*4.1. The Public Sector Context*

Our goal in this paper is to examine the influence of work motivation, job performance, and job satisfaction on the intention to leave an organization—especially in the contexts of the public sector organizations and the risk managemen<sup>t</sup> in public sector. Employee voluntary turnover has been an important issue of both practical and theoretical significance. Voluntary turnover could be driven by many factors, such as low job satisfaction, poor individual or organizational performance, or external factors (i.e., unemployment rate).

Public sector managemen<sup>t</sup> has evolved over the last three decades. In this 21st century's business environment, the public sector organization need a higher level of accountability and transparency than in the past century. Research and innovations in public administration and new public managemen<sup>t</sup> concepts can be useful to meet this progressive demand. A relevant example could be the Organization for Economic Co-operation Development (OECD), which has pushed reform agendas to its member countries. Moreover, governments in many countries have already launched public sector organizational reform to tackle their internal social and economic crises or meet to international demand and standards.

Therefore, in the globalized services providing environments public sectors' financial organizations are in a huge challenge to reform and provide better outcomes and performance to local, national and international communities. When an organization is under reform, it employees not only face with changes related to their job design, salary arrangements, and performance appraisal system, but also they must meet specific performance target at individual and organizational levels. They require appropriate professional developments to equip themselves with high levels of work motivations to accomplish and align themselves to their organizational targets. The professional development opportunities may be limited in many public sector organization. As a result, a high proportion of employees may consider voluntary turnover, which will eventually disrupt performance of the organization to meet its functional objectives.

Highly motivated employees are valuable assets for organizations. Employees could be motivated by intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Interestingly, comparison studies on motivation and job satisfaction between public and private sectors have shown mixed results. Some have resulted in no significant di fferences in intrinsic motivation in either sector, but an important impact in the public sector for extrinsic motivation (Maidani 1991). Other researchers have found no significant disparities between private and public sectors (DeSantis and Durst 1996). While, a study of data from 51 countries revealed that employees of 21 countries (out of the 51 countries) have a higher intrinsic motivation in the public sector than the private sector (Cowley and Smith 2014). Table 1 presents the results of a comparative research between the public sector and private sector organizations on the topic of work motivation, job performance, job satisfaction, and intention to leave the organization. Although the table includes several selected studies from the public sector context, our discussion covers other relevant research which follows.


**Table 1.** A comparative study between public sector and private sector research on work motivation, job performance, job satisfaction, and turnover intention.

Findings reveal that intrinsic motivation has a statistically significant and positive link to an employee's job satisfaction (Carmeli and Weisberg 2006; Markovits et al. 2010; Cho and Perry 2012). Extrinsic motivation has also a positive relationship to the public sector motivation (Wang et al. 2012; Taylor and Taylor 2011). Additionally, people are attracted to the public sector organizations by their intrinsic rewards rather than their extrinsic rewards (Markovits et al. 2010; Georgellis et al. 2011). In other words, a higher level of extrinsic gains reduce the propensity of intrinsically motivated employees to involve in public sector organization (Mihajlov and Mihajlov 2016).

Additionally, in line with the sector characteristics, individuals might consider public sector occupation if they have high public service motivation (Perry and Wise 1990). Anderfuhren-Biget et al. (2010) examined the influence of PSM on work motivation in the public sector in Switzerland. Their study convincingly supported the inclusion of PSM as an important motivational factor in the public sector. Another study of PSM in the Australian public sector (Taylor 2007) confirmed that employees with higher levels of the four dimensions of PSM were more likely to show higher levels of organizational commitment, job motivation, and job satisfaction. Taylor and Westover (2011) investigated and compared the e ffects of a selection of antecedents related to job satisfaction in governmen<sup>t</sup> employees in the USA; Canada; Great Britain; Germany; France; Denmark; and Norway. They reported that job satisfaction was significantly related to PSM, extrinsic workplace attributes, intrinsic workplace attributes, work relations with managers and work relations with co-workers. A more recent study by Taylor (2014) examined the relationship between PSM, job design, and job satisfaction in Australian local government, and concluded that governmen<sup>t</sup> employees with a high level of PSM were more satisfied, particularly when they could observe the positive impact of their job to the community. Mihajlov and Mihajlov (2016) found somewhat a consistent finding in Serbia that a high level of PSM including extrinsic satisfaction can be derived from fundamental cultural values, close and harmonious relationships with supervisors and peers, and open information sharing within the corporation which reducing their fear and insecurity, and nurture strong bond with the corporation. Other studies also examined PSM in a non-western cultural context (Prihandinisari et al. 2016) and analyzed the e ffects of knowledge managemen<sup>t</sup> (KM) and human resource managemen<sup>t</sup> (HRM) processes to the performance organization and employee's job satisfaction (Rahman and Hasan 2017).

To conclude, these findings demonstrate that public sector context is an important area of research due to ever changing globally connected business environment, and demand for a higher level of accountability and transparency which must be competitive to the advanced private sector. It is interesting to note that in addition to the public sector motivation, both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation of public sector employees are crucial to maintain satisfactory levels of job performance and job satisfaction. These will ultimately contribute to employees' turnover intention including voluntary turnover from the public sector.

#### *4.2. Turnover Intention in the Public Sector*

It is only in the last few years that public administration scholars have begun exploring the question of job turnover in the public sector. The issues considered in these research have included the determinants of employee turnover (Bertelli 2007), administrative employees turnover (Bertelli 2007; Boyne et al. 2010; Bertelli and Lewis 2013), comparison of public and private sectors employees turnover (Carmeli and Weisberg 2006; Wang et al. 2012), examining link between employees turnover and their gender (Moynihan and Landuyt 2008; Grissom et al. 2012), individual and organization fit (Moynihan and Pandey 2008), analyzing organizational goals (Jung 2014), and employees and organization performance (Meier and Hicklin 2008; Lee and Jimenez 2011). Moreover, there are many research studies on turnover intention are related to job satisfaction though (e.g., Carmeli and Weisberg 2006; Bright 2008; Liu et al. 2010; Pitts et al. 2011; Grissom et al. 2012; Wang et al. 2012). Table 2 presents a summary of the findings from relevant research.


#### **Table 2.** Summary of research on turnover intention in public sector.

Results demonstrate that the employee turnover intention might have a negative or positive impacts on organizational performances (Bluedorn 1982b; Meier and Hicklin 2008; Lee and Jimenez 2011). Typically, the negative e ffects encompass expenditures related to new sta ff recruitment, drop in productivity and reduced self-esteem in existing workers. There is also a functional impacts which imply the positive values of employee turnover intention, especially when the leaving workers are a low level performers. In such situations, the organization can ge<sup>t</sup> advantage from appointing some highly skilled new employees. In most cases, a new sta ff will usually come advanced ideas and bring better innovations in the organization.

The relationship between job performance and intention to leave could be positive, negative, a non-linear relationship, or not significant (Allen and Gri ffeth 1999; Carmeli and Weisberg 2006; Meier and Hicklin 2008; Zimmerman and Darnold 2009). The mixed findings in the literature on the relationship between job performance and turnover intention leaves a gap that should be addressed empirically to gain a better understanding and validation of the issue. By gaining better knowledge around these factors, public sector organization should be able to manage the employee turnover risk e ffectively.

As already mentioned above, most studies of turnover intention are related to job satisfaction. Hellman (1997) meta-analysis reported that "the relationship between job satisfaction and intention to leave was significantly di fferent from zero and consistently negative". This conclusion was reached following the analysis of 50 studies between 1983 and 1993. The study took into consideration the relations of the variables amongs<sup>t</sup> federal governmen<sup>t</sup> employees. The study also revealed that federal governmen<sup>t</sup> employees were less likely to leave the organizations than the private sector employees. However, the meta-analysis is limited to studies in the USA context.

Na ff and Crum (1999) found that governmen<sup>t</sup> employees with high PSM had higher job satisfaction and were less likely to leave their organizations. However, the PSM-job satisfaction-turnover intention relationships became insignificant when person–organization fit was introduced as a mediating factor (Bright 2008). Again, however, both studies were conducted in the USA. The studies of job satisfaction relationship to turnover intention in the public sector outside of those conducted in the USA include Liu et al. (2010) for China, Wang et al. (2012) for Taiwan, Carmeli and Weisberg (2006) for Israel; and Hwang and Chang (2008) for Korea.

The apparent mixed results concerning the relationship between turnover intention and both job satisfaction and job performance must be given serious consideration. Additional considerations that need to be addressed are whether higher performing employees have higher job satisfaction; whether or not high job satisfaction leads to high performance; and, if so, whether their high satisfaction rates result in the high performing employees staying in their organizations.

Additionally, as we observe, most of the public administration literature considers only developed western countries (mainly in the US context). It will therefore be interesting to study how work motivation, job performance and job satisfaction influence the employees' turnover intention in a recently reformed public sector financial organization of a developing country in Asia.
