Public service motivation (PSM) has documented a positive effect on job satisfaction (Homberg and McCarthy 2013). However, a recent meta-analysis suggests that future research on job satisfaction and PSM should focus on inquiring whether there are any systematic difference in job satisfaction employees working in different sectors (Cantarelli, Belardinelli, and Belle 2015). Recently, some authors found that organizational characteristics influence the PSM–job satisfaction relationship, suggesting that public or private sector status is more important than other organizational characteristics (A. M. Kjeldsen and Hansen 2016). Others found that, in the attraction phase, PSM seems to be more associated with the nature of the public service work than the sector itself but later, as a consequence of socialization to the organizational culture and acquaintances to work communities, PSM results to be strongly affected by sector(Anne Mette Kjeldsen and Jacobsen 2013).. Indeed, some scholars found that also red tape plays an important role in affecting PSM and job satisfaction (Giauque et al. 2012; P. G. Scott and Pandey 2005; DeHart-Davis and Pandey 2005). Red tape causes resignation thus negatively influencing organizational commitment and job satisfaction also finding conflicting interactions between red tape and some dimensions of PSM (Giauque et al. 2012).
This paper focuses on the roles played by industry to look at the mission effect of organizations, by employees’ proximity to the final users to look at the nature of work effect and by the perception of red tape in predicting the relationship between PSM and job satisfaction.
In this analysis we control the previous relationships considering individual characteristics such as length at work and gender but also workplace bullying. Indeed, at the individual level, job satisfaction seems to be filtered by situational factors, like organizational deviance or workplace bullying. Deviant organizational behaviours poison social environment at work, frustrating and humiliating those involved, undermining any cooperation effort, and preventing job satisfaction to come into play (Salin 2003).
The study is based on a multi-sector survey on organizational climate and perception of safety and motivation to work in the public and non-profit sector, by involving employees of two municipalities, members of two social cooperatives (non-profit) and three healthcare organizations, for a total of 2,698 respondents in Umbria Region.
Although non-profit employees are more satisfied than the healthcare and municipality workers there is no interaction effect of the industry in the relationship between job satisfaction and PSM. Neither proximity to final users is a valid moderator in the relationship between job satisfaction and PSM while red tape seems to reduce the positive relation between job satisfaction and PSM. To deepen these results, we look also at the differences of the previous factors between employees at one, at five and over five years at work across industries.
It emerges that while PSM and workplace bullying are relatively stable between the first and the fifth year at work across the industries, job satisfaction decrease rapidly while red tape rapidly increased in health and municipality while it remain relatively stable in the non-profit.
