that aspects such as the feeling of justice and equality, organizational support expected by subordinates or reward system was different in organizations with high and low power distance and therefore have different moderating effects on job satisfaction and engagement.

Individualism (IND):
This dimension refers to the level at which individuals are integrated into society and to their sense of belonging.Therefore, in organizations with a high degree of individualism the reward systems are based more on individual merits as an example to emulate, the possibility of participating in decision making processes and assuming challenges at work is highly valuated, superiors also value positively their workers autonomy capability.Moreover, in collectivist organizations teamwork is perceived as something natural, not being so necessary but a motivational incentive to favor the generation of synergies from the working groups.Thus, rewarding policy and work management can be addressed very differently depending on the individualist or collectivist nature of organizational culture, and the employee job satisfaction and engagement could be affected by these human resource policies.

Masculinity (MAS):
A high score ("male") in this dimension indicates that the company will be driven by competition, achievement and success.Social status, hierarchical position within the organizational structure and level of reward are parameters with a direct impact on MAS levels.A low score ("female") means that the dominant values in society are personal relationships, caring for others and quality of life.It is therefore a cultural dimension with a strong motivational value.It would indicate what usually encourages people to develop themselves in their workplace, with a greater focus on personal success and achievements (male) or on parameters with a more social nature, such as the good working environment, personal job satisfaction, etc.If the organizational culture meets this motivational level, it would be expected that their level of job satisfaction and engagement will be higher.4. Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI): This last cultural dimension measures the degree to which members of an organization feel threatened by ambiguous unknown or unstructured situations.In organizations with high levels of risk aversion, change is seen as something negative, which generates an uncertainty that its members are unable to manage.Stability is therefore a very signiicant value.By contrast, in organizational cultures with low levels of risk aversion, the change is assumed to be a necessary improvement possibility for evolution.These are cultures which have a greater tendency to innovate.For instance, institutions with a high UAI which create a rewarding structure with a high variable component generate a demotivating uncertainty for its members, and it can affect their job satisfaction and engagement.
In relation with these cultural dimensions, Bouckaert (2007) highlights that even in bureaucratic cultures, cultural differences can have an impact on the processes of organizational change, on the way of carrying out human resources policies, and hence on the degree of worker satisfaction and organization engagement.Moreover, according

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to this study, certain combinations of cultural dimensions may have a synergistic effect on workers behavior.Thus, combining the dimensions PDI and UAI, "high-high" and "low-low" clusters are obtained (high power distance and high risk aversion, or low power distance and low risk aversion).In "high-high" cultures employees' satisfaction is linked to the degree of stability of tenure, no change, the presence of rules and regulations that guide their work, so that a ixed rewarding system, with strong organizational support could improve their level of engagement.
On the other hand, in "low-low", cultures workers are likely to change, take risks, make their own decisions and act autonomously, so some human resource policies could be expected to low in the opposite direction, in order to increase employee satisfaction and engagement.Moreover, according to Ongaro (2008), the combination of other cultural dimensions must be taken into account to understand the mediating effect of these changes in organizational entities.Thus, individualism and masculinity (IND and MAS) can inluence the independent variables of the model in the same direction as the cluster PDI-UAI increasing their effect or in the opposite direction counteracting it.
The transition from traditional (bureaucratic management) to NPM inluences the degree of satisfaction of public employees in their jobs and in their organizational engagement.In this sense, there are studies that show the inluence that the cultural dimensions of Hofstede have about switching to this new form of governance.Bouckaert (2007) concludes that low levels of power distance (PDI) and risk aversion (UAI) and high rates of masculinity (MAS) are necessary but not suficient requirements to manage a successful cultural change to NPM.The most inluencial dimension to favor this transit seems to be individualism (IND).So, high rates of this dimension are a necessary condition and perhaps largely suficient.In the same way, Khalil (2011) by studying 56 countries inds that the readiness for this transition is negatively correlated with the dimensions of risk aversion (UAI) and practices that cause an increase in power distance dimension (PDI), and positively with the cultural components of masculinity (MAS) and individualism (IND).
Another study (Frías et. al, 2013) shows the inluence of these dimensions in governance, revealing differences between different organizational cultures.Using a sample of 101 municipalities in Colombia, Portugal and Spain, the authors reveal that a proper balance between the cultural dimensions of Hofstede (1984Hofstede ( , 2001) ) favors the orientation of public employee towards a more transparent and citizen-oriented development of their tasks.This transparency is greater in areas of economic responsibility in those cultures with high levels of masculinity (MAS) and risk aversion (UAI).
All in all, it has been seen that numerous studies show the inluence of the organizational culture on different managerial parameters, not only in private companies but also in public entities.However, according to Schneider's model of homo-social reproduction (Schneider, 1987), people working for public sector organizations, due to their similar organizational cultures, might not be as affected by Hofstede cultural dimensions, since bureaucratic principles may override any differences between countries.Therefore, it would be interesting to check if these cultural dimensions exert some mediating inluence between the organizational rewarding actions, organizational and managerial support and procedural and distributive justice, irst as independent variables and public employee job satisfaction and engagement, and secondly, as dependent variables.Furthermore, it would be also interesting to gauge that inluence and study the effect of possible combinations of cultural dimensions, adding or counteracting their mediating inluence between the independent and dependent variables.

Research Questions and Hypothesis
As it was seen before, the phenomenon of evaluating a public employee's level of organizational commitment is complex and a number of steps should be taken in order to comprehend all its possible determinants and factors, even more in an international context.A number of gaps have showed up in regards to the role of job satisfaction and job engagement as determinants, and if this role is affected by cultural values.
In order to summarize the literature review that was carried out in section 2, Table 1 presents the main works related to each mediating relationship and its direction.It should be noted that OCB and job involvement are psychological constructs that are affected not only by organizational factors, but also by the personal features, like personality, values, and beliefs of the individual employee.Considering the strong weight of personal elements in their composition, they have been disregarded as mediators for the model, so as to avoid the effect of personal bias in the inal results and concentrate on exploring those parameters of a more organizational nature.

Antecedent
Mediator Research (Efect) Rewarding system Job satisfaction Poling, 1990  • H3A4: Public employees that work in countries with a higher score in the power distance dimension (PDI) will be more accepting of non-procedural justice policies than those that work in countries with lower score in PDI.• H3A5: Public employees that work in countries with a higher score in the power distance dimension (PDI) will be more accepting of non-distributive justice policies than those that work in countries with lower score in PDI.• H3B1: Public employees that work in countries with a higher score in the individualism (IND) dimension will prefer a rewarding system based on their own achievements rather than on teamwork objectives • H3B2: Public employees that work in countries with a higher score in the individualism (IND) dimension will be more appreciative of the efforts on organizational support.• H3B3: Public employees that work in countries with a higher score in the individualism (IND) dimension will be more appreciative of the efforts on managerial support.• H3B4: Public employees that work in countries with a higher score in the individualism (IND) dimension will demand procedural justice policies.• H3B5: Public employees that work in countries with a higher score in the individualism (IND) dimension will demand distributive justice policies.• H3C1: Rewarding system factor will have a higher impact on public employee's job satisfaction and engagement in countries with a higher score in the masculinity (MAS) dimension.• H3C2: Public employees that work in countries with a lower score in the masculinity (MAS) dimension will be more appreciative of the efforts on organizational support.• H3C3: Public employees that work in countries with a lower score in the masculinity (MAS) dimension will be more appreciative of the efforts on managerial support.• H3C4: Public employees that work in countries with a higher score in the masculinity (MAS) dimension will demand procedural justice policies.• H3C5: Public employees that work in countries with a higher score in the masculinity (MAS) dimension will demand distributive justice policies.• H3D1: Public employees that work in countries with a higher score in the uncertainty avoidance (UAI) dimension will prefer a mostly ixed rewarding system policy.• H3D2: Public employees that work in countries with a higher score in the uncertainty avoidance (UAI) dimension will be more appreciative of the efforts on organizational support.• H3D3: Public employees that work in countries with a higher score in the avoidance (UAI) dimension will be more appreciative of the efforts on managerial support.
• H3D4: Public employees that work in country with a higher score in the uncertainty avoidance (UAI) dimension will demand procedural justice policies.• H3D5: Public employees that work in country with a higher score in the uncertainty avoidance (UAI) dimension will demand distributive justice policies.

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To analyze the prior hypotheses, an empirical survey needs to be carried out.This survey will only produce signiicant results if its design complies with a number of requirements, as follows: -The sample: comparable samples should be used, made up of local employees at every level and unit, so as to be as representative as possible of the universe of public employees at local levels and to avoid single-respondent bias.To ensure that organizational values may not affect the results, just one local public administration will be targeted in each country, provided they have the same size and scope of work.-Cultural differences: to measure the possible moderating effects of Hofstede's dimensions, the criteria for selecting the countries must be their outstanding position in, at least, one of said dimensions, as per Hofstede's analysis.-The instrument: although the original survey will be written in English, the inal questionnaire will be translated into local languages (Kanning and Hill, 2013).It will be distributed personally by the researchers, to ensure the participation and understanding of the employees.Content validation will be gained by the theoretical review here presented, and construct reliability and validation will be ensured by ex-ante measures (order of questions) and ex-post statistical tests such as factor analysis (Kinicki et al, 2002;Chang et al., 2010).-Other demographic parameters as control variables: gender, age, position, qualiication level, and time working for the public sector.By studying these variables, results can be more detailed and employee proiles can be given to the policy makers of each surveyed country.

Final relections and research limitations
Over the past two decades, there have been changes happening in public sector organizations that have had a signiicant impact on their employees and their working conditions, although changes seem to be insuficiently addressed by academia considering the disparity of results obtained by the empirical research reviewed in this paper.Taking a step back and revising the extant theory and empirical conclusions allows for a more up-to-date, comprehensive overview of the problem at hand.In addition to this contribution, incorporating the concurrent effect of national cultural values may provide academics and public managers with a deeper comprehension of how organizational commitment might be achieved, and why some practices may or may not be transferrable from one country to another.The extant literature does not offer a straight and clear way to help public managers face the challenge of achieving public value through their human resources, since almost every other resource is scarce.As it was shown, the patterns of contribution of an organization's rewarding system, perceived organizational support, perceived managerial support, procedural justice and distributive justice represent a quite complex network, which may vary from country to country, although the problem is the same within the European environment: the current economic recession that, coupled with the changes in public sector culture, force the public employees to be more eficient and lexible, and to endure the strain of lacking the necessary resources to do their job well.Researchers in the public administration ield must concentrate on those factors determining job satisfaction, job engagement and organizational commitment to develop a model that overcomes the limitations of NPM and aims for better performance by providing for engaged public employees.
This paper has a number of limitations, the main one being its theoretical nature.To overcome this limitation of an incomplete research, the next step will be to carry out an empirical research that may prove or disprove the theoretical indings on the antecedents and mediators on public employees' job engagement, aiming to improve the motivation and performance of public employees in these times of scarcity.In addition, many researchers have introduced other possible mediating factors such as OCB, and antecedents as teamwork, which may be of interest for future researchers as a complement to this model.