A global measure of public service motivation : comparing a global attitude of PSM to the Kim et al measure

The topic of public service motivation is one of the thriving research domains in the field of public management and public administration (Vandenabeele et al 2014; Perry and Vandenabeele forthcoming).Public service motivation... [ view full abstract ]

The topic of public service motivation is one of the thriving research domains in the field of public management and public administration (Vandenabeele et al 2014; Perry and Vandenabeele forthcoming).Public service motivation assumed to be positively related to job satisfaction (Taylor 2007), performance(Belle 2013; Andersen et al 2014; Vandenabeele 2009) as well as other positively HR-outcomes (Vandenabeele and Van Loon 2015), at least when considered in an environment of public service delivery (Van Loon 2015). Within the evolution of the concept, one of the dominant story lines in the evolution and development of this field the search for a good and consistent measure of public service motivation. Starting from the initial measure (Perry 1996) various considerations have been made in the ever continuing process of measurement development. Some authors opted for contextualized measures (Vandenabeele 2008; Giauque et al 2011; Kim 2011), whereas others looked for universal measures (Kim et al 2013), and other again emphasized the need for a short and easily applicable measure, either based on dimensions (Coursey and Pandey 2007) or on an aggregate measure combining all dimension into one overarching measure (Wright et al 2013). However, none of these efforts have succeeded in building a concrete, global measure of public service motivation capturing the overall attitude of public service motivation – rather than relying on the separate dimensions (not unlike what has been developed for job satisfaction (Spector 1997)). This paper would like to further this debate by developing this kind of global measure, capturing the global concept of public service motivation. The benefit of such an approach is that such a measure would be more brief and yet at the same time not relying on individual dimensions, which would reduce the sensitivity to certain aspects of the environments (for example nurses would be more susceptible to compassion motives, whereas school teachers might be more responding to public interest or public values motives). This would not only increase the likelihood for invariance of the measure, but also make it more general applicable. In order to test validate the instrument, we compare the performance of our newly developed global measure to the Kim et al (2013) measure with respect to job satisfaction and individual performance. The data used for this comparison has been collected in two separate studies. One study, the calibration study, uses the responses of employees working in elderly care (N=181). This is afterwards validated by using data collected with local government employees (N=744). The statistical analysis will compare, by means of a hierarchical regression with robust standard errors (Wooldridge 2010), the explained variance of both measures.