Civil Service Management and Public Service Motivation: Evidence from an Original Large-Scale Cross-Country Survey of Public Employees

Public service motivation (PSM) has become a central construct in public administration. Despite a significant body of research, however, the relationship between civil service management practices and PSM remains largely... [ view full abstract ]

Public service motivation (PSM) has become a central construct in public administration. Despite a significant body of research, however, the relationship between civil service management practices and PSM remains largely unstudied. This is a curious omission. Governments are, arguably, keen to know how distinct recruitment and selection, pay, performance management and career development practices affect the public service motivation of their staff. This paper provides such evidence and thus fills this gap. It does so drawing on an original survey which is, to our knowledge, the largest-ever survey conducted on public service motivation: a comparable survey with over ten thousand public servants in eight countries in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. The resulting cross-regional data offers unique generalizability advantages over prior studies which had often narrowed in single countries, with concomitant concerns about external validity in other contexts. Our findings suggest that the effect of civil service management practices is, in part, country-specific and, in part, generalizable. Some practices generically exert positive effects on PSM, while others do so only in specific country settings.