Do Employees Behave Differently in Public- vs. Private-Sector Organizations? A State-of-the-Art Review

Individuals working in public-sector orga-nizations (i.e. civil servants) are often presumed to behave differently from private-sector employees. In this paper, 26 hypothesis-based empirical studies of such public-private comparisons are reviewed; do employees behave differently due to sector? Most of the studies find significant differences at the individual level across the two sectors, although not always in the expected direction; accumulation of em-pirical findings is almost absent to date. This study criticizes this line of inquiry. Recommendations include 1) the testing of broader models in which sector is only one of a range of variables and 2) the inclusion of theories and methodological sophisti-cation from the field of Organizational Behavior.