Antecedents of Public Service Motivation

The public administration literature has long emphasized the distinctive character of motives associated with public institutions. The recent development of a public service motivation (PSM) construct and an instrument to measure it opens the way for systematic empirical research. This study investigates the relationship of PSM to five sets of correlates: parental socialization, religious socialization, professional identification, political ideology, and individual demographic characteristics. The results generally confirm the hypotheses, but several anomalies were identified. The findings suggest that research using the PSM construct can be fruitful for understanding motivation. Among the directions for further research are studies of the influences of educational and bureaucratic socialization on PSM and the affects of PSM on individual and organizational behavior. Public administration practitioners and educators have long contended that public employees are different from employees in other sectors of American society (Perry and Porter 1982; Wittmer 1991). In fact, an increasing number of empirical studies suggest that public employees differ from their private sector counterparts with respect to work-related values and needs. For example, Wittmer (1991) analyzed differences in the rankings of eight reward categories for a sample of 210 employees in public, private, and hybrid organizations. He found that public and private employees differed significantly with respect to preferences for higher pay, helping others, and status. He concluded that "the public service ethic appears to be alive and well . . ." and ". . . extends beyond core public organizations (government) to more hybrid groups" (1991, 380). J-PART 7(1997):2: 18i-197 181/Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory This content downloaded from 157.55.39.221 on Sun, 06 Nov 2016 05:12:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Antecedents of Public Service Motivation Wittmer's findings reinforce the results of earlier empirical research by Rawls, Ulrich, and Nelson (1975), Rainey (1982), and Nalbandian and Edwards (1983). The cumulative pattern of findings is consistent with Perry and Porter's (1982) conclusion that the public motivational context is indeed different from the private. Conventional wisdom and empirical evidence that public employees are different led Perry and Wise (1990) to define a construct, public service motivation (PSM), intended to capture the distinction. They defined PSM as an individual's predisposition to respond to motives grounded primarily or uniquely in public institutions. Four dimensions-attraction to public policy making, commitment to the public interest and civic duty, compassion, and self-sacrifice-are empirically associated with the construct (Perry 1996). The goals of the present study are twofold. First, the research seeks to advance the validation (Schwab 1980) of a measure of public service motivation by reporting correlates of the scale (Perry 1996). A second goal is to investigate several hypotheses about the antecedents of public service motivation.