Prosocial Behavior and Public Service Motivation

Although research on public service motivation (PSM) is vast, there is little evidence regarding the effects of PSM on observable behavior. This article contributes to the understanding of the behavioral implications of PSM by investigating whether PSM is associated with prosocial behavior. Moreover, it addresses whether and how the behavior of other group members influences this relationship. The article uses the experimental setting of the public goods game, run with a sample of 263 students, in combination with survey‐based PSM measures. A positive link is found between PSM and prosocial behavior. This relationship is moderated by the behavior of other group members: high‐PSM people act even more prosocially when the other members of the group show prosocial behavior as well, but they do not do so if the behavior of other group members is not prosocial.     

公共服务动机：内涵、检验途径与展望

公共服务是一种特殊的使命,它解决的是涉及整个社会的公共问题.担当这一使命的个体应具有一种更高水平的伦理.传统动机理论在解释这一点上遇到了许多困境.公共服务动机理论则集中研究公共部门行为,在于识别、测量和理解这种公共服务伦理.有一些学者在这方面已经做了不少努力,通过检验公共部门雇员的公共服务动机水平和影响因素,揭示公共服务动机的结构,试图建立对公共服务行为能做出更合理解释的公共服务动机过程理论.这一理论虽然在研究方法和结论上是否具有普遍性还需进一步完善,但已经显示出对公共服务行为解释的合理性,并可能为公共部门行为激励结构设计提供一种新的思想源泉.     

The Role of Organizations in Fostering Public Service Motivation

In seeking to explain the antecedents of public service motivation, James Perry focuses on the formative role of sociohistorical context. This study tests Perry's theory and examines the role that organizational factors play in shaping public service motivation, based on responses from a national survey of state government health and human service managers. The findings support the role of sociohistorical context, showing that public service motivation is strongly and positively related to level of education and membership in professional organizations. The results also underscore the significant influence of organizational institutions, indicating that red tape and length of organizational membership are negatively related to public service motivation, whereas hierarchical authority and reform efforts have a positive relationship. Therefore, public organizations have both an opportunity and a responsibility to create an environment that allows employees to feel they are contributing to the public good.     

How Leadership and Public Service Motivation Enhance Innovative Behavior

Prior research has linked the innovative behavior of public sector employees to desirable outcomes such as improved efficiency and higher public service quality. However, questions regarding the drivers of innovative behavior among employees have received limited attention. This article employs psychological empowerment theory to examine the underlying processes by which entrepreneurial leadership and public service motivation (PSM) shape innovative behavior among civil servants. Based on three‐wave data from 281 Chinese civil servants and their 59 department heads, entrepreneurial leadership is found to positively influence subordinates' innovative behavior by enhancing two dimensions of psychological empowerment: meaning and impact. Additionally, PSM was found to influence subordinates' innovative behavior by enhancing the dimensions of meaning and competence. These findings suggest that to facilitate innovative behavior among employees, public organizations should consider introducing training that encourages leaders to serve as entrepreneurial role models and recruit employees with high levels of PSM.     

A Cross-Level Holistic Model Of Public Service Motivation

ABSTRACT

Using a sample of 63 supervisors and their direct reports (189 immediate subordinates), this study investigated a cross-level model of public service motivation’s (PSM) antecedents in the Chinese public sector. Correlation analyses and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) results simultaneously revealed that both subordinates’ proactive personality and supervisors’ servant leadership were related positively to subordinates’ PSM. Additionally, HLM analyses demonstrated that supervisors’ servant leadership and their immediate subordinates’ proactive personality interacted to correlate positively with subordinates’ PSM. Implications of the findings, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.     

Goal Setting in the Australian Public Service: Effects on Psychological Empowerment and Organizational Citizenship Behavior

Do specific and difficult job goals have a positive, negative, or negligible effect on higher levels of performance in the form of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) among government employees? Importantly, how do they influence OCB: directly and/or indirectly through psychological empowerment? This article on a small group of Australian federal government employees draws from the goal‐setting and self‐determination theories to provide a better understanding of how goal setting affects OCB. Findings show that goal specificity largely influenced OCB indirectly through psychological empowerment. In contrast, goal difficulty raised OCB directly and through the partial mediating effect of psychological empowerment.     

Person-Environment Fit and Public Service Motivation

This article incorporates insights from Person-Environment Fit theories to the discussion about the effect of Public Service Motivation (PSM) on vocational outcome variables. Analysis of a large Dutch dataset shows that workers with a PSM fit are more satisfied and less inclined to leave their job and the organization they work for than workers without such a fit. This is in accordance with the main hypothesis. Other results underline the importance of the PSM concept as they show that public sector workers have a higher level of PSM than private sector workers. Moreover, private sector workers with high levels of PSM are inclined to look for a job in the public sector, which is in accordance with a main propositions of the PSM framework. The article finishes with a discussion on theoretical and methodological issues raised by the analysis and puts forward some suggestions for further research.     

Public Service Motivation Concepts and Theory: A Critique

With its growth in popularity, public service motivation (PSM) research has been subjected to increasing critical scrutiny, but with more focus on measurement and models than on concepts. The authors examine PSM against standard criteria for judging the strength of concepts (e.g., resonance, parsimony, differentiation, and depth). After providing a critique of PSM concepts, they conclude with suggestions for research programs that could improve the explanatory power of PSM theory.     

Public Service and Motivation: Does Mission Matter?

This study advances our understanding of employee work motivation and performance in the public sector by reinterpreting the literature on public service motivation within the psychological framework of goal theory. An empirical test of this new framework suggests that goal theory provides a strong theoretical foundation for understanding the independent contributions of task, mission, and public service to employee work motivation and performance. The importance of an organization's mission increases employee work motivation in the public sector by making the job more important, even after controlling for the effect of performance-related extrinsic rewards.     

Public Service Motivation Research: Lessons for Practice

Public service motivation research has proliferated in parallel with concerns about how to improve the performance of public service personnel. However, scholarship does not always inform management and leadership. This article purposefully reviews public service motivation research since 2008 to determine the extent to which researchers have identified lessons for practice. The results of the investigation support several lessons—among them using public service motivation as a selection tool, facilitating public service motivation through cooperation in the workplace, conveying the significance of the job, and building leadership based on public service values. These results are important because they offer evidence that the field is coalescing around tactics that managers and leaders can use to address enduring concerns about employee motivation in the public sector. They also prompt us to articulate ideas that can guide a tighter integration of research and practice moving forward.     

Cultivating Public Service Motivation through AmeriCorps Service: A Longitudinal Study

The public service motivation literature has helped scholars and practitioners better understand who is attracted to public service and why. However, little is understood about how public service motivation in individuals may be cultivated or how it changes over time. This article uses panel data collected by the Corporation for National and Community Service to track the longitudinal effects of participation in the AmeriCorps national service program on participants’ public service motivation. Findings reveal that participation in AmeriCorps programs had positive effects on participants’ levels of commitment to the public interest and civic awareness immediately after the program; many of these program effects were sustained seven years later. However, when observed in isolation, the comparison group showed significant declines in levels of commitment to public interest and civic awareness over an eight‐year period, suggesting that public service motivation may initially decline upon entry into a public service career.     

Public Service Motivation: A Systematic Literature Review and Outlook

Over the past two decades, research on public service motivation has seen rapid growth. Despite the relatively large number of publications to date, no systematic research overview has been created, leaving the body of literature somewhat unstructured and possibly hampering future research. This article fills this void by providing a systematic literature review of 323 publications that examines six key aspects of the literature on public service motivation: the growth of research on the concept, the most prominent studies based on a referencing network analysis, the most frequent publication outlets, research designs and methods, lines of inquiry and patterns of empirical findings, and implications for practice drawn from the publications in the study sample. Strengths and weaknesses of the existing literature are identified, and future research directions are proposed.     

New Perspectives on Public Service Motivation: Symposium Introduction

ABSTRACT

A possible “dark side” of goal setting, namely perfectionism and its relationship with employee performance, was investigated. A study of police officers (n = 235) revealed that perfectionists' predisposition to (1) set goals that they perceive to be extremely high, and (2) base evaluations of self-worth on the attainment of those goals were positively related to maximum performance, namely promotional exam scores. The mediating variable was perceived effort. In the second study involving police officers (n = 242), however, perfectionism displayed a complex relationship with typical performance. The two dimensions of perfectionism, perceived high goals and contingent self-worth, were negative predictors of this criterion through their relationship with emotional exhaustion. Nevertheless, the goal difficulty dimension was a positive predictor of typical performance.     

Bridging the Public Service Motivation and Calling Literatures

Public administration research suggests there may be disparity in the extent to which public servants experience their work as a calling. The purpose of this article is to better illustrate and integrate calling research, which grows out of the positive organizational scholarship movement, into how we understand public service motives. The calling scholarship offers a productive way to view differences in public servants' orientations toward their work. Integrating calling into the public administration scholarship—particularly the public service motivation scholarship—provides insights to researchers and managers about how to help employees discover a deeper sense of meaningfulness in their work. In presenting the arguments and corresponding conceptual framework, the authors seek to supplement rather than replace the public service motivation construct. The authors articulate a research agenda that they believe will strengthen and enrich research on public servants' experience with their work.     

Social Desirability Bias in Measuring Public Service Motivation

ABSTRACT

Public service motivation (PSM) is usually measured using self-report data, which suggests that PSM measures can be influenced by social desirability bias. This study investigates whether respondents tend to report an inflated view of their attitudes and orientations during surveys on PSM. Experimental survey research (list experiment) is conducted to analyze the magnitude of social desirability bias in PSM measurements and to examine the relationship between socio-demographic factors and social desirability bias in Korea. The results show evidence of social desirability responding bias, although the pattern of bias varies across socio-demographic subgroups. Respondents in their forties or fifties, conservatives, Protestants, and those without a religious affiliation show more bias than other subgroups. This finding implies that correlational analysis in PSM research may be prone to the moderating effect of social desirability bias. Research that does not recognize and compensate for this bias may produce unwarranted theoretical or practical conclusions.     

Knights and Knaves Return: Public Service Motivation and the Delivery of Public Services

ABSTRACT

There are several models for delivering public services such as health care or education, most of which can be summarised under the headings of trust, mistrust, voice, and choice. Each contains assumptions concerning the motivation of the professionals and others who provide the service concerned: that is, the extent to which they are “knaves,” motivated primarily by self-interest, or “knights,” motivated by altruism and the desire to provide a public service. This article highlights the assumptions concerning motivation implicit in each of the delivery models, illustrating the points made by reference to the author's experience as a senior policy adviser to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and to some evidence on the performance of public services under the different models.     

Suited to Serve: The Antecedents and Perceptions of Public Service Motivation in National Service

While research suggests that public service motivation may be a dynamic trait in individuals, particularly early in their careers, other recent research has found that PSM may be relatively stable upon entry into the workforce (Vogel and Kroll 2016). To identify more precisely the decision point among individuals considering a public service career, the present study uses the antecedents of public service motivation framework (Perry 1997) to predict participation in AmeriCorps, a voluntary national service program in the United States. Findings reveal that antecedent conditions of PSM, including the prevalence of seeing family members and mentors help others as well as participation in student government, predict whether an individual will join an AmeriCorps programs. Many of these self-reported motivations support the argument that people attracted to public service hold strong other-regarding values. These findings suggest that human resources managers would be wise to consider these antecedent conditions to public service motivation when identifying pools of talent for recruiting and selecting prospective employees.     

Measurement and Public Service Motivation: New Insights,Old Questions

ABSTRACT

This article reviews some recent research from political science that speaks to the public service motivation (PSM) literature. Specifically, it discusses research that describes new measures of bureaucratic ideology and agency performance. These new measures might usefully be employed in the PSM literature and a discussion of them highlights some potential pitfalls in PSM research more generally.