Public, Private, or Nonprofit? Experimental evidence on sector preferences in Germany and the U.S.

Abstract

Common wisdom suggests that public organizations often suffer from a poor employer image among ‘high potentials.’ However, sector preferences in job choice have rarely been tested empirically and across different administrative systems. We address this gap and examine how high potentials from an Anglo-Saxon (i.e., the U.S.) and a continental European (i.e., Germany) system evaluate the attractiveness of public, private, and nonprofit employers. In a between-subjects experimental design, respondents (n = 362) screened job offers under speeded and non-speeded conditions. The job offers only differed in the employer’s sector affiliation, with all other job attributes held constant. Contrary to expectations, and consistently across the two subsamples, respondents evaluated public sector jobs more positively compared to vacancies in the private and nonprofit sector. By providing counterevidence to the prevalence of negative attitudes towards public organizations, our study warns against overgeneralizing previous findings on negativity biases to the context of employer image.