Validating the Construct of Public Service Motivation in For-profit Organizations: A preliminary study

Abstract

Delineating the theoretical link between individuals’ discretion and motivations in the private sector and their public service behaviours in Chinese society, this study explored public service motivation (PSM) in for-profit organizations. A survey of 348 employees from three engineering consulting organizations in China validated the construct of PSM in for-profit organizations. Besides the positive correlation between conscientiousness and PSM, the current study demonstrated that a positive correlation exists between PSM and community citizenship behaviour (CCB) with love of money (LOM) as a marginal moderator: the positive relationship between PSM and CCB is marginally stronger when LOM is higher, vice versa.

Key words:

• Conscientiousness
• community citizenship behaviour (CCB)
• love of money (LOM)
• public service motivation (PSM)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank National Natural Sciences Foundation of China (Project 71002035, 71132003, and 71172094), National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science (12BGL120), SMC-Chenxing Young Scholar Program (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), and Shanghai Pujiang Program for their financial support. And the first author also would like to thank School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University at Bloomington for the support in partially completing this project when he was a visiting scholar there. He appreciates invaluable and insightful comments and suggestions from Na Ni (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) and Tracy Xiaohua Zhou (The University of Hong Kong) on a draft. And he is indebted to Crystal Lynn Abbott (Indiana University Bloomington) for her assistant editing.

Notes

1. For example, the qualifications of an engineering consulting company are jointly verified by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development of the People’s Republic of China and National Development and Reform Commission according to the Administration of Qualification of Engineering Consulting; the business domain of engineering consulting company is regulated by the State Administration for Industry & Commerce of the People’s Republic of China according to the Act of Controlling the Registration of Enterprises as Legal Persons. The engineering consulting companies in China are also supervised by the Chinese National Association of Engineering Consulting (Member of International Federation of Consulting Engineers) under the Assessment of Service of Engineering Consulting.

2. Although the original scale of PSM was developed based on a survey of public employees (MPA students), scholars have also validated the scale in undergraduate students (e.g., Carpenter et al. 2012; Liu et al. 2011a; Vandenabeele 2008). In the present study, we made no changes when using the items from the extant literature.

3. We must caution that recent reviews of common methods bias tests suggest that none of the current tests are particularly strong in ruling out the possibility that bias exists (Podsakoff et al. 2003). Furthermore, the Harman’s single-factor test is one of the most used approaches to test this serious issue (Podsakoff et al. 2003).

4. We are indebted to the anonymous reviewer 1 of the Public Management Review for these insightful suggestions.

5. We are indebted to the anonymous reviewer 2 of the Public Management Review for these insightful suggestions.