1. Greater Focus on Federal Government Research
a glaring chasm between (a) scholarly research focusing on the Federal government and
(b) an organizational conglomerate numbering approximately two million employees and
whose mission impacts the lives of all 312 million Americans (www.census.gov). The
grounds are fertile for embarking on research to better understand how this workforce
operates, its unique features, and how it can leverage extant research for the betterment of
talent management practices. Plausibly, motivation factors for Federal government
employees have not changed significantly since Barnard (1938), who spoke of loyalty
and dedication as driving forces for public sector workers. While it could be argued that
leadership is a universal phenomenon and that some of this study’s findings could have
face validity (Maxwell, 2005) vis-à-vis the private sector, the study’s participants’
resolve in articulating the differences between employment sectors suggest that a diverse
array of learning and development topics could provide a rich source of Federal
government research fodder. For this recommendation, a comparative case study using
individuals selected via validated target population techniques (Maxwell, 2005) from the
private and public (e.g., Federal) sector could generate interesting findings in terms of
how EI appears in those diverse organizational settings.
2. Explore Culture in the Context of EI
findings, from the researcher’s perspective: that culture is an influencing variable in
terms of the degree to which EI is acknowledged. Moreover, the ability for leaders to
express EI, much less model EI attributes for followers and other organizational
leadership, seems related to the culture (however one wishes to define the term culture, as
an array of definitions exist (Martin, 2002)). To explore this recommendation, an