Public administration (PA) increasingly faces new and emerging challenges. To address such challenges, researchers can work collaboratively with practitioners to identify and tackle the most pressing issues. Yet, intentionally establishing an ongoing dialogue not only between researchers and practitioners but between researchers, practitioners, and the communities that PA scholarship and practice are intended to impact can enhance all stakeholders' understanding of complex social problems and improve solutions. Forms of participatory and context-based research such as this are called many things across disciplines, but PA has yet to embrace such approaches fully. Thus, we introduce a framework entitled CO-DESIGN, intended to illustrate the process of advancing PA research through the co-production of knowledge between researchers, practitioners, and communities.Additionally, it serves as an acronym outlining eight focal areas we argue the co-production of knowledge can help advance. We discuss the CO-DESIGN process and agenda, including its implications for the field.

This article compares the motivations and attitudes of public servants in Kazakhstan (n = 627) and Pakistan (n = 207) by analyzing quantitative and qualitative survey data. A comparison of these two developing Asian countries with distinct administrative traditions and path dependencies contributes to the public administration literature on developing countries. This literature often treats public servants in developing countries as a single category, with little contextualization of findings. This study finds that despite an overlap in Islamic societal values, public servants’ motivations and attitudes differ: lower prosocial proclivity and more aspiration for money in Kazakhstan may be partly explained by the Soviet administrative tradition, while prosocial propensity and lower concern with pay in Pakistan may be attributed to the South Asian tradition. The authors conclude that historical legacies help explain cross‐country differences in employee motivation and attitudes. The findings also improve our knowledge about the potential of reforms within the examined conditions.

Most Western studies into motivation suggest that public servants are prosocial.Moreover, scholars suggest that a desire for external rewards, like pay and job security, may crowd out prosocial proclivity. However, recent studies from non-Western contexts provide mixed results about the actual drivers of public servants' motivation to seek and retain public sector employment and perform their duties. To advance the development of theory regarding motivational dynamics of public servants in developing countries, we examine how pursuing external rewards impacts public service motivation, job satisfaction, and turnover intention among public servants in Kazakhstan (n = 627), a developing former Soviet republic that has been subjected to various waves of personnel reform. Our quantitative and qualitative data show that a desire for job security relates positively to public service motivation and job satisfaction, whereas a desire for monetary rewards correlates negatively with public service motivation and positively with turnover intention. We conclude with the implications for theory and practice.

Although pension reform has been a global trend in the last couple of decades, public administration research has seldom addressed the issue of how targeted pension reforms affect civil servants. The goal of this study is to conceptualize pension reform as the breach of the psychological contract between the government and civil servants and to understand whether it leads to the experience of regret in civil servants over choosing a government career. In doing so, this study also explores the possible role of public service motivation (PSM) in moderating the experience of regret elicited by psychological contract breach as well as the negative perception of the pension reform. The analysis of the data collected from 944 Taiwanese public employees shows that (i) both psychological contract breach and negative perception trigger regret and (ii) PSM strengthens the impacts of psychological contract breach and the negative perception of the pension reform. The findings have critical implications for both practitioners handling pension reforms and researchers interested in building a theory of PSM.

Recent administrative reforms in highly ranked countries like the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore and Sweden focus on legal normalization and the use of performance contracts, with public servants enjoying far less job security than one or two decades ago. Our study in Kazakhstan, a developing former Soviet republic subjected to various waves of personnel reform, demonstrates that job security is highly valued by public servants (n ¼ 627). Moreover, as the primary reason for joining public service, it relates positively to public service motivation, and job satisfaction, and negatively to turnover intention. We discuss the risks of repealing job security for developing countries, which look to the advanced economies for public management solutions, and the adverse effects of transplanting reform strategies from the developed world to the developing world. We conclude with critical implications for policy and reform.

The scholarship on work engagement has proliferated in the past several decades, building a solid body of evidence for its role in positive achievements at, and attitudes to, work. Similarly, public service motivation (PSM) became a permanent fixture in the public sector management research, having generated insights on predisposition to serving the public and its impact on performance of civil servants. However, there is limited evidence on the relationship between PSM and work engagement. To address this gap, we surveyed 218 civil servants occupying mid‐level management positions in the civil service of a small European country of Moldova. Using moderation analysis, we find that higher PSM strengthens the positive impact of some job resources, such as perceived social impact on work engagement, whereas lower PSM makes the negative effect of some job demands, such as red tape, more pronounced. This highlights the importance of PSM in work engagement of mid‐career managers, and its role as both an enhancer and a coping mechanism. We find that high public service motivation (PSM) strengthens the positive relationship between work engagement and job resources, whereas low PSM makes the negative impact of job demands on work engagement more pronounced. To improve work engagement, public agencies should help employees understand how their individual efforts contribute to the overall prosocial impact of the public service.

Public service motivation (PSM) scholarship has mushroomed since the early 2000s. After initially being an exclusively Western field of study, scholarship has recently become more internationalised. As a corollary, scholars have begun to formulate a research agenda for advancing non-Western PSM research. To contribute to this advancement, and examine how non-Western PSM scholarship has developed in recent years, we conduct a systematic literature review of 83 empirical studies published between 2015 and 2020. We assess origin of scholarship, theories, samples and methodologies used, and empirical findings on the relation between PSM and key antecedents and outcomes. Our findings show that non-Western PSM scholarship is growing, and increasingly using contextual variables to explain variance in findings in comparison with Western studies. That being said, ample opportunity remains for leveraging contextual and regional particularities to build a more distinct body of scholarship. We conclude with suggestions for further advancing non-Western PSM research.

Public affairs programs aim to prepare students for public service roles by teaching certain skills and reinforcing prosocial motivations. Studies provide mixed results as to whether these aims are met. What we do not know is whether public administration and public affairs programs in Asia attract students different in their job sector attitudes and sector preferences from those in Western Europe. To this end, we analyze survey data on 247 students from public affairs programs in the Netherlands and Singapore. We find no significant difference in job sector preference. However, Singaporean students display a higher level of public service motivation (PSM) and a higher preference for pecuniary rewards. This implies that public affairs programs in Asia should take into account students' distinct motivations when designing curricula, and public affairs programs in both countries should leverage the prosocial motivation of students by enhancing their PSM through socialization during their educational experience.