This paper develops further knowledge about social institutions and social capital as antecedents of PSM. During the first attempts to understand PSM concept, Perry (1997) named parental, professional, political and religious... [ view full abstract ]
This paper develops further knowledge about social institutions and social capital as antecedents of PSM. During the first attempts to understand PSM concept, Perry (1997) named parental, professional, political and religious socialization as the antecedents of individual-level PSM. The argument was further supported by the empirical evidence that PSM varies depending on each country’s peculiarity, e.g. tradition in South Korea (Kim, 2009), dominating religion in Poland (Prysmakova, 2015), or societal culture in Switzerland (Ritz and Brewer, 2013), administrative systems and political structures (e.g. Vandenabeele and Van de Walle, 2008 and Prysmakova, forthcoming). The common line between these studies is that while public organizations function within cultures and political regimes, institutional context influences motivation of employees by establishing settings for public values, which in their turn, correlate with individual PSM.
Controlling for a social institutional context is particularly relevant in a cross-country comparison conducted in this research. The present study uses a cross-sectional, non-experimental design and collected primary data using self-administered paper-and-pencil and online surveys. The purposeful sampling strategy was used to recruit study participants employed by public organizations in the border region in Belarus and Poland. The region is especially interesting, because for the last twenty years it has been going through an active socio-political transformation. Labor market and social care organizations were invited to participate in the survey, which attracted 390 respondents from 41 organizations. The dependent variable — level of PSM — is operationalized by the index developed by Kim et al. (2013). The independent variables are presented by declared by the respondents’ practice of social activism, religion, and altruism. These factors are likely to influence individuals’ engagement in pro-social activities for the sake of public benefit.
The results of the statistical analysis show that political parties, labor unions, churches, and voluntary organizations determine individual PSM of public service employees to a large extent. In particular, being consistent across the countries, labor union membership was found to reduce the level of PSM, especially its self-sacrifice dimension. This suggests that unionized public sector employees do not feel the urge to help out their colleagues, because they know that these issues are covered by their membership fees. Contrary to Polish public service, party membership in Belarus is strongly and significantly associated with higher PSM and especially with self-sacrifice and compassion dimensions. These findings suggest that for Belarus a political party remains a center of social rather than political life, and is likely to play the same role of social organization, as the church does in Poland. These two variables similarly correlate with the total PSM and self-sacrifice, while political parties are associated with higher compassion in Belarus and higher attraction to public service in Poland. Volunteering is negatively and significantly correlated the compassion element of PSM for Belarus, which indicates the distortion of the volunteerism concept. Volunteering had a compulsory character during the Soviet era and therefore, the majority still views it as a forced obligation rather than an expression of goodwill.
