Making sense of New Zealand’s ‘spirit of service’: social identity and the civil service

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the creation a more unified civil service in New Zealand with the Public Service Act 2020, which promotes the most profound changes to the public service since New Zealand’s New Public Management heyday in the late 1980s. Among its many reforms is an explicit attempt to foster a unified culture around a ‘spirit of service to the community’—a construct without fixed definition that appears to incorporate ideas of motivations and ethics. This paper shows that this unified culture can be traced through a series of key collaborative discussions that have taken place among New Zealand’s public sector chief executives. The authors present a case study to show how these collaborations contributed to a new social identity, and provided a foundation for a civil service unified by its spirit of service to the community. The paper contributes to this PMM theme by providing empirical evidence from the latest New Zealand experience; and also contributes to theory of social identity and sensemaking in creating civil service values.

IMPACT

This paper will be useful for practitioners aiming to create a more cohesive agency, and inter-agency, identity. This paper explains how New Zealand is fostering a unified culture and social identity across the public service, which coalesces around the concept of ‘spirit of service to the community’. Over several years, senior New Zealand public service leaders have used this concept to make collective sense of their agency’s role within a single ‘team’, with stewardship responsibilities for public service as a whole. The paper will be of particular interest to practitioners who wish to create a joined-up public service, in situations where culture and social identity are fragmented along individual agency lines.

KEYWORDS:

• Inter-agency collaboration
• leadership
• New Zealand
• public sector
• sensemaking
• social identity
• spirit of service

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).