Organisational Changes and the Evolution of Working Life Quality: a Comparison Between the Private Sector and the State Civil Service
Abstract: High Performance paradigm and New Public Management are implemented both in the private and the public sectors in a context of organisational rationalisation and cost containment. Using a French linked employer-employee survey on organisational change and computerisation (COI), we first analyse the effects of organisational changes in the private sector and the state civil service on work intensification, job enrichment, work involvement and recognition at work. Organisational changes are more intense in the state civil service than in the private sector, which confirms the importance of changes in the working environment of employees within the context of the modernisation of the state. However, these reforms have not resulted into work intensification. Only in the private sector, changes are related to work enrichment. The contrasts between the private sector and the state civil service are the greatest, in the areas of involvement and recognition at work. In the private sector, organisational changes increase involvement and feeling of recognition as long as the intensity of change is not too great. On the contrary, state officials express a decline in work involvement and their perception of work non-recognition is reinforced due to even moderate changes. We then test the moderating role of three forms of employee participation: within change contexts: consultation on changes, presence of union representatives and the existence of informal discussion groups. We show that they contribute to explaining the observed differences between the private and the public sectors.
