1 Determinants of organizational satisfaction in the Dutch Public Sector

Introduction HRM-issues are getting increasingly attention within Public Administration. This is not surprising as 'human resources' are of decisive importance for the performance and the quality of services rendered by public organizations. Probably this is even more important compared to private organizations. Public organizations themselves are devoting a lot of time and effort to the management of their human resources. Like in the private sector, employee surveys are one of the tools used. In this respect the survey held by the Dutch Ministry of Home Affairs must especially be mentioned. Since 1999 each year 1 a large number of public sector employees are interviewed about their job, their perception and evaluation of several aspects of their job and their organization, etcetera. This survey is very interesting as it provides a lot of information about the attitudes of Dutch public sector workers. I have earlier published about these data, especially about the 2002 data set. I want to continue this attention in this paper by analyzing the 2003 dataset. The survey in that year contains an interesting item that measures the 'organizational satisfaction' of the employees involved. Unlike job satisfaction, organizational satisfaction is a much less researched subject. Organizational satisfaction, however, is an interesting subject in itself as it tells us how employees perceive their organization. It tells us, in other words, something about the organization. When (public) organizations in the near future (again) need to compete for employees and need to become an 'attractive employer', it is important to know how employees perceive their organization and what factors are influencing this perception; Although the survey deals with the Dutch public sector as a whole, I will only deal in this paper with employees working for the state sector. This is because I have learnt in the other analyses done so far, one gets in this way a better understanding in the mechanism leading to specific answers of the respondents. By analysing only a part of the survey, one gains a better in-depth understanding of the processes lying behind the data. Moreover, the sub-survey of employees working in the state sector is still large: it includes no less than 3751 employees. Like my earlier publications on job satisfaction I want to focus on the determinants of organizational satisfaction, with special attention devoted to the role of HRM-practices. More specifically, my research question is: " what factors determine the organizational satisfaction of …