No abstract

We theorize that people with high Public Service Motivation (PSM) are especially prone to engage in prosocial rule-breaking (PSRB) behavior, which ultimately leads to discriminatory practices, particularly for clients associated with positive affect. We conduct an original vignette study in three countries (Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands) with 928 observations in total. Our findings provide tentative behavioral evidence on a linear relationship between PSM and the likelihood of PSRB and a strong positive association with client likeability, which is an asymmetric relationship: Negative affect cues have a larger negative effect than positive affect cues have a positive effect on PSRB. Although our results vary across the three country studies regarding the effects of PSM, overall, the results imply that high-PSM individuals have a tendency to being more likely to engage in PSRB and that clients who are perceived as more favorable will receive a less strict application of bureaucratic rules compared to less favorable clients.

A commonly held assumption is that public service motivation (PSM) positively affects individuals’ attraction to government, but there are also private and nonprofit organizations that are beneficial to the common good. Therefore, the goal of this study is to shed light on an understudied topic in Public Administration, namely, how the public value of public, private, and nonprofit organizations affects their attractiveness to citizens and how PSM moderates this relationship. We find that employer attractiveness is strongly influenced by organizations’ public value regardless sectoral affiliation. This attribution of public value interacts with citizens’ PSM. For high-PSM individuals, the relationship between public value and attractiveness is stronger than for low-PSM individuals. Furthermore, high PSM exercises an asymmetric effect, punishing organizations with low public value more strongly in the private sector. These results highlight important implications for HR practitioners in all three sectors seeking to attract and retain highly motivated employees.

Anti-public stereotypes suggest that public agents are more likely to shun risk and tolerate delay vis-à-vis private agents. Based on context dependency of administrative behaviour, this study reports experimental evidence from 22,800 choice tasks exploring the effects of publicness as a mental frame for individual risk judgement. Decision makers are not automatically triggered to deviate from predicted economic discounting behaviour when switching from a public to a private sector context. However, public sector employees in this sample systematically overestimate risks and tolerate delay in rewards compared with the general population, tentatively linking public sector affiliation with biases in risk behaviour.