Public Service Motivation Research: Lessons for Practice

Abstract

Public service motivation research has proliferated in parallel with concerns about how to improve the performance of public service personnel. However, scholarship does not always inform management and leadership. This article purposefully reviews public service motivation research since 2008 to determine the extent to which researchers have identified lessons for practice. The results of the investigation support several lessons-among them using public service motivation as a selection tool, facilitating public service motivation through cooperation in the workplace, conveying the significance of the job, and building leadership based on public service values. These results are important because they offer evidence that the field is coalescing around tactics that managers and leaders can use to address enduring concerns about employee motivation in the public sector. They also prompt us to articulate ideas that can guide a tighter integration of research and practice moving forward. Practitioner Points• Employee public service motivation (PSM) is changeable by both intended and unintended organizational and management practices. • Attracting and retaining employees with high PSM is a reliable way to enhance employee performance and agency mission accomplishment. • Organizations that intentionally nurture PSM develop stronger ties between organizational and employee values and goals. • Relationships between employees and service beneficiaries should be leveraged for motivational advantages. • Leaders should communicate and model public service values.

The Persistence of Prosocial Work Effort as a Function of Mission Match

“…Despite the foregoing limitations, we believe our findings have important relevance to both public administration research and practice. Orienting and screening employees in line with the prosocial mission of the organization can increase the persistence of employees’ prosocial work behaviors—an outcome critical to public and nonprofit organizations (Christensen, Paarlberg, and Perry ). Moreover, our results suggest that specific identification with an organization's mission is more substantively significant in prosocial work than more broad based other‐regarding orientations to society, such as self‐sacrifice.…”

Collaborative Innovation, New Technologies, and Work Redesign

“…Many of the positive outcomes from the redesign project were delivered by collaborative innovation practices that support shared problem‐solving in job roles and interdisciplinary boundary spanning in work organization. Crucially, while the impacts on employees' job quality were mixed, those working “nearer the patient,” who reported largely positive experiences, also pointed to the benefits of an exercise in work redesign that prioritized interdisciplinary learning and collaboration (see also Christensen, Paarlberg, and Perry ). Thus, our research adds to a growing international literature across diverse public management regimes that points to the potential benefits of collaborative networking for innovation among public service employees, in order to join up ideas, expertise and energies to drive change (for reviews of evidence, see de Lancer Julnes 2015; Sørensen and Torfing ).…”

Stability not change: Improving frontline employee motivation through organizational reform is harder than it looks

“…assumptions about motivation. A natural candidate arises from research on autonomous types of motivation such as public service motivation (PSM) and intrinsic motivation, variables that have positive relationships with job satisfaction, organizational commitment and performance in the public sector (Judge et al 2001;Ryan and Deci 2004;Houston 2011;Andersen and Kjeldsen 2012;Bellé 2014;Andersen et al 2015;Christensen et al 2017;Jakobsen et al 2018). Moreover, some recent empirical work has shown that autonomous motivation in the public sector can be both encouraged (Kjeldsen 2013;Bellé 2014;Ward 2014) and harmed (Frey and Jegen 2001;Georgellis et al 2011;Jacobsen et al 2014).…”