Does a Public Service Ethic Encourage Ethical Behaviour? Public Service Motivation, Ethical Leadership and the Willingness to Report Ethical Problems

Abstract

This article aims to advance our understanding of and confidence in the relationship between employee public service motivation (PSM) and ethical behaviour by testing the degree to which PSM predicts the ethical behaviour or behavioural intention of government employees. Building on previous research, we argue that government employees with higher PSM are not only more likely to internalize values that support public interests, they also are likely to be concerned less about the potential consequences that they may experience by reporting unethical conduct within their agencies. Using data collected through a survey from 477 employees working in a large state agency, we find that supervisors with higher PSM are more likely to be perceived by their subordinates as exhibiting ethical leadership, supervisors exhibiting higher ethical leadership are more likely to have subordinates with higher levels of PSM and that subordinates with higher PSM express a higher willingness to report unethical behaviour within their agency. We discuss implications of these findings for research on PSM.

Encouraging civil servants to be frank and fearless: Merit recruitment and employee voice

“…Several control variables are also shown to have a statistically significant relationship with fear to voice a dissenting opinion. Consistent with previous studies (Hassan ; Wright et al ), the results show that employees whose immediate supervisor exhibits high levels of ethical leadership have lower levels of fear towards voicing a dissenting opinion. As with previous research (Miceli et al ), gender does not seem to be related to employee voice.…”

“…Studying the public sector, Hassan () found a positive relationship between a manager's ethical leadership and their employees’ disposition to voice their opinions. Similarly, Wright et al () found that ethical leadership is associated with higher levels of public service motivation among employees, and that this in turn is tied to a higher propensity among staff to report unethical behaviour.…”

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“…In addition to concerns about whether we can hold government accountable for desired policy outcomes, decreasing trust levels also re ect concerns that the actions of public administrators during policy implementation are driven by self-interest rather than the interests of the larger public or community (Wright et al 2016).…”