Fostering Public Service Motivation in Organizational Settings

Abstract

Public Service Motivation (PSM) is one of the vintage topics in public administration field that has received great amount of attention from scholars around the world. A number of studies revealed the various relationships between PSM and various outcomes such as improved performance, job satisfaction, organizational commitment and decreased turnover intention and whistle-blowing. Since PSM is correlated with many positive outcomes in organizations, one can ask how we can enhance and maintain the level of PSM of individual employees. The main purpose of this study is to suggest what managers can consider doing in order to foster PSM in their organizations by analyzing the relationship between PSM and some factors we often find in organizational settings. Using survey data of the Korean public officials in various sectors of central government, this study attempts to find out if leadership (transformational leadership in particular), merit-based system, and red tape have significant influence of individuals' level of PSM. The result shows that the transformational leadership is positively related with the level of PSM. However, unlike many previous researches, this study with Korean public officials shows that red tape does not have significant relationship with their level of PSM while the merit-based reward system has significant positive influence on employees level of PSM.