Reward Expectancies and Other Work-Related Attitudes in Public and Private Organizations: a Review and Extension

In recent years numerous studies have compared such work-related attitudes of employees of public and private organizations as work satisfaction, organizational commitment, and perceived relations between performance and rewards ("reward expectancies"). These comparisons are rele vant to various theoretical and institutional design issues, including civil service reform. This paper reviews these studies and discusses problems in methodology and in the aggregation of findings in this area of research. It then reports a comparison of "extrinsic expectancies" — perceived rela tions of pay and promotion to performance — on the part of public and private employees in two states. The results replicate a previous study which found weaker extrinsic reward expectancies on the part of public employees. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for theory and for administrative reform.