The public organisation in the test of organisational performance: plural paradoxes

This paper attempts to show that not all attitudes and behaviours of public employees lead toperformance in a public organisation. We have defined a model of performance via commitment, satisfaction, attitudes and behaviours of public servants. We attempt to answerthe research question: "Do the attitudes and behaviours of public officials influence performance? We have adopted a post-positivist posture, a hypothetical-deductive logic and aquantitative approach. The latter is broken down into phases, the factorial technique of principal component analysis (PCA) to extract the most significant characteristics of public servants concerning their attitudes, behaviour and performance, then multiple regression to model performance according to its determinants. A questionnaire was administered to 136 public servants, 72 of whom were interviewed at their place of work and 64 of whom were randomly interviewed in the street. The result of the research is a typology of four groups of agents, two of whom are high performers and two of whom are low performers, and an Attitudes-Behaviour-Performance model showing paradoxes.