Public Service Motivation and Interpersonal Citizenship Behavior in Public Organizations: Testing a Preliminary Model

Abstract

A good deal of research has demonstrated how public service motivation (PSM) facilitates desirable organizational attitudes and behaviors such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and work effort. Other research has demonstrated that PSM predicts higher levels of social capital and altruistic behavior in society. Between these two strands of PSM research, there is a gap in knowledge about whether PSM matters to citizenship behavior internal to the organization. This article tests the direct and indirect relationship between individual levels of PSM and interpersonal citizenship behavior using a structural equation model. We also account for the effect of organizational environment by incorporating a measure of co-worker support. We find that PSM has a direct and positive effect on interpersonal citizenship behavior in public organizations, even when accounting for the significant role of co-worker support.3

The Big Question for Performance Management: Why Do Managers Use Performance Information?

“…High PSM employees exhibit higher levels of organizational commitment, enjoy higher job satisfaction, experience greater job involvement, and require less extrinsic rewards (Pandey and Stazyk 2008). There is also evidence that PSM fosters positive citizenship behavior both internal (Pandey, Wright, and Moynihan 2008) and external to the organization (Brewer 2003;Houston 2006).…”

Contextualized measures of public service motivation: the case of Spain

“…Obviously it would have been better to have a 24-item scale for measuring a four-dimension PSM and to add a fifth dimension. However, many PSM studies have used many fewer than 24 items and it is quite common to use models with just five items (Alonso and Lewis 2001;Brewer, Selden and Facer 2000;Kim, 2005;Pandey, Wright, and Moynihan, 2008;Wright and Pandey, 2008;Christensen and Wright, 2011). Some scholars have also justified a shortened scale or a threedimensional PSM construct on the basis of practicalities as they consider that a 24-item scale is too long for inclusion in a typical public administration questionnaire (Coursey & Pandey 2007).…”

Prosocial Attitudes in the Public and Private Sector: Exploring Behavioral Effects and Variation Across Time

“…On the other hand, these employees were also found to show higher levels of extra-role behavior which goes beyond normal job expectations and is usually not recognized by formal reward systems (Leisink and Steijn 2009;Wright 2007). For example, some studies documented that prosocially driven employees are more likely to engage in organizational citizenship behavior, such as helping out their colleagues (Kim 2006;Pandey, Wright, and Moynihan 2008). Other studies reported that these employees tend to take on extra responsibilities and engage in performance management practices which can create additional effort but might also be useful to improve outcomes for the clientele they serve (Kroll and Vogel, forthcoming;Moynihan, Pandey, and Wright 2012).…”

“…Though there is a growing literature that aims at further qualifying these observations (Bright 2008;Christensen and Wright 2011;Moynihan and Pandey 2008;Steijn 2008;Wright and Pandey 2008), one of the "unanswered questions about public service motivation" (Wright and Grant 2010) is whether the concept is a dynamic state or stable trait. Such a distinction has critical implications, because in the first case a prosocial motivation could be conceptualized as a personal disposition that varies over time and can be changed, whereas in the latter case it would be something static that only differs among people.…”