Fueling workplace commitment with New ways of working (NWW): insights from the public sector

Résumé 0

Extending the concept of commitment makes sense in an era where the very notion of work needs to be extended in order to account for the development of protean careers in a post-industrial era and the emergence of new expectations from individuals, among which public employees now navigate. Our aim in this article was to investigate how employees in the public sector precisely relate their workplace commitment to the way their work environment is designed. Whereas the workplace commitment of public servants is a critical issue in post-bureaucratic contexts, scant research has tried to unveil how the emerging NWW would potentially affect individual attitudes and behaviors at work. Our contribution addresses the Commitment-foci vs NWW relation and broadens our understanding of the importance of work arrangements and design for the way employees relate to their employer, organization, or their job strictly speaking. Our study reveals that they are core conditions that feed commitment to work design. These are policies promoting flexible work hours, and better social interactions by means of different hard and soft tools to be used by employees in their everyday communications and collaboration. Another important contribution resides in the possible mobilization of flexible workplace design in fostering the commitment of public employees. What is more, the results of the current study could pave the way for an alignment of modern HRM practices to the specific challenges of hybrid work environments in the public sector.