Public Service Motivation and Civic Engagement

The Role of Pro-social Motivations in Shaping Society

Fabian Homberg, Joyce Costello

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030024529
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030024536
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

This book explores the behaviours that result from Public Service Motivation (PSM), outside of a firm or agency environment. Covering topics such as volunteering, and political participation, the authors present rich empirical data from the US and the UK, as well as other countries. With fresh insights into a growing area of interest, this book will provide valuable reading for researchers working in the field of PSM, and those involved in working towards a successful and sustainable society.

© The Author(s) 2019

Fabian Homberg and Joyce CostelloPublic Service Motivation and Civic Engagementhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02453-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. On the Nature of Public Service Motivation

Fabian Homberg¹ and Joyce Costello²

(1)

Department of Business & Management, LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome, Italy

(2)

Media School, Bournemouth University, Bournemouth, UK

Fabian Homberg (Corresponding author)

Joyce Costello

Abstract

The chapter offers a brief introduction to the main theme of the book and provides an outline of subsequent chapters. It briefly introduces the concept of public service motivation (PSM) defined as an other-oriented need to contribute to society and discusses its state- and trait-like nature.

Keywords

Public Service MotivationCivic engagementStateTraitSociety

End Abstract

Introduction

Reading newspapers and watching the news on TV can be quite a disturbing experience these days, as reports about crises dominate daily headlines: war in Syria, natural disasters such as floodings or devastating storms, and the refugee crises, leading to losses of many lives at sea and at land. Additionally, many western countries face populist governments, such as the Trump administration in the US, Orban’s regime in Hungary or the rise of the joint government of Movimento 5 Stelle and Lega in Italy, that can lead to distortions at the international level with potentially severe implications for trade and multilateral cooperation in solving the many crises the news report on. Another case in point is Germany where the Alternative for Germany (AFD), a right-wing populist party, has become an influential force in certain regions of the country. Additionally, Germany saw violent protests of right-wing groups occurring in Chemnitz, a town in former East Germany, in the end of August 2018 that made headline news internationally.

However, occasionally one can hear about what some may label as “good news”: Huffington Post (2016) reports about the informal Louisiana’s “Cajun Navy”—an all-volunteer group of regular citizens—whose members hitched their boats to their pickup trucks and headed to Texas to help in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in 2017. It was a clear example of individuals delivering a service to “do good” for the benefit of others. These sorts of behaviours are often replicated in the case of individuals seeking to help others during natural disasters such as the California wildfires or opening their homes to provide refuge in terrorist situations such as events in Las Vegas and London in 2017.

Similarly, one may consider the volunteers engaged in privately organized help missions. Although such privately organized Save-and-Rescue (SAR) activity spurs much debate itself, news have reported on the difficult, at times dangerous, journeys and the destinies of Lifeline, Sea Watch 3 and Iuventa. The rescuers argue it is their civic duty to save lives. In an article about British volunteers in privately organized SAR missions, The Independent (2016) quotes one of the helpers as “My motivation was simple: to make a positive impact on the world, and not sit back and watch it happening on TV. I hope that if I was ever in desperate need then someone else would drop what they are doing and help me.” One can find initiatives driven by similar altruistic motivations and idealism where citizens come together to fight corruption in their countries, when they demonstrate to support democracy, or when they self-organize to help those in need in order to make society a better place to live. Whatever one may think about volunteer helpers, activists, or the professional attitudes and the behaviours arising from them, without such other-oriented individuals, society would be worse-off and we would most likely have to endure more negative news.

Such other-orientation is the main theme of this book, and the introductory examples above have one thing in common: They reflect an internal drive to contribute to society and doing good for others. Academics have researched this phenomenon referring to it as Public Service Motivation, in short PSM. While Perry and Wise (1990, p. 386) anchored their original definition of PSM to an individual predisposition to serve the public, for the purposes of this book we follow its more general variant which defines PSM as “an individual’s orientation to delivering service to people with the purpose of doing good for others and society” (Perry & Hondeghem, 2008, p. vii). Over time the PSM concept evolved, and leading scholars put forward variants of Perry and Wise’s notion of PSM (a more detailed review follows in Chap. 2). However, all of them converge in the idea that PSM is an other-oriented “need” to contribute to society.

Much of the research on PSM focuses on public sector organizational settings linking PSM to organizationally relevant outcomes such as performance (van Loon, 2017; Warren & Chen, 2013), job satisfaction (Homberg, McCarthy, & Tabvuma, 2015), organizational citizenship behaviours (OCBs; Christensen, Paarlberg, & Perry, 2017), sector attraction (Asseburg & Homberg, 2018; Wright, Hassan, & Christensen, 2017) or behaviours related to organizational change (Campbell, 2018; Homberg, Vogel, & Weiherl, 2017). This subject focus is natural given the relevance of motivation in all kinds of work settings. Nonetheless, as Houston (2008) argues PSM has a much wider relevance, in particular “beyond the workplace” (p. 177).

A widely cited systematic literature review on PSM covering 323 publications by Ritz, Brewer, and Neumann (2016) identifies several lines of inquiry in which PSM scholars are engaged. The first domain includes comparisons of PSM between the public, private and non-profit sector (see e.g. Bullock, Stritch, & Rainey, 2015). Second, studies have explored the implications for (public) human resource management. A relevant question here is, for example, to what extent recruitment should be geared towards applicants’ PSM levels (Asseburg, Homberg, & Vogel, 2018; Waldner, 2012). Third, a whole methodological branch has developed seeking to refine the empirical measurement of PSM (for an overview, see Wright, Christensen, & Pandey, 2013). Fourth, a number of works tried to enhance the theoretical underpinnings from which PSM has been developed. In particular, the relation of PSM to adjacent concepts such as altruism is in the focus here (Schott, Neumann, Bärtschi, & Ritz, 2016, working paper).

However, the two largest branches in PSM research are, fifth, the study of antecedents (drivers) and, sixth, the study of outcomes (consequences) of PSM. Researchers interested in the antecedents of PSM, for example, highlighted the relevance of personal and organizational socialization (Kjeldsen & Jacobsen, 2012; Perry, Brudney, Coursey, & Littlepage, 2008) for the shaping of PSM. The line of research focusing on outcomes tried to link PSM to a wide variety of employee- and organizational-level outcomes ranging from job satisfaction (Homberg et al., 2015; Taylor, 2014) to performance (Ritz, 2009; Warren & Chen, 2013; Wright et al., 2017) among many others.

In this book, we focus on this latter line of enquiry but, following Houston’s (2008) argument on the extended relevance of PSM, we move away from the traditional research context of PSM, that is, the public sector work setting. Instead, we focus particularly on behaviours that are relevant for making society work materialising outside the organizational or work setting. The two original studies presented in the later chapters of this book investigate outcomes of PSM such as volunteering, and forms of political participation which we summarize under the label of civic engagement . Both volunteering and political participation activities can be argued to be driven by a felt need to contribute to society, hence they constitute a potential outcome of PSM. However, before we are able to dive into the study of PSM and its outcomes, it is important to clarify a few conceptual issues and declare our vantage point on them.

PSM: A Misnomer? (or: The State Versus Trait Debate)

One unresolved issue in the study of PSM is the question whether it is a state or a trait. While originally conceptualized and named as a motivation (i.e. one example of a malleable state), researchers have shown that PSM also displays some properties of traits and h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. On the Nature of Public Service Motivation
• 2. Zooming In on Public Service Motivation I: Conceptual Facets
• 3. Zooming In on Public Service Motivation II: Construct Measurement
• 4. The Association of Public Service Motivation and Civic Engagement: Linking PSM and Volunteering Intensity
• 5. Civic Engagement as Political Participation: Does PSM Create Politically Active Citizens?
• 6. Lessons Learnt and the Way Forward
• Back Matter