Evidence for Practice

Conceptualizing Public Service Motivation and Value Congruence

Goal-Oriented Leadership: Transformational and Transactional Leadership

How Goal-Oriented Leadership Affects Public Service Motivation

How Value Congruence Moderates the Effect of Goal-Oriented Leadership on PSM

Research Design, Data, and Methods

Validation of Experiment

Results

Discussion

Conclusion

References

Abstract

Questions of how and when managers can motivate the workforce of public organizations are fundamental for scholars and practitioners alike. A dominant assertion is that goal-oriented leadership strategies, such as transformational leadership, foster public service motivation (PSM). However, existing studies rely on designs that are vulnerable to endogeneity and rarely investigate the scope conditions of the leadership-PSM relationship. Combining a field experiment with 364 managers and surveys of their 3,470 employees, the authors show that transformational leadership and transactional leadership, when induced experimentally, do not have the claimed positive effect on PSM. In fact, the results indicate that goal-oriented leadership can have demotivating effects when employee and organizational values are incongruent. Public managers should therefore carefully assess existing levels of value (in) congruence before implementing goal-oriented leadership strategies, and—in case of value conflicts—seek to align perceptions of the desirable among members of the organization.

Conceptualizing Public Service Motivation and Value Congruence

Perry and Wise (1990) set the agenda for studying PSM when they argued that this type of motivation could increase individual performance in public organizations. Since then, several studies have demonstrated that this expectation can be correct, at least under some circumstances (e.g., Andersen, Heinesen, and Pedersen 2014; Bellé ۲۰۱۳). Still, the rapid increase in the number of journal articles investigating PSM (for a recent review, see Ritz, Brewer, and Neumann 2016) has accentuated the need for a clear conceptualization of PSM (Bozeman and Su 2015). Distinguishing PSM from public values, Andersen et al. (2013) argue that PSM can metaphorically be seen as the “fuel” that provides individuals with energy to expend extra effort in delivering public service, while public values depict specific understandings of what is desirable for other people and society. In other words, values set the direction for behaviors, while motivation refers to the vigor and persistence characterizing those behaviors. PSM can be seen as an individual’s latent willingness to contribute to desirable public service (i.e., desirable as seen by each individual based on his or her values) with the intention of improving the well-being of other people and society more broadly. This understanding of PSM is captured by Hondeghem and Perry’s (2009) definition, and we correspondingly see PSM as “an individual’s orientation to delivering services to people with a purpose to do good for others and society” (Hondeghem and Perry 2009, 6). According to this perspective, PSM can be seen as an individual’s motivation to perform services directed toward other people and society and it highlights the prosocial motive underlying public service–motivated behavior—to “do good.”