组织特征、公务员态度与公共服务合供意愿:东部某市的调查研究

Organizational Characteristics and Officials'Attitudes and Willingness to Participate in Coproduction:A Survey of M City in Eastern China

在政府部门与公民进行公共服务合供的过程中,公务员作为规则设计者和执行者扮演着重要角色,但有关公务员对部门合供态度的研究却较为少见。本研究从宏观部门和微观个体两个层次出发,构建了公务员对部门合供态度的理论模型,并以M市市直部门为研究对象,利用问卷调查数据和多层线性模型,实证分析了组织特征和公务员态度对部门合供意愿的影响。结果表明:在个体层面,公务员对公民的政治信任和自身的合供态度正向影响其对部门合供的态度;在组织层面,组织自主性负向影响公务员对于部门合供的态度,领导支持产生正向影响,而组织兼容性的影响不显著。基于此,本研究认为未来要从组织和个体两个层面来增强公务员对所在部门公共服务合供的支持态度,进而推动政府部门和公民合供公共服务。

Under the dual pressures of shrinking public finances and citizens’ rising expectations with respect to public services, there has been a general trend whereby governments will actively cooperate with citizens. In the process of such coproduction between officials and citizens, we know that officials play an important role in designing and executing the rules, but there has been little research on the influence of those actors participating in such coproduction. Therefore, based on the theories of public service coproduction, we construct a multilevel model of “ organizational characteristics and subjective variables in officials’ attitudes toward coproduction in the public sector”, and then, based on the perspective of macro and micro interactions, we analyze the coproduction behavior of officials.In order to test our hypotheses, we selected M city as the research object, from where we collected 281 valid questionnaires that had been distributed to 55 municipal public departments. We used SPSS 20.0 software to run the descriptive statistical analysis and correlation analysis, and we used HLM7.0 to run the multilevel model. The results reveal that:First, at the individual level, there exists both positive political trust and positive personal attitudes on the part of the officials. Civil servants who have more trust in citizens are more willing to promote coproduction, thus confirming the simple principle that “trust is the cornerstone of cooperation”.Second, at the organizational level, the main effects of departmental compatibility are consistent with the results of previous studies, but they are not statistically significant.Furthermore, leader support has a significant positive impact on the officials’ attitudes toward departmental coproduction. However, the impact of department autonomy on the officials’ attitudes toward departmental coproduction is negative and thus is inconsistent with our research hypothesis and previous existing studies.Third, we believe that coproduction among officials and citizens is often a mix of individual and collective actions. On the one hand, the officials are embedded in the bureaucratic framework and their actions are inevitably constrained by various conditions,such as the environment, rules, and management. Therefore, they execute their managerial functions and service behavior under specific constraints. On the other hand,they are individuals with their own subjective initiatives and wills.Based on this, we believe that in order to promote coproduction between officials and citizens, we should strengthen the officials’ attitudes toward their departments at both the organizational and the individual levels. We should not only focus on enhancing the trust of government and citizens and encouraging positive attitudes among civil servants toward citizen participation but also enhance the support of leaders and build a smooth channel for coproduction.The results provide empirical support for the effects of officials’ attitudes toward coproduction on their own departments, which help us understand the motivations and behavioral logic of various departments in the process of coproduction. In the future, we should engage in more in-depth research on the behavioral motivations of various subjects and how they interact in practice, which will be helpful in opening the coproduction black box.