Exploring the structure and meaning of public service motivation in the Turkish public sector: a test of the mediating effects of job characteristics

ABSTRACT

Using a data set consisting of 315 middle-managers at the district level in the Turkish public sector, we develop a structural equation model (SEM) for assessing the impact of empowerment and stewardship on public service motivation (PSM) through job characteristics. The results demonstrate that stewardship and empowerment are distinct ‘levers’ that managers can use in novel ways to influence PSM; and cultural context may factor into the manipulation of these levers. We find that job-based mediators may not compliment leadership styles and self-generating rewards, but, rather work separately in their appeal to PSM.

KEYWORDS:

• Public service motivation
• international administration
• public sector reform
• public management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. SAS Foundations are composed of a Civil Service Administrative Authority that serves as the presidents of the SAS Foundations, and a Board of Trustees that includes: The District Mayor, District Treasurer, Director of Education, Health Director, Director of Food, Agriculture and Livestock, Director of Social Service and Children Protection Institution; the local Mufti; one headman and one village headman elected by the majority of the committee of headmen; two representatives elected by the leaders of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which are recognized by Law No 3294; and two Philanthropic citizens who are elected by the Provincial Council (SAS Foundation 2015).

2. Based on our initial results from the CFA for latent variables in our model, the autonomy item in Hackman and Oldham’s job characteristics index was dropped from the scale due to serious cross-loading and weak factor loading (<0.2).

3. We measure place of work as 1 = Social Assistance and Solidarity (SAS) Foundations (2015; a quasi-public organization) and 0 = Civil Registry Office personnel.

4. Shalley, Gilson, and Blum (2009) also cited evidence from another study that self-ratings of creativity correlated substantially (r = .62) with supervisor ratings.

5. Jöreskog (1999) suggests that, ‘a common misunderstanding is that coefficients in the completely standardized solution must be smaller than one in magnitude and if they are not, something must be wrong’. He suggests that this misunderstanding can be attributed to ‘classical exploratory factor analysis where factor loadings are correlations if a correlation matrix is analyzed and the factors are standardized and uncorrelated (orthogonal). However, if the factors are correlated (oblique), the factor loadings are regression coefficients and not correlations and as such they can be larger than one in magnitude’ (1). This is true for structural equation applications such as LISREL and the Stata SEM procedure employed here.

6. The results for the indirect effects of Model 1 are not reported. However, the indirect effect of empowerment on public service motivation was significant and positive (β = .578, p < .01).

7. We employed Harman’s single factor test (Podsakoff et al. 2003; Spector 2006). The results of our CFA demonstrated that a single factor model did not fit the data well. However, the reliability of the Harman test has recently been questioned (see Craighead et al. 2011). Additionally, we conducted an exploratory maximum likelihood factor analysis resulting in distinct factors for the latent variables employed, each with an eigenvalue greater than 1.0.