How to foster employee quality of life: The role of employee performance management and authentic leadership.

Although employee performance management (EPM) enhances performance, the effects that these systems have on employee quality of life remain unclear. Such information is particularly relevant for 'vulnerable' workers, whose employment situation has the potential to alter their social and economic position in life. Based on data gathered from 111 leaders and 547 vulnerable workers in 36 social profit organizations, multilevel regression analysis demonstrates that EPM is related to vulnerable workers' quality of life. Moreover, authentic leadership and psychological empowerment buffer the negative relationship between EPM and vulnerable workers' quality of life. These findings imply that organizations that employ vulnerable workers need authentic leaders to foster a positive impact not only on performance through EPM but also on vulnerable workers' quality of life. In addition, organizations can also pursue vulnerable workers' psychological empowerment by providing tasks that are meaningful to them and in which they experience self-efficacy to reduce the potential negative effects of EPM on vulnerable workers' quality of life.

A Guide to Benchmarking COVID-19 Performance Data.

If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is that policy makers, experts, and public managers need to be capable of interpreting comparative data on their government's performance in a meaningful way. Simultaneously, they are confronted with different data sources (and measurements) on COVID-19 without necessarily having the tools to assess these sources strategically. Because of the speed with which decisions are required and the different data sources, it can be challenging for any policy maker, expert, or public manager to make sense of how COVID-19 has an impact, especially from a comparative perspective. Starting from the question "How can we benchmark COVID-19 performance data across countries?," this article presents important indicators, measurements, and their strengths and weaknesses, and concludes with practical recommendations. These include a focus on measurement equivalence, systems thinking, spatial and temporal thinking, multilevel governance, and multimethod designs.

We Know the Yin-But Where Is the Yang? Toward a Balanced Approach on Common Source Bias in Public Administration Scholarship.

Surveys have long been a dominant instrument for data collection in public administration. However, it has become widely accepted in the last decade that the usage of a self-reported instrument to measure both the independent and dependent variables results in common source bias (CSB). In turn, CSB is argued to inflate correlations between variables, resulting in biased findings. Subsequently, a narrow blinkered approach on the usage of surveys as single data source has emerged. In this article, we argue that this approach has resulted in an unbalanced perspective on CSB. We argue that claims on CSB are exaggerated, draw upon selective evidence, and project what should be tentative inferences as certainty over large domains of inquiry. We also discuss the perceptual nature of some variables and measurement validity concerns in using archival data. In conclusion, we present a flowchart that public administration scholars can use to analyze CSB concerns.