Does Gender Really Matter? Testing the Mediating Role of Public Service Motivation between Gender and Organizational Citizenship Behavior in Federal Agencies

ABSTRACT

Although a wide variety of studies have been conducted on the role of gender, public service motivation, and organizational citizenship behavior, the findings have not completely dispelled the suspicion about the causal relationship between these concepts. This article examines the mechanisms through which gender affects the performance of organizational citizenship behavior directly and indirectly through a mediating variable – public service motivation (PSM). A sample of 485,534 employees from the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) was used to test the mediation model using the bootstrapping technique. Findings show that women scored higher on their PSM level, which, in turn, positively affected their OCB levels compared to men. Also, this study demonstrates that PSM as a construct has distinct gender dimensions attached to it.

KEYWORDS:

• Public service motivation
• organizational citizenship behavior
• gender
• public administration

Notes

1. All coefficients reported are unstandardized unless otherwise noted. a = .05 two-tailed is the criterion for statistical significance.

2. Full mediation requires that path c’ or the direct effect between gender and OCB to be insignificant when adding the mediator. It is partial mediation because path c’ remains significant even after adding the mediator.

3. Indirect effect of M (PSM): ab = (032*.814) = .026 (2.6%).

Additional information

Funding

The author did not receive any financial support for conducting this research.