Scholarly interest in psychological states of motivation that are associated with positive employee and organizational outcomes continues to grow across many disciplines, including public management. However, an integration... [ view full abstract ]
Scholarly interest in psychological states of motivation that are associated with positive employee and organizational outcomes continues to grow across many disciplines, including public management. However, an integration of perspectives is far less common, and as a result, we are left with numerous psychological constructs and limited ability to understand which factors might be most strongly associated with particular outcomes. Moreover, the antecedent conditions that drive these various constructs are not typically tested in concurrent studies, which leads to ambiguity in determining if certain antecedents are more important than others in predicting particular motivated states.
In this study, we seek to take a step forward in addressing this gap by investigating the antecedent roles of organizational culture and person-organization fit in predicting public service motivation (PSM), community experiences (sense of community-SOC, sense of community responsibility-SOC-R), and pro-social motivation (Pro-Soc). In addition, the study investigates how these motivated states predict customer complaints as an organizational performance measure within a large multi-state non-profit healthcare system.
A mixed-methods approach was employed in which interviews were conducted with administrative leadership of the healthcare system at the “executive suite level” and top leadership at multiple hospital sites. In addition, focus groups were completed across the healthcare system with “systems leaders” (next level down from executive suite). Next, a multi-site survey of 957 employees was conducted to measure organizational culture, public service motivation (PSM), community experiences (sense of community-SOC, sense of community responsibility-SOC-R), and pro-social motivation (Pro-Soc). Finally, independent organizational performance outcome data (i.e., customer complaints) was collected in order to understand if particular organizational cultural factors and motivated states were associated with performance.
Findings indicate that a “clan” culture (being part of a family type environment) is most predictive of psychological motivated states in general, and that this cultural setting tends to produce a situation where community experiences are the strongest predictors of low customer complaints. Public Service Motivation was found to best fit as an antecedent to community experiences, and Pro-Social Motivation did not have much predictive power. These findings continue to advance our understanding of the role and function of PSM, in that, when it does hold predictive power, it most likely occurs because of the dispositional effects of PSM as a characteristic of individuals as they enter organizations instead of PSMs direct ability to predict key outcomes in public organizations. In addition, the findings showed that community experiences are important proximal predictors of organizational outcomes and that pro-social motivation was not especially important when tested concurrently against other motivated states.
