Review: Public service motivation—practical problems, scientific evidence and the role of a research community

Abstract

This review article introduces Public Money & Management's theme papers and articles on public service motivation (PSM). PSM has proven to be a promising road in creating public performance and public value and this theme brings it to an even wider audience, ensuring that policy-makers and those responsible for delivering public services worldwide are aware of the value of PSM research. The article also presents new findings about how best to further PSM research.

Keywords:

• Journal rankings
• public administration
• public management
• public service motivation (PSM)
• research citations

Notes

* Papers that belong to the top 1% most cited papers— compared to papers published in the same year—in the general category of social sciences are considered by the Web of Science to be ‘highly cited’, whereas ‘hot papers’ belong to the recent top 0.1% papers.

* Since articles on PSM and articles included in symposia or special issues on PSM are highly correlated, we calculated the variance inflation factor in a regular OLS model. It did not exceed 10 and tolerance was not below 0.10, suggesting that multicollinearity was not a big problem.