Public service motivation, prosocial motivation, prosocial behavior, and altruism: Towards disentanglement and conceptual clarity

Research on public service motivation (PSM) has made great strides in terms of study output over the past decade. In light of the enormous scholarly attention that PSM has received, we find it all the more surprising that... [ view full abstract ]

Research on public service motivation (PSM) has made great strides in terms of study output over the past decade. In light of the enormous scholarly attention that PSM has received, we find it all the more surprising that there still exist considerable conceptual ambiguities and overlaps with related concepts such as prosocial motivation, prosocial behavior, and altruism that remain unresolved. We address this issue by systematically carving out the differences and similarities between these concepts using three key criteria: theoretical foundations, beneficiaries, and stages of human action. This allows us to clarify the conceptual space of PSM and the various other concepts, and to recommend a set of compatible definitions, which will help avoid confusion in future research. A preliminary empirical test of the concepts’ differences based on their relationship with the outcome variable job satisfaction supports our argument that the concepts share similarities but are not equal.