Public service motivation and government officials’ willingness to learn in public sector benchmarking process

ABSTRACT

Benchmarking between local governments has become an important topic in public administration. In benchmarking practice, local government officials play important roles in deciding what they learn, who they learn from, and how to adopt, and adapt to the lessons. However, less attention has been paid to why local government officials to willingly take lessons from their peer governments. Focusing on a particular type of motivational basis, public service motivation (PSM), this study found that PSM is positively associated with government official’s willingness to learn. Out of PSM’s subdimensions, in particular, only attraction to public policy-making shows a significant positive relationship.

KEYWORDS:

• Public sector benchmarking
• PSM
• willingness to learn
• local government

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Butler et al. (2017) used this concept to investigate the role of policy makers’ learning in policy diffusion process, but they did not explain what it is in detail. This study further defines the concept in the following section. Given that policy diffusion is about dissemination of innovations among local, regional, and state policy makers, willingness to learn can be applied to the PSB context as well.

2. Also, note that willingness to learn is a different concept from government managers’ information-seeking behaviour. Information seeking is an actual activity ‘undertaken to identify a message that satisfies a perceived need’ (Krikelas 1983, 6) and thus is not the willingness to learn per se, but rather the consequence of the willingness, including eagerness or intention to learn from available information through others’ experience.

3. This study categorized mayor, superintendent, city manager and clerk into elected/appointed position. Otherwise, unelected/not appointed.

4. The baseline referent group is the control group without any extrinsic reward treatment (i.e. monetary and promotion treatments) in the experimental survey question.

5. Ammons and Roenigk (2014) explain the difference as ‘Information without insights is merely a collection of data; however, with insights gained from experience or analysis, information can be transformed into knowledge’ (310). The transitional process requires government officials’ commitment and endeavour.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Namhoon Ki

Namhoon Ki is a postdoc in the Askew School of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA. His research interests focus on collaborative governance, inter-governmental relations, local government, organizational behaviour, and public management.