Insights from the Discourse on Behavioral Public Administration: Enriching Public Administration Research in Sri Lanka

This paper seeks to bring the on-going discourse on the Behavioral Public Administration (BPA), a sub-field of public administration to the focus of the research community. The emphasis of the BPA is on the micro-perspective of individual behavior and attitudes and associated psychological processes within or between individuals which employs insights from behavioral sciences to study on individuals and groups in public administration settings. Leading scholars who contribute to this argument reveal that many theories in public administration rest on micro-foundations of individual attitudes and behavior but are seldom tested empirically. A study was carried out exploring the research publications of the scholars in the higher academic system in the disciplines of public administration, business management and human resources and to explore the extent to which cross fertilization between public administration and other fields of study had occurred basically using psychological theories and methods and vice versa. In this study public domains were used to collect data and content analytic method was used for data analysis. The findings show a lack of cross-fertilization between the disciplines of public administration and psychology related organizational/business management fields, concentration of research methods within own fields, a general lack of research publications in the system, a lack of research in the newly emerging public administration areas, such as transparency, accountability, citizen perspectives on development, public intervention on poverty alleviation etc.