Organizational Commitment and Length of Service in Local Government
By Kent Myers, PhD
Local government management brings a set of challenges that can make full commitment to the organization and the community difficult to sustain. Political environments shift, new state statutes restrict how cities operate, and public expectations continue to rise. Every one of those pressures can wear on a leader’s commitment.
Public sector leaders should recognize that the level of commitment they show each day sets the standard for everyone who works for them. If we are not committed, we cannot reasonably expect our employees to be.
Organizational commitment matters because it predicts productivity, job performance, employee morale, and job satisfaction. Low commitment shows up directly in a city’s ability to serve its community.
What the Research Shows
In 2021, I completed my PhD in Leadership Studies at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio. My dissertation examined how succession planning in local government relates to organizational commitment.
The study defined organizational commitment as an employee’s psychological attachment to an organization and measured it through the three-component model developed by J.P. Meyer and N.J. Allen in 1991: affective commitment, or emotional attachment; normative commitment, or a sense of moral or ethical obligation; and continuance commitment, or the perceived cost of leaving.
Drawing on survey responses from local government employees, the study found that employees in organizations with a well-established succession plan reported higher levels of commitment than employees in organizations without one. A succession plan is a visible statement that the organization intends to invest in its people’s growth, and employees read it that way.
Several other findings carried across the data:
Authentic leadership by managers was a positive predictor of all three components of commitment.
A supervisor’s tenure in the local government organization was a positive predictor of both affective and normative commitment.
An employee’s perception of their supervisor’s moral and ethical character was a positive predictor of affective commitment. The stronger that perception, the stronger the employee’s emotional attachment to the organization.
Those results point in a consistent direction. Commitment is built by leaders who stay, who behave ethically in plain view, and who show their people a future in the organization.
Commitment in a Very Different Setting
After more than 40 years as a City Manager in five cities across Texas, Arizona, Washington, and Arkansas, I had an unusual opportunity to observe organizational commitment at a level I had not encountered before.
Clear Career Professionals was engaged to advise a group working to incorporate a new city in South Texas. That effort became the City of Starbase. I advised the incorporation for roughly six months, and in May 2025 I was asked to serve as the city’s first City Administrator, a role I filled on a contract basis for about a year. Starbase is a Texas general law city with a population under 5,000, which is why the position carries the City Administrator title rather than City Manager.
The work put me in a number of meetings with SpaceX leadership and staff. What stood out to me was not the technology. It was the clarity.
Every person in the room could state the mission in a sentence, and every person could tell you what their own work had to do with it. Decisions that many organizations would route through three committees were made in the room by the people accountable for the outcome. Nobody had to be told why their piece mattered.
After my first visit, I drove home and told my wife that I had just spent the day with people who fully intend to put human beings on Mars, and that I would not bet against them getting there within the next decade.
I still would not.
What Local Government Can Take From It
Let me be direct about the limits of that comparison. A private company built around a single mission operates under conditions no city will replicate, and some of what drives intensity in that environment would be neither healthy nor appropriate in a municipal workforce.
Commitment built on exhaustion is not commitment. It is turnover on a delay.
Our people have families, obligations outside the office, and a right to a sustainable career. Whatever commitment we build has to hold up over 20 years, not 20 months.
What does translate is clarity of mission, and clarity costs nothing.
Consider these questions about your own organization:
How many of your employees can state your city’s primary mission without looking it up?
How many can name a specific action they personally take that advances it?
What example do you set in your own level of commitment to that mission?
Do you have both a professional and an emotional attachment to your organization?
If the answers are thin, that is a leadership problem before it is an employee problem, and it is a solvable one.
Length of Service and Organizational Commitment
I retired from full-time city management about four years ago. I now serve as Senior Vice President of Recruitment for Clear Career Professionals, where I help cities recruit city managers, assistant city managers, finance directors, and other management personnel.
The work involves reviewing a great many resumes and sitting in a great many interviews.
Across those resumes, I have noticed tenures growing shorter. That trend deserves an honest look rather than a quick judgment.
Some short tenures are entirely justified, and our profession has long recognized as much. A governing body can change composition overnight. An employer may decline to honor commitments it made at hire. A vote of no confidence can end a tenure that was going well the week before. Family circumstances can require a move on someone else’s timetable.
None of that reflects on a professional’s commitment, and I have placed outstanding managers whose previous position ended for exactly those reasons.
What I want to speak to is the part that is genuinely a choice.
Ambition is a good thing in this profession. Wanting a larger city, broader responsibility, or better compensation is legitimate, and I would not counsel anyone out of it. The question is not whether to pursue those goals. The question is how to build the record that gets you there.
Here is what I see from the recruiter’s chair.
What separates a strong candidate is rarely the number of cities on the resume. It is what they finished in each one.
The candidate who can walk a council through a bond program taken from concept to ribbon cutting, a reorganization that held, a fund balance rebuilt, or a department turned around is the candidate who gets the interview and the offer. Accomplishments like those take time to produce.
A resume of short stays, whatever the reasons behind them, gives a hiring council very little to evaluate.
So set a personal goal for length of service before you take the job rather than after you start scanning postings. Decide what you intend to accomplish in that community, and be realistic about how long it will take. Then build your career on finishing those things.
That is the most reliable path to the larger city and the higher salary, and it is also the path that leaves a community measurably better than you found it.
The time factor is just as real on the front end. Cities invest heavily in recruiting and hiring a manager. Even the most experienced professional spends 6 to 12 months learning the community’s problems, priorities, and politics.
There may be financial issues, legal matters, or personnel problems waiting on the first day. Building trust with a city council, staff, and residents takes longer still. A manager who leaves before that investment matures never gets the chance to deliver what they were hired to deliver.
What the Code of Ethics Says
These realities are why both the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) and the Texas City Management Association (TCMA) address length of service in their ethical guidelines.
The guideline falls under Tenet 3 of the ICMA Code of Ethics, which calls on members to “demonstrate by word and action the highest standards of ethical conduct and integrity in all public, professional, and personal relationships in order that the member may merit the trust and respect of the elected and appointed officials, employees, and the public.”
The length of service guideline under that tenet provides that “for chief administrative/executive officers appointed by a governing body or elected official, a minimum of two years is considered necessary to render a professional service to the local government.”
The guideline further states that a short tenure should be the exception rather than a recurring experience, and it recognizes specific circumstances that can justify a shorter stay, including an employer’s refusal to honor employment commitments, a governing body’s vote of no confidence, and significant personal issues.
In 1984, TCMA adopted the ICMA Code of Ethics and holds its members to the same tenets and guidelines.
I recently spoke with Jessica Cowles, Ethics Director for ICMA, about how repeated short tenures affect public trust in the profession. When ICMA becomes aware of a violation of the two-year guideline, she noted that the association can take action against the member, which typically takes the form of private or public censure. She also noted that financial gain by itself is not a justification recognized under the guideline.
A Floor Under Professional Service
The two-year guideline is not a ceiling on ambition. It is a floor under professional service, and it exists because that is roughly how long it takes for a community to see any return on the leader it hired.
We ask councils to invest in us. We ask them to trust our judgment on multi-year capital programs, on personnel decisions that will outlast the current board, and on financial plans that will not show results for several budget cycles.
That request only holds together if we intend to be there when the results arrive.
Set the goal. Finish the work. Let the record make the case for the next position.
Kent Myers, PhD
Senior Vice President of Recruitment
Clear Career Professionals
