What Makes Government Workers Tick? Reinforcing Motivation through Workplace Trust to Attenuate Effects of Perceived Politics on Outcomes

ABSTRACT

In a highly political organization, how could employees’ trust behavior affect their motivation to serve the public? This article examines how trust and public service motivation, as social and personal resources, respectively, can attenuate the potentially negative impact of perceived politics on employee behavior and outcomes. The findings suggest that workplace trust is a strong factor in enhancing employees’ motivation and thereby mediating perceived politics-outcomes significantly. An important implication of this study findings is that despite the challenges and problems of power play in politics, workers can still draw support and motivation from their peers and the citizens they serve.

KEYWORDS:

• Workplace trust
• public service motivation (PSM)
• perception of organizational politics
• organizational outcomes
• social workers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.