Working with Winners? Satisfaction with Performance and the Willingness to Coproduce

A well-developed body of research on the individual and organizational antecedents of citizens’ willingness to coproduce public services has produced a small number of studies on the impact of satisfaction with organizational performance on coproduction. That work often assumed that citizens step in to help fill the gap between actual and expected performance levels, but the theoretical and empirical bases for that assumption are incomplete. We develop the alternative argument that potential coproducers may seek the efficiency and reputational benefits of working with organizations that are already well regarded. We test the resulting hypothesis that satisfaction and coproduction will be positively correlated using a longitudinal panel of 11,000 parents observed across four years from over 1,000 schools in the United States. The results, estimated in the presence of parent and period fixed effects, suggest that low levels of average satisfaction with an organization leads to less coproduction, not more, supporting the theory that citizens are sensitive to the potential efficiency and reputational gains that come with working with high-performing organizations.