Does organizational ownership matter? Objectives of employees in public, nonprofit and for-profit nursing homes

Abstract

Does organizational ownership matter for employees? We conducted a discrete choice experiment to reveal employees’ objectives in for-profit, nonprofit and governmental nursing homes. The results indicate that differences in objectives among nursing home staff are at least partially related to differences in ownership type. More specifically, we find that employees of public nursing homes are less extrinsically motivated than their for-profit and nonprofit counterparts. However, the results also show that employees of for-profit, nonprofit and governmental nursing homes are trading off output quality and output quantity differently, in line with the view that public providers of elderly care are pursuing a supplier-of-last-resort objective function.

Keywords:

• discrete choice experiment
• mixed logit
• nursing homes
• ownership
• nonprofit

Jel Classification:

• C25
• I11
• L30

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO) [research project G.0083.09N] ‘Understanding nonprofit employees’ motives: a “discrete choice” analysis’, and partially supported by the Interuniversity Attraction Pole (IAP) on Social Enterprise (SOCENT) [project P7/42] ‘If Not for Profit, for What? And How?’.