Civil Service Management and Public Service Motivation (PSM): Evidence from a Cross-Country Survey of Public Officials

Public service motivation (PSM) has become a central construct in public administration. Despite a significant body of research, however, the relationship between civil service management practices and PSM remains largely unstudied. This is a curious omission. Governments are, arguably, keen to know how distinct recruitment and selection, pay, performance management and career development practices affect the public service motivation of their staff. This paper provides such evidence and thus fills this gap. It does so drawing on an original survey on public service motivation in ten countries in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. The resulting cross-regional data offers unique generalizability advantages over prior studies, which had often narrowed in single countries, with concomitant concerns about external validity in other contexts. Our findings suggest that the effect of civil service management practices is, in part, country-specific and, in part, generalizable. Some practices generically exert positive effects on PSM, while others do so only in specific country settings.