Fostering Employee Cooperation Behavior in the Federal Workplace: Exploring the Effects of Performance Management Strategies

The purpose of this study was to discover how performance management strategies foster cooperative behavior as a means of producing better outcomes. Using multiple data from the 2010 Federal Human Capital Survey provided by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management via its FedScope data portal and Federal Human Resource Data, we tested hypotheses that considered both individual- and agency-level factors in individual cooperative behaviors. This study highlights how performance management strategies promote employee cooperation such that the management practice is taken for granted; however, there is no research that examines the relationship between them. This investigation confirms several performance practices existing between and within the federal agencies. Managers can learn from the evidence provided and apply these strategies to induce cooperative behaviors that help to achieve organizational goals and improve organizational performance. The results reveal that performance management strategies display positive and nonlinear relationships with employee cooperation.