Training Executives to Enhance Employee Engagement in Government: Field Experimental Evidence from Luxembourg

Which management practices enhance organizational effectiveness? A vast literature in public administration, management and economics has assessed this question. However, most of it is correlational. By contrast, evidence is scant concerning the causal effects of management practices, all the more so in public administration. The proposed ESRC-FNR project addresses this gap for one management practice in particular: executive training. While trainings are a default solution for a range of management challenges, there is little causal evidence on their effectiveness in government. Our project addresses this shortcoming for an executive training focused on an outcome which is central to organizational effectiveness: employee engagement. Executive trainings are a default solution for organizations seeking to enhance engagement. Our core research question is thus: do executive engagement trainings enhance employee engagement in government?
To provide rigorous answers, the proposed ESRC-FNR project would partner with the Government of Luxembourg in a large-scale field experiment, in which senior managers of half of Luxembourg’s 124 civilian institutions would receive an executive engagement training. To evaluate training effectiveness and mechanisms, an engagement survey would be fielded with Luxembourg’s 28,600 civilian government employees before and (one year) after the training. Through five publications based on this data, the project would add much needed causal evidence to scholarly debates about the effectiveness of management practices in general and executive engagement trainings in government in particular. As a further benefit of the baseline and endline survey, the project would generate the largest panel survey dataset in public administration and on employee engagement to-date, enabling a stream of longitudinal research the effectiveness of distinct management practices to enhance engagement in government. In doing so, our project would also spur the study of public administration in Luxembourg and encourage future UK Luxembourg research collaborations. In addition, the project would generate significant policy impact in Luxembourg, providing a step change in evidence to government institutions to enhance employee engagement, and a training toolkit and policy evidence to other public and private institutions.