The article Behavior Public Administration: Combining Insights from Public Administration and Psychology was coauthored by Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen, Sebastian Jilke, Asmus Leth Olsen, and Lars Tummers. The article is the first issue, Volume 77, published under the Public Administration Review journal. The article successfully elucidates key behavioral public administration concepts as it relates to psychology as a field in modern literature, despite some limitations relating to generalizability.
Summary
Grimmelikhuijsen, Jilke, Olsen, & Tummers’s (2016) article analyzes the various aspects of psychology that theorists in public administration can borrow, particularly, those pertaining to behavioral psychology. In so doing, the authors recommend an approach that complements traditional public administration. Further, the study takes an in-depth examination of existing research in the behavior of public administration and psychology. Notably, Grimmelikhuijsen et al. (2016) shed light on the role played by psychology in other related disciplines such as political science and economics. In essence, the authors draw from this application some key takeaways that will go a long way to expounding behavioral public administration.
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Critique
The article aims, chiefly, at deepening the conversation between scholars in public administration and psychology by offering an integrated approach of the two disciplines. Grimmelikhuijsen et al. (2016) argue that practitioners can benefit from behavioral public administrations by employing some crucial insights in psychology. Indeed, several scholars have shed some light on the field and have profoundly stressed the essence of such an application. The authors take an in-depth analysis of literature in the past 20 years on the topic, ranging from topics such as leadership and motivation. The article finds that there exists a substantial number of published articles informed by psychology, with an observed remarkable increase in recent years (Grimmelikhuijsen et al., 2016).
Further, Grimmelikhuijsen et al. (2016) have paid significant attention to the scholarly community while also offering some critical insights that public administrators could employ. Policymakers, as the article finds, acknowledge the essence of cognitive thinking and rationality in attaining desired behavior in organizations and other environments. The authors contend that psychology informed methods are gaining global recognition following the apparent scientific developments and policies.
Additionally, the authors delineate individual and group behavior and attitudes that affect public administration at a micro-level. Accordingly, the micro-level analysis of psychological processes entails the examination of the interactions among individuals, which are essentially the micro-foundations of public administration.
Methodology
Fundamentally, the authors employ critical and systematic literature review approaches to examine various literature that helps further elucidate public administration and psychology. A critical review entails detailed scrutiny of literature to compare and evaluate several standpoints. The article successfully and unmistakably gives a close evaluation of recent developments in the synergy between psychology and public administration. Notably, the authors elected to use a 1996 to 2015 timeframe for the selection of the literature to ensure relevance given that the title is essentially a trendy concern in both fields.
Sampling is a critical part of the development of a succinct research paper. Grimmelikhuijsen et al. (2016) identified 216 studies containing the word “psychology” among the 1,807 articles published in the Public Administration Review-Journal. Amid the 216 articles, only 63 proved to relevant, which comprised 3.5 percent of the total volume. Also, the authors considered articles published under JPART where they identified a total of 650 articles published in the same timeline, 74 of which were psychologically informed. The sample is arguably sufficient hence the improved reliability of the results.
Findings
Grimmelikhuijsen et al.’s (2016) have two crucial findings: the role played by psychology in other neighboring fields and theories on behavioral public administration. Economics and political science are the two closest disciplines to public administration and have borrowed some crucial aspects from psychology. Accordingly, political psychology has adopted the study of individual-level political behavior, as observed in the past two decades. Also, there is a consistently rising attention to political behavior of individuals and an appreciation of the intertwined nature of psychology and politics. Grimmelikhuijsen et al. (2016) find that the psychology-politics synergy has a substantive adoption of motivated reasoning, which theorizes that people tend to hold on their previously held believes when making decisions. Also, there exists a potential application of social psychology in modern politics. Grimmelikhuijsen et al. (2016) further find that behavioral economics is indeed an expanded application of psychology by explicating the works of renowned economics scholars such as Daniel Kahneman.
Consequently, the authors find that public administration is congruent with the various aspects of psychology, and such an application will go a long way to redefining the two fields and literature. In essence, there is a need for public administrators and scholars to embrace psychology to ensure the development of the discipline. Also, the article successfully attracts a dialogue between scholars from the two fields.
Reference
Grimmelikhuijsen, S., Jilke, S., Olsen, A. L., & Tummers, L. (2016). Behavioral public administration: Combining insights from public administration and psychology. Public Administration Review , 77 (1), 45-56. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12609
