Testing a dark side of PSM: justification of unethical behavior

EasyChair Preprint 1139

Abstract

Over the past decades, research on public service motivation (PSM) has made substantial progress in terms of explaining desired work-related outcomes of the concept (Ritz et al. 2016). More recently, an increasing body of research is focusing on the potential “dark sides” of PSM and has found that PSM is associated with negative attitudes, such as dissatisfaction and burnout (e.g. Van Loon et al. 2015). This research is relevant as it advances our understanding of the concept of PSM. However, we argue that an additional dark side of PSM requires attention as it is a prerequisite for flourishing good societies and organizations: unethical behavior. Building on recent theoretical developments exploring the potential unethical outcomes of PSM (Schott and Ritz 2017, Ripoll 2018), we aim to empirically answer, for the first time, the question of whether highly public service-motivated individuals vary their justification of an unethical behavior when this type of behavior advances or puts at risk their interpretation of the public interest. In order to shed light on this question, we take an experimental approach, which is in line with the recent calls in public administration research (Grimmelikhuijsen et al. 2016).

Keyphrases: PSM, Unethical behaviour, dark sides

@booklet{EasyChair:1139,
  author    = {Guillem Ripoll and Carina Schott},
  title     = {Testing a dark side of PSM: justification of unethical behavior},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 1139},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2019}}