Talking the Talk of Public Service Motivation: How Public Organization Logics Matter for Employees' Expressions of PSM

Abstract

This article aims to move beyond the public-private dichotomy in studying public service motivation (PSM) by showing how organizational logics matter for the type of PSM (instrumental, normative, or affective) that employees express. Using data from 50 interviews in police stations, prisons, hospitals, municipalities, and schools, we show that differences in service logic (the user's feeling of the desirability of a service) and user logic (people-changing or people-processing services) matter for employees’ expressions of PSM in that this results in different emphases within public service motivation. We conclude that institutions such as organizational logics matter for PSM expressions and that research on PSM should account for differences between public service-providing organizations.

Keywords:

• public service motivation
• types of public service motives
• types of public service organizations
• qualitative research

Acknowledgments

This work is financed by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). The authors thank the Aarhus University Department of Political Science and Government, the EGPA Public Personnel Panel, and the USBO Research Day Group for useful comments and suggestions on previous versions of this paper.

Notes

¹The users are those citizens using the ”service” for example a suspect when detained by the police, as opposed to beneficiaries, who in this instance could be the victims of the crime.

²This does not mean that such motives are never expressed, but that this will be less pronounced.

³Even ‘neighborhood police officers’ are mostly focused on working together with social services. They identify certain individuals or groups and try to refer them for justice or to social services.

⁴In The Netherlands, the focus is on fighting crime; in policy documents, the task of ‘aiding’ has been removed from the “core tasks” of the police, who should mainly focus on fighting crime.

⁵To ensure anonymity all respondents are referred to as “him/he” and are assigned a code ‘R[number],[service domain],[function]’. Service domain is only mention for education/hospital. Function names are pp &primary process), mng &management), and sst &supportive staff).

⁶In general one can distinguish between motives for choosing a job and motives to perform well within the job. These do not have to be similar, as Jacobsen (2011) has shown. Our study focuses on the motivation to work well and perform within the job.