Are future bureaucrats more prosocial?

Abstract

This article explores the associations between self‐reported Public Service Motivation (PSM) and preferred job traits, study choice, and observable prosocial behaviour. We studied three subject pools covering over 250 university students in Germany. We used laboratory experiments with monetary rewards to measure altruism, fairness, strategic fairness, and cooperativeness, and a post‐experimental survey on subjects' PSM. Higher levels of PSM were not associated with studying public administration but were positively associated with altruism and negatively with strategic fairness. The experimental data reveal robust subject pool effects. After controlling for PSM, public administration students behaved more altruistically and displayed less merely strategic fairness than business students. And they behaved more cooperatively than business and law students. These behavioural findings about future bureaucrats corroborate cumulative earlier survey evidence about the higher prosocial tendencies of public sector employees. They point to the danger of crowding out such tendencies through overly extrinsic management tools.

Where Does the Good Shepherd Go? Civic Virtue and Sorting into Public Sector Employment

“…Another open question is whether the relationship between personal motives and public sector employment is due to selection, including self‐selection (individuals with specific motives are sorted into the public sector), and/or due to socialization (personal motives tend to change during the employment in a specific sector). With respect to selection, Dur and Zoutenbier () find that public sector employees are higher in altruism, on average, even at zero years of work experience, Tepe and Vanhuysse () find a positive selection effect for experimentally observed altruism, and Holt () finds a positive selection effect for prosocial motivation in general. To estimate socialization effects, some studies analyze the effects of changes between the private and public sector on prosocial motivation or behavior.…”

“…Research on prosocial motivation has largely focused on altruism (e.g. Andreoni, ; Khalil, ; Konow, ), which has been found to relate positively to public sector employment (Dur and Zoutenbier, , ; Tepe and Vanhuysse, )…”

A Moral Theory of Public Service Motivation

“…For instance, PSM has been associated with a variety of prosocial behaviors, such as volunteering and donating time or blood (Houston, 2006;Coursey et al, 2008;Clerkin et al, 2009;Lee, 2012;Piatak and Holt, 2020). The relationship between PSM and observed prosocial behavior is also found in laboratory and field experiments: People with higher PSM are more altruistic, egalitarian, cooperative, and trustworthy, and are more likely to undertake altruistic punishment to uphold social justice (Esteve et al, 2015(Esteve et al, , 2016Tepe, 2016;Tepe and Vanhuysse, 2017;Prokop and Tepe, 2020).…”

Behavioural and experimental public administration: Emerging contributions and new directions

“…Tepe and Vanhuysse () use a series of monetarily incentivized laboratory experiments (i.e., the dictator game, the ultimatum game, and the public goods game) to measure prosocial behaviours in samples of students of public administration, business and law. The aim is to observe how these three groups differ in terms of their prosocial behaviours (for example, the amount contributed in a public goods game) and, importantly, how these revealed behaviours are related to public service motivation.…”