Civil Service Management Practices and Work Motivation: Evidence from a Survey of 23.000 Public Servants in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe

Motivating public employees is a central public management challenge in both OECD and developing countries. Yet, the relationship between civil service management practices and work motivation 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 work motivation of their staff. This paper provides such evidence and thus fills this gap. It does so by drawing on an original survey which is, to our knowledge, the largest-ever original survey conducted on work motivation in public sector: a comparable survey with 23.000 public servants 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 work motivation, while others do so only in specific country settings.