Like It or Leave: Regional Logics, Controversial Policies & Turnover in Public-Sector Organizations

Le résumé fourni par la source

A rich literature has examined the effects of firms or their leaders in taking stances on controversial issues; however, this same literature has offered less attention to the communities in which these organizations are embedded. In this paper, we explore how organization members may respond differently to the same controversial policy depending on their community’s prevailing logic. As a baseline, we hypothesize that when an organization becomes subject to a controversial policy, employee turnover will increase, and we argue that this effect will depend on the organization leader’s own political ideology. Next, we hypothesize that regional logics moderate these effects for two reasons—one having to do with local interpretation of the policy, and the other having to do with community embeddedness. To examine these assertions, we study employee turnover within Florida school districts in the wake of the 2022 Parental Rights in Education Act, colloquially known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Utilizing a novel dataset of hiring and separation data from 2019 through 2023, we probe differences in employee turnover before and after the statewide legislation. Our results reveal that the policy increased turnover, and that this increase is driven by separations from districts in which the superintendent is a Republican and where districts are in Republican-affiliated counties. Our study demonstrates that what matters is not only the introduction of a controversial policy, but also the prevailing ideology of the organization’s leader and of the community where the employees live. We offer several managerial, practical and policy implications.

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