ABSTRACT
Motivating and rewarding public employees correctly is a topic of significance to elected officials, public managers, the employees themselves, and-of course-to citizens. Specifically, motivation and reward serve as important variables in the performance of critical public functions. As such, connecting appropriate rewards with organizational goals represents a big idea in public management. And this idea has even more currency given the ever-increasing demands for high performance in an environment of shrinking resources. This paradoxical situation has thus contributed to an increased need for collaboration, or working across agency and sector boundaries to accomplish organizational goals. Understanding how to properly motivate and reward such collaborative behavior is a significant research task that has only just begun. Understanding how human resource management reforms such as performance-based pay affect collaborative behavior is a primary goal of this research.
