John D Marvel
Biographic Data
| ID | 4385065 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John D Marvel |
| GIVEN NAMES | John D |
| FAMILY NAME | Marvel |
| SIGNATURE | MARVEL J D |
| AFFILIATIONS | George Mason University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5444-3021 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 213 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 17 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Large Language Models and Conversational Counter-Arguments to Anti-Public Sector Bias
Can a good argument change an individual’s mind? In three pre-registered experiments, we explore this question in the domain of public sector organizational performance. We observe human subjects as they engage in conversations with a generative artificial intelligence (AI) programmed to argue in one of seven distinct “styles,” including a confrontational challenger style, a didactic style, and a sycophantic style. We develop a theory of effectiv…
The Paradox of Meritocracy
Within public administration, concerns about performance pay’s effectiveness have tended to focus on how institutional constraints and public sector employees’ unique dispositional qualities limit the potential efficacy of monetary incentives. We suggest that an important, previously overlooked pitfall of public sector performance pay is that it can generate a “paradox of meritocracy” by interacting with results-based organizational cultures in s…
Assessing Political Brand Equity in Policy
This study examines the effect of a political actor's brand equity in relation to a salient policy domain. The premise of this work is that political actors establish brands, akin to commercial counterparts, which can accumulate equity in the form of approval ratings. These brands are conveyed through various mechanisms, including symbolic imagery, name, personal appearance, and slogans. Establishing a political brand is important to personalist …
Sex, Race, and the Allocation of Credit in Dispersed Teams
When the members of a team work together in pursuit of a collective goal, who stands out? We analyze this question by focusing on how managers allocate credit among a team’s members when employee performance is difficult to observe. We argue that under conditions of incomplete information, managers use whatever information they have readily at hand—even if it is only crudely reflective of individual performance—to make inferences about team membe…
Covid-19 Morbidity, Vaccine Side Effects, and Vaccine Hesitancy among African Americans
COVID-19 research conducted in the pre-vaccine era indicates strong hesitancy toward vaccination among African Americans. Recent research has found growing acceptance of COVID-19 vaccination in the general US population. This study investigated vaccination intentions in Black communities and explored behavioral mechanisms involved in vaccination decisions. It focused on individuals’ risk perception in the face of a double hazard relating to the c…
Procedural environment of public engagement
This research (1) examines how employees’ recollections of public engagement are associated with their willingness for future engagement (WFE), (2) assesses whether employees’ discrete recollections are driven by their procedural environments, and (3) tests whether employees’ recollections interact with their perceptions of red tape in affecting WFE. We find that one’s procedural environment parameterizes the effect of episodic recall on a subjec…
Equality of Opportunity? Sex, Race, and Occupational Advantages in Promotion to Top-Level Management
We examine how occupation, race, and sex interact to affect employees’ probability of promotion to the upper reaches of federal agencies’ personnel hierarchies. Three interrelated questions draw our attention. First, we are interested in whether employees who are members of an agency’s dominant occupational group are more likely to be promoted to Senior Executive Service (SES) positions than employees who are members of non-dominant occupational …
Evolution and egalitarianism
I advance a behavioral account of managers’ performance pay decisions that is grounded in evolutionary psychology. In doing so, I seek to explain a common organizational phenomenon — compression in employees’ merit pay bonuses. My behavioral account puts forward two propositions. First, that compression in awards is a consequence of a fundamental human proclivity for egalitarianism. Second, that individual managers will differ in their preference…
The Persistence of Prosocial Work Effort as a Function of Mission Match
The authors use an online experiment to test the proposal that “mission match” leads to persistent prosocial work effort, whereby employees go above and beyond remunerated job responsibilities to deliver a public good. First, the importance of mission match to persistent prosocial work effort in public and nonprofit organizations is discussed. Then a real‐effort experiment is used to test whether mission match is associated with the persistence o…
Not Seeing Eye to Eye on Frontline Work
The author uses nationally representative data on matched pairs of public school principals and teachers to test whether principal–teacher disagreement about the severity of school problems is associated with teacher turnover. More specifically, the author tests a managerial efficacy hypothesis that proposes that employees will be less likely to leave their jobs when their managers perceive problems to be severe, holding employees’ perceptions of…
Congress as manager
Federal agencies perform many important tasks, from guarding against terrorist plots to mailing social security checks. A key question is whether Congress can effectively manage such a large and influential bureaucracy. We argue that Congress, in using oversight to ensure agency responsiveness to legislative preferences, risks harming agency morale, which could have negative long-run effects on performance and the implementation of public policy.…
Gender Congruence and Work Effort in Manager–Employee Relationships
This article uses data on public school teachers and principals to examine whether teachers who share the gender of their principal work more overtime hours than teachers who do not. Findings show that gender congruence is associated with overtime hours for female teachers but not for male teachers. This result holds between schools and within schools: female teachers with female principals work more overtime hours than female teachers with male …
Citizen Attributions of Blame in Third‐Party Governance
The authors use a survey experiment to examine how structural differences in governance arrangements affect citizens’ notions of who is culpable for poor service quality. More specifically, two questions are investigated: (1) When things go wrong, do citizens attribute more blame to political actors if the provider of government services is a public agency or a private contractor? (2) Does the length of the accountability chain linking political …
Unconscious Bias in Citizens’ Evaluations of Public Sector Performance
The premise of our article is that repeated exposure to antipublic sector messages affects the way people evaluate the performance of public sector organizations. More specifically, we argue that individuals' implicit attitudes regarding public sector organizations are biased: Citizens automatically and unconsciously associate public sector organizations with inefficiency, inflexibility, and other pejoratives, and these automatic associations col…
The Boston Marathon Bombings
This article examines how elite attributions of blame—statements from politicians and high‐level public administrators assigning responsibility for failure to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings—affect citizens’ beliefs regarding which government organizations, if any, are culpable for failing to prevent the bombings. The primary hypothesis is that public administrators, owing to their greater credibility relative to politicians, will more stron…
Bureaucratic Discretion, Client Demographics, and Representative Bureaucracy
For passive representation to translate into active representation, bureaucrats must have discretion. Despite its importance to representative bureaucracy theory, though, discretion has received little empirical attention in public administration. We seek to address this shortcoming by examining the determinants of bureaucratic discretion, paying particular attention to how the demographic characteristics of clients and bureaucrats interact to in…
So Hard to Say Goodbye? Turnover Intention among U.S. Federal Employees
Why do U.S. federal government employees choose to leave the federal service? By focusing on turnover intentions, this article develops propositions about why employees anticipate leaving their jobs along three dimensions: (1) demographic factors, (2) workplace satisfaction factors, and (3) organizational/relational factors. Two distinct measures of turnover intention are advanced that reflect those who intend to leave their agency for another po…
Unconscious Bias in Citizens’ Evaluations of Public Sector Performance
The premise of our article is that repeated exposure to antipublic sector messages affects the way people evaluate the performance of public sector organizations. More specifically, we argue that individuals' implicit attitudes regarding public sector organizations are biased: Citizens automatically and unconsciously associate public sector organizations with inefficiency, inflexibility, and other pejoratives, and these automatic associations col…
So Hard to Say Goodbye? Turnover Intention among U.S. Federal Employees
Why do U.S. federal government employees choose to leave the federal service? By focusing on turnover intentions, this article develops propositions about why employees anticipate leaving their jobs along three dimensions: (1) demographic factors, (2) workplace satisfaction factors, and (3) organizational/relational factors. Two distinct measures of turnover intention are advanced that reflect those who intend to leave their agency for another po…
Bureaucratic Discretion, Client Demographics, and Representative Bureaucracy
For passive representation to translate into active representation, bureaucrats must have discretion. Despite its importance to representative bureaucracy theory, though, discretion has received little empirical attention in public administration. We seek to address this shortcoming by examining the determinants of bureaucratic discretion, paying particular attention to how the demographic characteristics of clients and bureaucrats interact to in…
Congress as manager
Federal agencies perform many important tasks, from guarding against terrorist plots to mailing social security checks. A key question is whether Congress can effectively manage such a large and influential bureaucracy. We argue that Congress, in using oversight to ensure agency responsiveness to legislative preferences, risks harming agency morale, which could have negative long-run effects on performance and the implementation of public policy.…
Equality of Opportunity? Sex, Race, and Occupational Advantages in Promotion to Top-Level Management
We examine how occupation, race, and sex interact to affect employees’ probability of promotion to the upper reaches of federal agencies’ personnel hierarchies. Three interrelated questions draw our attention. First, we are interested in whether employees who are members of an agency’s dominant occupational group are more likely to be promoted to Senior Executive Service (SES) positions than employees who are members of non-dominant occupational …
Assessing Political Brand Equity in Policy
This study examines the effect of a political actor's brand equity in relation to a salient policy domain. The premise of this work is that political actors establish brands, akin to commercial counterparts, which can accumulate equity in the form of approval ratings. These brands are conveyed through various mechanisms, including symbolic imagery, name, personal appearance, and slogans. Establishing a political brand is important to personalist …
So Hard to Say Goodbye? Turnover Intention among U.S. Federal Employees
Why do U.S. federal government employees choose to leave the federal service? By focusing on turnover intentions, this article develops propositions about why employees anticipate leaving their jobs along three dimensions: (1) demographic factors, (2) workplace satisfaction factors, and (3) organizational/relational factors. Two distinct measures of turnover intention are advanced that reflect those who intend to leave their agency for another po…
Bureaucratic Discretion, Client Demographics, and Representative Bureaucracy
For passive representation to translate into active representation, bureaucrats must have discretion. Despite its importance to representative bureaucracy theory, though, discretion has received little empirical attention in public administration. We seek to address this shortcoming by examining the determinants of bureaucratic discretion, paying particular attention to how the demographic characteristics of clients and bureaucrats interact to in…
The Boston Marathon Bombings
This article examines how elite attributions of blame—statements from politicians and high‐level public administrators assigning responsibility for failure to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings—affect citizens’ beliefs regarding which government organizations, if any, are culpable for failing to prevent the bombings. The primary hypothesis is that public administrators, owing to their greater credibility relative to politicians, will more stron…
Gender Congruence and Work Effort in Manager–Employee Relationships
This article uses data on public school teachers and principals to examine whether teachers who share the gender of their principal work more overtime hours than teachers who do not. Findings show that gender congruence is associated with overtime hours for female teachers but not for male teachers. This result holds between schools and within schools: female teachers with female principals work more overtime hours than female teachers with male …
Citizen Attributions of Blame in Third‐Party Governance
The authors use a survey experiment to examine how structural differences in governance arrangements affect citizens’ notions of who is culpable for poor service quality. More specifically, two questions are investigated: (1) When things go wrong, do citizens attribute more blame to political actors if the provider of government services is a public agency or a private contractor? (2) Does the length of the accountability chain linking political …
Unconscious Bias in Citizens’ Evaluations of Public Sector Performance
The premise of our article is that repeated exposure to antipublic sector messages affects the way people evaluate the performance of public sector organizations. More specifically, we argue that individuals' implicit attitudes regarding public sector organizations are biased: Citizens automatically and unconsciously associate public sector organizations with inefficiency, inflexibility, and other pejoratives, and these automatic associations col…
Congress as manager
Federal agencies perform many important tasks, from guarding against terrorist plots to mailing social security checks. A key question is whether Congress can effectively manage such a large and influential bureaucracy. We argue that Congress, in using oversight to ensure agency responsiveness to legislative preferences, risks harming agency morale, which could have negative long-run effects on performance and the implementation of public policy.…
The Persistence of Prosocial Work Effort as a Function of Mission Match
The authors use an online experiment to test the proposal that “mission match” leads to persistent prosocial work effort, whereby employees go above and beyond remunerated job responsibilities to deliver a public good. First, the importance of mission match to persistent prosocial work effort in public and nonprofit organizations is discussed. Then a real‐effort experiment is used to test whether mission match is associated with the persistence o…
Not Seeing Eye to Eye on Frontline Work
The author uses nationally representative data on matched pairs of public school principals and teachers to test whether principal–teacher disagreement about the severity of school problems is associated with teacher turnover. More specifically, the author tests a managerial efficacy hypothesis that proposes that employees will be less likely to leave their jobs when their managers perceive problems to be severe, holding employees’ perceptions of…
Evolution and egalitarianism
I advance a behavioral account of managers’ performance pay decisions that is grounded in evolutionary psychology. In doing so, I seek to explain a common organizational phenomenon — compression in employees’ merit pay bonuses. My behavioral account puts forward two propositions. First, that compression in awards is a consequence of a fundamental human proclivity for egalitarianism. Second, that individual managers will differ in their preference…
Equality of Opportunity? Sex, Race, and Occupational Advantages in Promotion to Top-Level Management
We examine how occupation, race, and sex interact to affect employees’ probability of promotion to the upper reaches of federal agencies’ personnel hierarchies. Three interrelated questions draw our attention. First, we are interested in whether employees who are members of an agency’s dominant occupational group are more likely to be promoted to Senior Executive Service (SES) positions than employees who are members of non-dominant occupational …
Covid-19 Morbidity, Vaccine Side Effects, and Vaccine Hesitancy among African Americans
COVID-19 research conducted in the pre-vaccine era indicates strong hesitancy toward vaccination among African Americans. Recent research has found growing acceptance of COVID-19 vaccination in the general US population. This study investigated vaccination intentions in Black communities and explored behavioral mechanisms involved in vaccination decisions. It focused on individuals’ risk perception in the face of a double hazard relating to the c…
Procedural environment of public engagement
This research (1) examines how employees’ recollections of public engagement are associated with their willingness for future engagement (WFE), (2) assesses whether employees’ discrete recollections are driven by their procedural environments, and (3) tests whether employees’ recollections interact with their perceptions of red tape in affecting WFE. We find that one’s procedural environment parameterizes the effect of episodic recall on a subjec…
Sex, Race, and the Allocation of Credit in Dispersed Teams
When the members of a team work together in pursuit of a collective goal, who stands out? We analyze this question by focusing on how managers allocate credit among a team’s members when employee performance is difficult to observe. We argue that under conditions of incomplete information, managers use whatever information they have readily at hand—even if it is only crudely reflective of individual performance—to make inferences about team membe…
The Paradox of Meritocracy
Within public administration, concerns about performance pay’s effectiveness have tended to focus on how institutional constraints and public sector employees’ unique dispositional qualities limit the potential efficacy of monetary incentives. We suggest that an important, previously overlooked pitfall of public sector performance pay is that it can generate a “paradox of meritocracy” by interacting with results-based organizational cultures in s…
Assessing Political Brand Equity in Policy
This study examines the effect of a political actor's brand equity in relation to a salient policy domain. The premise of this work is that political actors establish brands, akin to commercial counterparts, which can accumulate equity in the form of approval ratings. These brands are conveyed through various mechanisms, including symbolic imagery, name, personal appearance, and slogans. Establishing a political brand is important to personalist …
Large Language Models and Conversational Counter-Arguments to Anti-Public Sector Bias
Can a good argument change an individual’s mind? In three pre-registered experiments, we explore this question in the domain of public sector organizational performance. We observe human subjects as they engage in conversations with a generative artificial intelligence (AI) programmed to argue in one of seven distinct “styles,” including a confrontational challenger style, a didactic style, and a sycophantic style. We develop a theory of effectiv…
Political science (15 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Social Psychology (11 works) · Public relations (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Business (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Public Policy and Administration Research (8 works) · Sociology (8 works)