Bilateral ESRC/FNR: Training Executives to Enhance Employee Engagement in Government: Field Experimental Evidence from Luxembourg

Which management practices enhance organizational effectiveness? A vast literature in public administration, management and economics has assessed this question. However, most of it is correlational and plagued by endogeneity concerns. For instance, whether organizations see the need to change management practices - such as performance incentives or leadership practices - depends in part on how effective they are. Simply correlating management practices with measures of organizational effectiveness can thus lead to spurious associations. By contrast, evidence is scant concerning the causal effects of management practices. This holds all the more in public administration, where field experimental research remains underdeveloped more generally. As a result, governments - and bodies advising them, such as the OECD or World Bank - frequently lack an evidence base for management choices.

The proposed ESRC-FNR project addresses this gap for one management practice in particular: executive training. While trainings are a default solution for a range of management challenges, there is little causal evidence on their effectiveness in government. Our project addresses this shortcoming for an executive training focused on an outcome which is central to organizational effectiveness: employee engagement.

Engaged employees are in a positive, fulfilling psychological state in which they are emotionally, cognitively and physically engaged with their work. Yet, particularly in public sector organizations, employee engagement is challenging. For instance, austerity pressures and the Covid-19 pandemic have pushed up workloads, while administrative jobs with routine operating procedures disengage employees. Executive trainings are a default solution for organizations seeking to enhance engagement. Our core research question is thus: do executive engagement trainings enhance employee engagement in government? Further, we explore mechanisms: how do such trainings affect employee engagement?

To provide rigorous answers, the ESRC-FNR project would partner with the Government of Luxembourg in a large-scale field experiment. Replicating standard approaches to executive engagement training, our trainings would present senior managers with an engagement diagnostic of their organization, followed by coaching them to develop and implement an action plan to raise engagement. Senior managers of half of Luxembourg's 124 civilian institutions would be randomly selected to receive the training in year 1. To evaluate training effectiveness and mechanisms, an engagement survey would be fielded with Luxembourg's 28,600 civilian government employees before and (one year) after the training. Moreover, administrative data will allow the project to assess training effects on behavioral consequences of engagement, such as turnover.

As such, the project would add much needed causal evidence to scholarly debates about the effectiveness of management practices in general and executive engagement trainings in government in particular. As a further benefit of the baseline and endline survey, the project would generate the largest panel survey dataset in public administration and on employee engagement to-date, enabling a stream of longitudinal research on the effectiveness of distinct management practices to enhance engagement in government. In doing so, our project would also spur the hitherto neglected study of public administration in Luxembourg and encourage future UK-Luxembourg research collaborations.

Beyond these academic contributions, the project would generate policy impact in Luxembourg - providing engagement trainings and diagnostics for 124 government institutions, and evidence to enable government-wide reforms to enhance employee engagement; next to an engagement training toolkit and policy evidence to other governments, international organizations and private sector firms seeking to improve management practices to enhance engagement.