Ben Kuipers

Leiden University, Governance and Global Affairs, Faculty Member

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Papers by Ben Kuipers

The Management of Change in Public Organizations: A Literature Review

by Walter Kickert, Lars Tummers, and Ben Kuipers

Public Administration, 2014

This article presents a review of the recent literature on change management in public organisati... more This article presents a review of the recent literature on change management in public organisations and sets out to explore the extent to which this literature has responded to earlier critiques regarding the lack of (public) contextual factors. The review includes 133 articles published on this topic in the period from 2000 to 2010. The articles are analyzed based on the themes of the context, content, process, outcome and leadership of change. We identified whether the articles referred to different orders of change, as well as their employed methods and theory.

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Sustainable Procurement in Practice

Public Procurementâs Place in the World, 2014

Sustainable procurement is often used to reduce negative environmental impacts related to product... more Sustainable procurement is often used to reduce negative environmental impacts related to production and consumption. Several studies in the sustainable procurement literature have identified potential drivers of and barriers to sustainable procurement, which are often organisational in nature. Using an organisational perspective, this paper examines if and how three organisational factors – top management support, expertise and commitment – influence the degree of sustainable procurement in procurement projects in the Dutch national government. The article concludes that both organizational factors (especially commitment) and the actions of individual actors are important.

THE MANAGEMENT OF CHANGE IN PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONS: A LITERATURE REVIEW

by Ben Kuipers and Lars Tummers

This article presents a review of the recent literature on change management in public organizati... more This article presents a review of the recent literature on change management in public organizations and sets out to explore the extent to which this literature has responded to earlier critiques regarding the lack of (public) contextual factors. The review includes 133 articles published on this topic in the period from 2000 to 2010. The articles are analysed based on the themes of the context, content, process, outcome, and leadership of change. We identified whether the articles referred to different orders of change, as well as their methods and theory employed. Our findings concentrate on the lack of detail on change processes and outcomes and the gap between the common theories used to study change. We propose an agenda for the study of change management in public organizations that focuses on its complex nature by building theoretical bridges and performing more in-depth empirical and comparative studies on change processes.

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Talking the Talk or Walking the Walk? The Leadership of Planned and Emergent Change in a Public Organization

by Sandra Groeneveld and Ben Kuipers

Journal of Change Management, 2013

ABSTRACT The implementation of public management reform may entail radical change for public sect... more ABSTRACT The implementation of public management reform may entail radical change for public sector organizations, as it implies changes in the values of the organization. Although such organizational changes are widespread and prevalent in the public sector, the processes through which such changes take place are largely overlooked in the public management literature. By means of an embedded, comparative case study, the authors analyse both planned and emergent processes of change. Their analysis indicates that changes come about through careful reinterpretation and reframing of organizational commitments, rather than replacement of the old by the new values. Moreover, there are important differences in the leadership activities in planned and emergent processes of organizational change. They highlight the need for an increased understanding of the role of leadership in emergent processes of change. In order to successfully change public organizations, they find that the approach to change and corresponding leadership activities should be congruent with the content of the desired organizational change. Managers must dare to go beyond talking the talk and start walking the walk.

Held Back and Pushed Forward: Leading Organizational Change in a Complex Public Environment

by Sandra Groeneveld and Ben Kuipers

ABSTRACT Purpose. Recent studies have suggested that the specific characteristics of public organ... more ABSTRACT Purpose. Recent studies have suggested that the specific characteristics of public organizations may have a bearing on the implementation of organizational change. Public organizations typically operate in an environment characterized by checks and balances, shared power, divergent interests and the primacy of politics. The objective of this study is to advance our understanding of how this complex environment affects the implementation and leadership of change. Design/methodology/approach. A case study of the merger of three governmental departments in a Dutch city was conducted. The merger took place in an environment that became increasingly complex as the implementation process progressed. Interviews were conducted with 23 managers that were involved in the organizational change. Findings. A high degree of environmental complexity forces public organizations to adopt a planned, top-down approach to change, while simultaneously the effectiveness of such an approach to change is limited. In addition, we find that with increasing environmental complexities, internally focused transformational leadership is accompanied by a network approach of leadership. Originality/value. This study provides empirical evidence about organizational change in public organizations and formulates theoretical propositions to direct future research.

Why turnover matters in self-managing work teams: Learning, social integration, and task flexibility

by Gerben van der Vegt, Ben Kuipers, and S. Bunderson

This study considers how turnover in self-managing work teams influences the team interaction pro... more This study considers how turnover in self-managing work teams influences the team interaction processes that promote effective task accomplishment. Drawing from research on self-managing work teams and group process, the authors propose that team turnover affects performance in self-managing teams by affecting social integration, team learning behavior, and task flexibility. Hypotheses were tested in a sample of 47 self-managing work teams using longitudinal panel data and an objective measure of team performance. Results suggest that team turnover indeed decreases social integration, team learning behavior, and task flexibility in self-managing teams but that only task flexibility and team learning behavior mediate the negative relationship between team turnover and team effectiveness.

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Does Leadership Style Make a Difference? Linking HRM, Job Satisfaction, and Organizational Performance

by Ben Kuipers and Brenda Vermeeren

Review of Public Personnel Administration, 2014

With the rise of New Public Management, public organizations are confronted with a growing need t... more With the rise of New Public Management, public organizations are confronted with a growing need to demonstrate efficiency and cost effectiveness. In this study, we examine the relationship between public organizational performance and human resource management. Specifically, we focus on job satisfaction as a possible mediating variable between organizational performance and human resource management, and on the influence of a supervisor's leadership style on the implementation of HR practices. Drawing on a secondary analysis of data from a national survey incorporating the views of 6,253 employees of Dutch municipalities, we tested our hypotheses using structural equation modeling. The findings indicate that a) job satisfaction acts as a mediating variable in the relationship between HRM and organizational performance and b) a stimulating leadership style has a positive effect on the amount of HR practices used, whereas c) a correcting leadership style has no effect on the amount of HR practices used.

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Implementing change in public organizations: The relationship between leadership and affective commitment to change in a public sector context

by Ben Kuipers and Sandra Groeneveld

We propose and test a theoretical framework concerning the relationship between transfor- mationa... more We propose and test a theoretical framework concerning the relationship between transfor- mational leadership behaviour and affective commitment to change in a public sector con- text. We apply change management theory to explain how direct supervisors contribute to processes of organizational change, thereby increasing affective commitment to change among employees. While the change leader- ship literature emphasizes the role of executive managers during change, we conclude that the transformational leadership behaviour of direct supervisors is an important contribution to the successful implementation of change. Furthermore, the results show how the speci- fic context of public organizations determines the transformational leadership behaviour of direct supervisors.

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Human Resource Management and Performance of Public Organizations: A study of HRM activities and public service quality of Dutch municipalities

by Brenda Vermeeren and Ben Kuipers

soc.kuleuven.be

During the last two decades, public sector performance has become more and more of an issue. Our ... more During the last two decades, public sector performance has become more and more of an issue. Our aim is to gain insight into the relationship between HRM and the quality of public service in order to help public organizations improve their performance by means of better HRM policies. For the analysis two different data bases were used. The data bases provide us with data about employee well being and data about the performance of municipalities. The data of both surveys were aggregated on the organizational level, with the result that data can be compared among 35 different municipalities in the Netherlands. Because of the fact that organizational performance has been measured independent of the measurement of HRM, the often found problem of common method bias has been obviated. Based on the secondary data analysis both hypotheses were confirmed, showing that a) in organizations with a more performance oriented HRM system employees have a more positive attitude and behavior towards their job and b) organizations in which employees show a more positive attitude and behavior towards their job will reach better organizational public service performance. However, the effect of job satisfaction seems to be somewhat ambiguous. More satisfied employees seem to have a negative influence on organizational performance in efficiency terms (waiting time increase), but a positive influence on customer satisfaction with respect to service delivery (customers' satisfaction with respect to employee's empathy increase). In the context of New Public Management both performance indicators are pursueded, but because of the tension between these two performance indicators there raise some questions about the value of these criteria.

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Two Faces of the Satisfaction Mirror: A Study of Work Environment, Job Satisfaction, and Customer Satisfaction in Dutch Municipalities

by Ben Kuipers and Brenda Vermeeren

Review of Public Personnel Administration, 2011

ABSTRACT During the past three decades, the performance of public organizations has become more a... more ABSTRACT During the past three decades, the performance of public organizations has become more and more of an issue. However, academic research on public administration pays relatively little attention to how organizational performance is related to work environment and human resources within organizations. In this research, work environment characteristics, job satisfaction, and customer satisfaction are studied by comparing customer satisfaction data with data on the well-being of front-office employees in 35 Dutch municipalities. The authors test their hypotheses using structural equation modeling. Contrary to what was expected, the findings indicate that the effect of job satisfaction on customer satisfaction is twofold. In organizations in which employees are more satisfied with their jobs, customers are more satisfied with the empathy of the employees, but the waiting times for services tend to increase concomitantly. In addition, findings indicate that the work environment characteristics influence job satisfaction. These results have some implications for human resource management (HRM).

Teamwork in the public cage. Antecedents of self-management of teams in public organizations

by Sandra Groeneveld and Ben Kuipers

Whereas the organizational concept of self-managed teams has received abundant attention by publi... more Whereas the organizational concept of self-managed teams has received abundant attention by public management scholars as a post-bureaucratic answer to the increasing demands faced by public organizations, research on what teamwork in public organizations actually looks like is lacking. This paper fills this gap by investigating to what extent characteristics of teamwork commonly found in research on private sector organizations -goal dependency, task dependency and external cooperation -affect the degree of self-management of teams in public sector organizations. Furthermore, we examine how self-managed teams are affected by their attachment to public values by analyzing publicness as a moderator of the relationships of goal dependency, task dependency and external cooperation with selfmanagement. Analyses of supervisor and team member data from a sample of 68 teams in Dutch public sector organizations show that goal dependency and external cooperation positively affect the degree of self-management, while task dependency does not. Moderated multiple regression analysis also shows that publicness bounds the positive association between goal dependency and self-management, but does not significantly affect the relationship of external cooperation with self-management.

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Sustainable Procurement in Practice: Explaining the Degree of Sustainable Procurement from an Organisational Perspective

by Sandra Groeneveld and Ben Kuipers

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De kracht van High Performance Teams: Zes ingrediënten voor excellent presteren in de publieke sector

by Sandra Groeneveld and Ben Kuipers

ABSTRACT Ben Kuipers en Sandra Groeneveld (Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam) hebben in samenwerking... more ABSTRACT Ben Kuipers en Sandra Groeneveld (Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam) hebben in samenwerking met InternetSpiegel onderzoek gedaan naar een groot aantal teams; van uitvoerende teams tot project teams en management teams. Dit heeft geleid tot het identificeren van de zes belangrijkste ingrediënten van High Performance Teams. Dat zijn unieke kenmerken die deze teams onderscheiden van andere teams: • Teambevlogenheid • Doelgerichte samenwerking • Stakeholdergerichte samenwerking • Zelfmanagement • Taakgericht samenwerking • Leiderschap Het onderzoek geeft inzicht in hoe deze teams excellente prestaties leveren en tot grotere hoogte komen dan andere teams. Want vanzelf gaat dat niet. Dit boek gaat uitvoerig op de zes ingrediënten in, die zowel in publieke als commerciële organisaties van groot belang zijn. Het toont onder meer aan hoe belangrijk de rol van leidinggevenden is voor het excelleren van teams. Maak kennis met praktische inzichten en concrete handvatten op basis van gedegen onderzoek om ook uw eigen organisatie in beweging te brengen met High Performance Teams.

It is not easy being green: increasing sustainable public procurement behaviour

by Ben Kuipers and Jolien Grandia

To achieve greater sustainability, governments need to continuously adapt their purchasing activi... more To achieve greater sustainability, governments need to continuously adapt their purchasing activities to innovations in the market. Sustainable procurement is a decision-making process in which the decisions of procurers determine if the full potential of sustainable procurement is used. The decisions and thus behaviour of procurers are therefore crucial for the successfulness of sustainable procurement. According to organizational theory, commitment to change could influence this behaviour. Hence, in the study, we examined if commitment to implement sustainable procurement increases sustainable procurement behaviour by Dutch public procurers and what determines this commitment to implement sustainable procurement are. Our study shows first that both affective commitment to implement sustainable procurement and procedural justice increase sustainable procure- ment behaviour. In addition, the results show that commitment to change acts as a mechanism between fit with vision, ecological sustainability attitude, procedural justice and sustainable procurement behaviour.

Held back and pushed forward: leading change in a complex public sector environment

by Ben Kuipers and Sandra Groeneveld

Purpose – Public organizations often need to implement organizational change. Several authors hav... more Purpose – Public organizations often need to implement organizational change. Several authors have argued that the specific characteristics of public organizations make the implementation of organizational change in public organizations distinct or even more difficult. However, this issue has received little empirical investigation in both public management and change management research. Public organizations typically operate in an environment characterized by checks and balances, shared power, divergent interests and the political primate. The purpose of this paper is to advance knowledge about how the implementation of change and its leadership is affected by the complex environment in which public organizations operate.
Design/methodology/approach – A case study approach is adopted. A merger of three government departments in a Dutch city is selected as a case. This merger took place in an environment that became increasingly complex as the implementation process advanced. The main method of data collection was interviewing the managers that were involved in the organizational change. In all, 23 interviews were conducted and fully transcribed. The interviews were then coded using Atlas.ti software.
Findings – The analysis indicates that a high degree of environmental complexity forces public organizations to adopt a planned, top-down approach to change, while the effectiveness of such an approach to change is simultaneously limited by a complex environment. In addition, typical change leadership activities, such as defining the need for change, role modeling and motivating employees to implement the change, are not sufficient to implement change in a complex environment. In order to overcome environmental dependencies and maintain momentum in the change process, public managers must engage in more externally oriented leadership activities.
Originality/value – The paper provides empirical evidence about the relevant and rapidly growing research topic of organizational change in public organizations. The paper concludes with hypotheses that can be tested in follow-up research, and as such provides a starting point for future research concerning change management in public organizations.

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Moving European research on work and ageing forward: Overview and agenda

by Ben Kuipers, Hans Witte, René Schalk, annet de Lange, Franz Gellert, Matthijs Bal, and MJD Schalk

This paper summarizes the state of affairs of European research on ageing and work. After a close... more This paper summarizes the state of affairs of European research on ageing and work. After a close inspection of the age construct, an overview is presented of research in four areas: the relationship between age and HR-policies, early retirement, age and performance/employability, age and health/well-being. The overview results in a research agenda on work and ageing and in recommendations for practice.

Talking the Talk or Walking the The Leadership of Planned and Emergent Change in a Public Organization

The implementation of public management reform may entail radical change for public sector organi... more The implementation of public management reform may entail radical change for public sector organizations, as it implies changes in the values of the organization. Although such organizational changes are widespread and prevalent in the public sector, the processes through which such changes take place are largely overlooked in the public management literature. By means of an embedded, comparative case study, the authors analyse both planned and emergent processes of change. Their analysis indicates that changes come about through careful reinterpretation and reframing of organizational commitments, rather than replacement of the old by the new values. Moreover, there are important differences in the leadership activities in planned and emergent processes of organizational change. They highlight the need for an increased understanding of the role of leadership in emergent processes of change. In order to successfully change public organizations, they find that the approach to change and corresponding leadership activities should be congruent with the content of the desired organizational change. Managers must dare to go beyond talking the talk and start walking the walk.

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Development and performance of self-managing work teams: a theoretical and empirical examination

Several theories have been developed that prescribe the team development of self- managing work t... more Several theories have been developed that prescribe the team development of self- managing work teams (SMWTs). Some of these have led to models with successive linear developmental phases. However, both the theory and the empirical data show little support for these models. Based on an extensive review of team development literature, we propose, instead of linear phases, describing team development in three general team processes. These processes, internal relations, task management, and external relations and improvement, were empirically explored in a longitudinal field- study of more than 150 blue-collar and white-collar SMWTs in a Volvo plant in Sweden. The three processes were found to be consistent over time and appeared to relate to one-year-later objective SMWT performance measures for product quality, the incidence of sick-leave and long-term sick-leave. Based on these findings, a result- oriented team development approach is proposed, in which the achieved results determine the processes followed to develop SMWTs further. Also, managers and HR practitioners are encouraged to monitor the three ongoing team processes and to relate these to the desired team performance. Such an analysis should be the starting point of a dialogue between manager and team to improve the functioning and performance of SMWTs.

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Two Faces of the Satisfaction Mirror: A Study of Work Environment, Job Satisfaction and Customer Satisfaction in Dutch Municipalities

by Ben Kuipers and Bram Steijn

During the past three decades, the performance of public organizations has become more and more o... more During the past three decades, the performance of public organizations has become more and more of an issue. However, academic research on public administration pays relatively little attention to how organizational performance is related to work environment and human resources within organizations. In this research, work environment characteristics, job satisfaction, and customer satisfaction are studied by comparing customer satisfaction data with data on the well-being of front-office employees in 35 Dutch municipalities.The authors test their hypotheses using structural equation modeling. Contrary to what was expected, the findings indicate that the effect of job satisfaction on customer satisfaction is twofold. In organizations in which employees are more satisfied with their jobs, customers are more satisfied with the empathy of the employees, but the waiting times for services tend to increase concomitantly. In addition, findings indicate that the work environment characteristics influence job satisfaction. These results have some implications for human resource management (HRM).

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Teamwork: a case study on development and performance

by M. Witte and Ben Kuipers

The most popular model of team development in Dutch socio-technical literature is a linear approa... more The most popular model of team development in Dutch socio-technical literature is a linear approach, which states that teams develop in four successive phases. A method for defining the particular phase a team is in was developed a number of years ago and was recently used in a large-scale survey at Volvo’s cab manufacturing plant in Umea ̊ (northern Sweden). Thirty-seven semi-autonomous teams were studied at this plant during a seven-month period. This paper examines the development of the teams and addresses the effects of team development on overall team performance. The aspect of team development was correlated to both performance in terms of quality of working life (QWL) and business performance (BP), which is an empirically unexplored field within team literature. The linear phase approach of team development could not be proved. Nevertheless, teams were found to develop in four important areas, with each aspect significantly affecting team performance.

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