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Feminist scholars of public administration have critiqued the dominance of masculine imagery in public administration theory and practice. However, public service motivation is one area of public administration discourse that contains both feminine and masculine imagery. Focusing on Perry’s multidimensional public service motivation scale, the authors borrow from a range of social science literatures to contend that compassion is a feminine dimension of public service motivation, whereas attraction to policy making and commitment to public service are masculine dimensions. Data from a survey of public managers in state health and human service agencies reveal that women score higher on Perry’s compassion subscale but also on attraction to policy making. No statistically significant gender differences were found on commitment to public service.

After 60 years of scholarship on the rule‐bound bureaucratic personality, this article turns attention to the unbureaucratic personality. Identified by a willingness to bend rules, the unbureaucratic personality is thought to be influenced by individual and workplace attributes. The individual attributes investigated in this article include nonconformity, risk propensity, and public service commitment, all of which are expected to stimulate the unbureaucratic personality. Workplace attributes include formalization and centralization, which are expected to suppress the unbureaucratic personality, and red tape, which is expected to trigger it. These hypotheses are tested using mail survey data collected from employees of four cities in a midwestern state. The results of ordered probit modeling of the data suggest that nonconformity and risk taking increase the unbureaucratic personality, as do red tape and centralized workplaces. By contrast, the unbureaucratic personality appears to be diminished by public service commitment and workplace formalization. The implications of these results for the normative aspects of rule bending are discussed.

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A long‐standing contention in the public and private management literatures is that women use rule abidance as a way to compensate for their relative lack of organizational power. Many of the studies making this assertion rely on anecdotal evidence rather than theory‐guided empirical studies. In this paper, the authors use survey data collected from four cities in a midwestern state to empirically test gender dimensions of rule abidance. The findings support long‐asserted gender differences in rule abidance. Contrary to recent scholarship, however, the findings suggest that rule abidance among women is inversely related to organizational status, with higher‐level women abiding by rules more so than women lower in the hierarchy.