Conceptual foundations of workforce homogeneity in the public sector. Insights from a systematic review on causes, consequences, and blind spots

ABSTRACT

Workforce diversity is a key objective of public personnel policies worldwide. We augment this discourse by exploring the complementary and multifaceted concept of workforce homogeneity. This systematic literature review clarifies an elusive concept and reveals dominant causes and consequences of public sector workforce homogeneity, synthesizing how self-selection, personnel policies, and socialization create often implicit yet persistent practices that lead to workforce homogeneity. By linking these causes with their (un-)intended consequences, this study on workforce homogeneity sheds light on an important theoretical concept for public management and identifies broad avenues for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Workforce homogeneity
• diversity
• self-selection
• public personnel management
• systematic literature review

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2022.2084770.

Notes

1. By public sector, we refer to the broad sectoral domain occupied by governmental and federal institutions, public institutional systems, and public enterprises (Fletcher et al. 2020).

2. This initial search was conducted in the 20 most prestigious journals ranked by h5-index in the field of Public Policy and Administration.

3. We use the broader definition of the ‘public sector’ rather than the narrower ‘administrative core‘ to maximize review coverage. Yet, we purposefully exclude the education and healthcare sector in the current study since in many countries, educational and medical services are not exclusively delivered by public institutions but often co-created in a mixed-sector or hybrid environment.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Iris Seidemann

Iris Seidemann is a doctoral student at the Chair for Organization Studies at University of Hamburg, Germany. Her research focusses on organizational legitimacy and the emergence of tension, conflict, and paradoxes in organizations. Particularly, she focuses on organizational responses to paradoxes in the context of grand challenges.

Kristina S. Weißmüller

Kristina S. Weißmüller is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at KPM Center for Public Management, Universität Bern (Switzerland), specialized in behavioural and experimental PA/PM research. Her research focuses on public sector corruption and the psychological effects of ‘publicness’ on behaviour, e.g. regarding strategic choice, motivation, leadership, and negotiation in PPPs.