More Blessed to Give Than to Receive: Evidence of the Altruism–Promotion Relationship from Female Taiwanese Civil Servants

Abstract

The spirit of public service is benevolence toward all—a caring altruism. To investigate whether altruism is related to career success, multisource data were collected from a cohort of government employees in Taiwan. Analytical results supported research hypotheses by revealing that altruism and male gender are positively associated with pay grade advancement. Moreover, the altruism–promotion relationship was statistically more prominent among women, because less altruistic women, compared with their male counterparts, were more likely to struggle to advance in their careers. Suggestions are offered to redress the imbalance between men and women and to connect more effectively the practices of human resource management with the moral base of benevolence in public service.

Keywords:

• altruism
• career success
• employee promotion
• gender differences

Acknowledgment

The author is grateful to Don-Yun Chen for making the dataset available for this study, Sanjay K. Pandey, the associate editor of Public Performance & Management Review, and anonymous reviewers for their support for this article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chih-Wei Hsieh

Chih-Wei Hsieh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Policy at City University of Hong Kong.