Exploring the conditionality of public service motivation: evidence from a priming experiment

ABSTRACT

Scholars have demonstrated that public service motivation (PSM) may be conditional and activated in certain contexts or by particular primes. However, to date researchers have focused on the impact of positive experiences or beneficial consequences of public serving activities on employee PSM. Altruism research suggests that PSM may also respond, somewhat counterintuitively, to negative experiences. We test this in an experimental study of 456 public employees in which treatment groups were asked to recall negative or positive interactions with citizens, before responding to questions from a widely used scale of PSM. Results suggest that expressed PSM is sensitive to, and in fact increases, in response to both positive and negative experiential primes. We conclude with a discussion of implications of conditionality for our broader understanding of PSM.

KEYWORDS:

• Public service motivation
• experience recall
• altruism
• reciprocity
• objective-self awareness/personal responsibility

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

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

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. We inserted a series of paired lottery games as a distraction technique between the measurement of this potential moderator and the measurement of PSM. The games were not relevant to the theme of the experiment, but the purpose was to mask the relationship between elements in the experiment that we aim to investigate.

2. We also estimate these same relationships with a MIMIC (multiple indicator multiple causes) model to help us rule out that observed differences are not a product of systematic difference in the interpretation of the questions across groups (samples, treatments). Because the MIMIC results are consistent with the OLS results, we simply note here that our findings are robust to different estimations.

3. We note that social dominance orientation has a significant and negative association with expressed PSM. This is consistent with expectations and reinforces the importance of controlling for this personality characteristic.

4. A reviewer of this article suggested that “research about PSM and altruism from sociology, social psychology, and economics (e.g., Dur & Zoutenbier, 2014) has begun to inform one another in positive ways. In some respects, the research on PSM has led the way and the altruism research from social psychology and economics have taken note and begun to catch up.”

Additional information

Funding

Christensen’s role in this work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF-2014S1A3A20448].

Notes on contributors

Sean Nicholson-Crotty

Sean Nicholson-Crotty is the Paul H. O’Neill Professor of Public Affairs at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University. His research focuses on solutions to racial disparity in the outcomes of public programmes, administrative decision-making, and the diffusion of innovations among governments and public organisations.

Jill Nicholson-Crotty

Jill Nicholson-Crotty is Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University. Her research focuses on both public and non-profit management in the policy process. She has published numerous papers on the consequences of diversity in public organisations.

Danyao Li

Danyao Li is a PhD Candidate at The O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University Bloomington. She is interested in questions that concern issues of social equity and justice. Her research centres on representation and diversity, bureaucratic decision-making and the performance of public organisations, typically with a specific application to law enforcement.

Robert K. Christensen

Robert K. Christensen is Professor of Public and Nonprofit Management and George W. Romney Research Fellow at the Romney Institute of Public Service and Ethics in the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University. His research examines pro- and anti-social motives and behaviours among public service employees. He co-edits the Cambridge University Press Elements Series in Public and Nonprofit Administration.