UNRAVELLING THE ROLE OF SOCIO-PROFESSIONAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS IN SHAPING IDENTIFICATION WITH THE FRENCH CIVIL SERVICE

For several decades, public sector employees in France have faced profound reforms driven by the emergence of New Public Management (i.e., NPM), in the 1980s across Western countries, and the paradigms it introduced (Bezes & Musselin, 2015; Pollitt et al., 2007; Reiter & Klenk, 2019).The implementation of these managerial doctrines and practices has been linked in the literature to various negative effects on employees' health, attitudes, and behaviors (e.g., Abord de Chatillon & Desmarais, 2012;Rivire et al., 2019) and raises questions about a loss of bearings and meaning at work (Dussuet et al., 2017;Emery & Giauque, 2012).Specifically, according to some authors, the dichotomy between these market-inspired practices and values and the traditional ethos of public servants has led to a hybridization of institutional culture (Emery & Giauque, 2014).This transformation raises questions about the identity positioning of public sector employees.While identification has already been studied in the public sector, particularly through the lens of identification with work groups or organizations, no research has to date specifically examined identification with the public service as an institution.Yet, its broader scope, compared to organizational focus, calls for an additional specific quantification of this form of identification in a context as vast and complex as the French civil service.Moreover, the French civil service presents a distinct work context, shaped by a unique system of representations and values (Hondeghem & Vandenabeele, 2005;Rouban, 2009).Despite this distinctiveness, the relationship that public servants maintain with the institution (i.e., French public service) remains largely underexplored.Therefore, this study aims to explore this relationship between public servants and the French public service by examining the socio-professional and organizational characteristics likely to influence these connections in differentiated ways.Data were collected from a sample of 676 public servants from various French public contexts.Descriptive, correlational, and mean comparison analyses were conducted.The results demonstrate that several of these determinants are significantly associated with the level of identification with the public service, suggesting differentiated levels of identification based on employee typologies.This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the relationships that French public servants maintain with their institution, while also highlighting differences that may exist between various categories of employees and public organizations.