Sector and Occupational Differences in Public Service Motivation: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

The relationship between employment sector and public service motivation remains unclear since previous studies fail to control for the occupation of the investigated employees. Based on 32 semi-structured interviews with Danish nurses and nursing assistants working in the public or private health sector, this study shows that occupation and employment sector have very different relationships with the separate dimensions of public service motivation. This suggests that future studies of sector differences in public service motivation should pay attention to employees' occupation as an important control variable, and the benefits of using a qualitative approach to measure public service motivation.

Keywords:

• public service motivation
• professionalism
• qualitative research
• health sector

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Carsten Grønholdt for kind help with conducting the interviews and the subsequent coding of the interviews. Besides, I would like to thank participants in the panel on Public Service Motivation at the 2010 IRSPM Conference for their helpful comments and suggestions regarding an earlier version of this article.

Notes

¹An occupation's degree of professionalism can be defined as the amount of specialized, theoretical knowledge possessed by members of the occupation (usually obtained through higher education) and the firmness of work-related norms for acceptable actions within the occupation (Andersen, 2005, pp. 23–25; Freidson, 2001, p. 127).

² Freidson (2001) lists five indicators which can be used to classify a specific occupation as having a high degree of professionalism: 1. work based on specialized, theoretical knowledge and skills, 2. exclusive jurisdiction controlled by the occupation, 3. sheltered position at external and internal labor markets based on qualifying credentials created by the occupation, 4. higher, formal education obtained outside the labor market, and 5. common norms and ideals among members of the occupation which focuses on doing good work of high quality rather than economic gain and efficiency. These indicators are used to classify the degree of professionalism of the nurses' and nursing assistants' occupations in the section on study design and methods.

³The interview guide is available upon request by writing to: [email protected].