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Social science research contains a wealth of knowledge for people seeking to understand collaboration processes. The authors argue that public managers should look inside the “black box” of collaboration processes. Inside, they will find a complex construct of five variable dimensions: governance, administration, organizational autonomy, mutuality, and norms. Public managers must know these five dimensions and manage them intentionally in order to collaborate effectively.

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How has research regarding public service motivation evolved since James L. Perry and Lois Recascino Wise published their essay “The Motivational Bases of Public Service” 20 years ago? The authors assess subsequent studies in public administration and in social and behavioral sciences as well as evolving definitions of public service motivation. What have we learned about public service motivation during the last two decades? What gaps in our understanding and knowledge have appeared with respect to the three propositions offered by Perry and Wise? This essay charts new directions for public service motivation scholarship to help clarify current research questions, advance comparative research, and enhance our overall understanding of individuals’ public service motives.

The growth in international research on public service motivation (PSM) raises a number of important questions about the degree to which the theory and research developed in one country can contribute to our understanding of PSM in other counties. To help address this issue, this study revisits the conceptual and operational definitions of PSM to address weaknesses previously noted in the literature. Although some important steps have been taken to both improve and internationalize the PSM scale, this work has been done incrementally. In contrast, this study takes a more systematic and comprehensive approach by combining the efforts of international PSM scholars to develop and then test a revised measurement instrument for PSM in 12 countries. Although the resulting four dimensional 16-item measure of PSM reported here provides a better theoretical and empirical foundation for the measurement of PSM, our results suggest that the exact meaning and scaling of PSM dimensions are likely to differ across cultures and languages. These results raise serious concerns regarding the ability to develop a single universal scale of PSM, or making direct comparisons of PSM across countries.Its earlier versions were delivered at the Annual Conference

The public administration literature has long emphasized the distinctive character of motives associated with public institutions. The recent development of a public service motivation (PSM) construct and an instrument to measure it opens the way for systematic empirical research. This study investigates the relationship of PSM to jive sets of correlates: parental socialization, religious socialization, professional identpcation, political ideology, and individual demographic characteristics. The results generally conjirm the hypotheses, but several anomalies were identped. The findings suggest that research using the PSM construct can be Puitfil for understanding motivation. Among the directions for firther research are studies of the influences of educational and bureaucratic socialization on PSM and the affects of PSM on individual and organizational behavior. Public administration practitioners and educators have long contended that public employees are different from employees in other sectors of American society (Perry and Porter 1982; Wittmer 1991). In fact, an increasing number of empirical studies suggest that public employees differ from their private sector counterparts with respect to work-related values and needs. For example, Wittmer (1991) analyzed differences in the rankings of eight reward categories for a sample of 210 employees in public, private, and hybrid organizations. He found that public and private employees differed significantly with respect to preferences for higher pay, helping others, and status. He concluded that "the public service ethic appears to be alive and well. . ." and ".. . extends beyond core public organizations (government) to

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