The Benefits of PSM: An Oasis or a Mirage?

EasyChair Preprint 1102

Abstract

Scholarly interest in Public Service Motivation has yielded a vast amount of research explicating its benefits for public sector organizations; including increased employee job satisfaction, boosted individual performance, higher intention to stay with the organization, enhanced organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior. However, a closer inspection of the literature reveals mixed empirical evidence for each of these PSM impacts PSM. This study attempts to shed light on these contextual factors and measurement related choices made by researchers in the empirical studies and see if some part of the variance in the results is attributable to them. In order to do so, we perform a meta-analysis on each of these five impacts of PSM. By analyzing a total of 162 estimations, we consider the salience of two types of factors in the existing studies and how they strengthen or weaken a given individual or organizational impact of PSM. We find evidence of the existence of a true effect for PSM over negative outcomes, organizational commitment and organizational citizenship. In addition, we also find that contextual variables, legal origin and corruption of the country, along with the measurement related variables, affect each of the five relationships in a unique manner. While we can say that there exists a relationship between PSM and beneficial outcomes in the organizational context, these benefits are concentrated or diluted depending on the level of corruption and the legal origins of the country. We find that the role of PSM in enhancing the job satisfaction of individuals employed in the public sector is even greater in corrupt countries, as compared to countries that rank lower in corruption. We have also found that lower perceived corruption strengthens the impact of PSM on individual performance and organizational commitment.

Keyphrases: Performance, Public Service Motivation, meta-analysis, organizational commitment

@booklet{EasyChair:1102,
  author    = {Sahar Awan and Germà Bel and Marc Esteve},
  title     = {The Benefits of PSM: An Oasis or a Mirage?},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 1102},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2019}}