Essay About Development Of Public Service Motivation And Public Policy

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC SERVICE MOTIVATION AT THE ORGANIZATIONAL LEVEL
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Introduction
In the last twenty years public service motivation (PSM) has emerged as an important area of
research in public administration and personnel management. Advances have been made in the
study of variation in PSM among individuals, particularly in the development of survey
instruments to measure PSM and tracing out its antecedents. Yet in other important areas
knowledge of PSM remains cursory or nonexistent. In this brief essay I will discuss the
development of high PSM among employees of public organizations.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC SERVICE MOTIVATION AT THE ORGANIZATIONAL LEVEL
Perry and Wise (1990, 368) defined public service motivation as an individuals predisposition to respond
to motives grounded primarily or uniquely in public institutions. Perry (1996) further decomposed PSM
into four dimensions: attraction to public policymaking, commitment to the public interest and civic duty,
compassion, and self-sacrifice. It is apparent from the conceptual definition and empirical measurement
of public service motivation that not all individuals are equally endowed with it. Determinant sand
antecedents of PSM at the individual level have been analyzed in the literature (Perry 1997; Brewer,
Selden, and Facer 2000). Given the individual-level variation in PSM, it is not prima facie obvious that
public bureaucracies must be populated by actors who possess high levels of it. Prominent examples of
bureaucratic corruption and malfeasance both in the United States and abroad are sufficient to
demonstrate the empirical relevance of this point: it is difficult to contend that recent scandals relating to
bribes in the distribution of mineral rights on public lands by the U.S. Department of Interior reveal a high
degree of public service motivation on the part of perpetrators ratings on PSM measurement scales, little
attention has been devoted to how organizations can develop high PSM in their ranks or attract
individuals with high levels of PSM. Furthermore, recent work that does explore organizational
determinants of PSM (Moynihan and Pandey 2007; Paarlberg, Perry, and Hondeghem 2008) focuses on
internal management practices within public organizations, for example, mission statements, internal red
tape, and degree of hierarchy. Excluded from this research is the issue of the political environment
surrounding public organizations. Given the presumed importance of PSM in fostering successful public
service delivery, this is an important missing link in the literature. In general there are two paths public
organizations can take to cultivate high PSM in their work force: organizations can select individuals who
already possess high PSM, and they can inculcate high PSM among individuals who happen to work for
the organization. Little is known about either mechanism–how it works at a causal level, how and why it
developed in specific cases, etc. Gailmard and Patty (2007) develop a formal model related to the first
channel. The model formalizes two aspects of public service motivation as identified in the PSM literature:
a process of self-selection into a public bureaucracy by potential bureaucrats, and individual
heterogeneity in degree of PSM. Self-selection helps to endow organizations with a high PSM workforce.
The central point of the model is that this self-selection has several beneficial consequences from the
standpoint of organizational capacity and effectiveness, but the same self-selection also inherently
contributes to politicization of bureaucratic policymaking. Thus, the attraction and self-selection of public
servants is a double-edged sword, though the PSM literature has focused only on one of the edges. A
basic presumption of this model is that individuals vary in the extent to which they are concerned with
public policy, a presumption firmly bolstered by individual-level survey evidence (G. Lewis and Frank
2002). Some agents attach intrinsic concern to public policy in the sense that they will sacrifice other
important goals to improve it; they are policy motivated. For other agents in the model, utility is not
affected by public policy; these agents are labeled policy indifferent in the models parlance while
intentionally stark and dichotomous, this distinction maps directly into Perrys (1997) first dimension of
PSM, attraction to public policymaking. Arguably, though, there are differences in the concepts. Literally
construed, Perrys dimension is specifically public policy making in and of itself–so that simply
participating in the process, no matter what policies