The American Review of Public Administration

The study of Public Service Motivation (PSM) has achieved considerable academic momentum with increasingly subtle research appearing each year. It is now opportune to look back at decades of work to see whether the concerns that initiated this area of study have been addressed. This article uses seminal articles that have shaped the field to find three main topics of interest: a concern about the way that theories of public choice characterized human nature, an ambition to crystallize and measure long-held understandings about a public service ethos, and a wish to promote a practical basis for incentivizing staff in the public sector. The application of PSM to these goals is examined, with the conclusion that PSM studies have made little progress in addressing any of those concerns. The implications of that conclusion are briefly considered.

Local governments use various technologies to enhance responsiveness to citizens’ demands and to improve efficiency. However, the determinants for technology adoption may vary by the type of technology used. We separately examine the adoption of two different types of information and communication technologies (ICTs): intranet, which increases efficiencies within an organization, and e-services, which aim to increase efficiencies for the public and government agencies. Using 2012 data collected from a national random survey of the managers in 500 municipal governments with populations ranging from 25,000 to 250,000, we find that organizational centralization, work routineness, and personnel constraints are related to the adoption of both intranet and e-services, but that these relationships are mediated by an organization’s risk-taking culture. We also find that external stakeholder influence is positively related to ICT use. Governmental stakeholder influence is related to intranet adoption, and non-governmental stakeholder influence is related to the adoption of e-services. Our study highlights the importance of understanding the dynamics by which different ICTs are adopted. A main contribution lies in the finding that risk-taking culture mediates the relationship between structural constraints and ICT adoption in municipal governments.

A highly fragmented system of local governance represents a market-like arrangement in which competition among service providers benefits citizen-consumers by improving the efficiency of local public service delivery. Yet, the local public market can also fail, producing negative outcomes for some communities and their residents. Because fragmentation can have differential impacts on the welfare of different groups of citizens—benefiting others and harming some—the organization of the local public sector raises important equity questions. This research focuses on the negative outcomes or externalities generated by local government fragmentation, specifically urban sprawl and spatial economic segregation. The results of the empirical analysis suggest that the design of the local public sector structure involves a trade-off between efficiency and equity.

Public servants are expected to be good stewards of resources, including the energy and environmental resources consumed in a public organization’s day-to-day operations. Many government organizations have enacted policies to mitigate the environmental impact of their operations. Even in the absence of formal policies, however, individual public employees might engage in a number of discretionary, pro-environmental behaviors known as eco-initiatives. What motivational factors cause a public employee to exhibit eco-initiative? To answer this question, we draw on a theoretical framework based on connectedness to nature, organizational commitment, public service motivation (PSM), and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). We use employee-level data from a large city in the southeast United States to examine employee participation in individual eco-initiatives. We contextualize these discretionary initiatives as interesting forms of OCB, which are directed toward the environment (OCB-E). Our findings suggest that connectedness to nature, organizational commitment, and PSM are significant predictors of eco-initiative in the public workplace. In addition, we find that PSM conditions the impact of organizational commitment on eco-initiatives for certain types of employees. We conclude with a discussion that underscores the importance of individual employee motivation in discretionary efforts that advance OCB-E and effective public stewardship generally.

This study analyzes the effects of decoupling of telework on job satisfaction using the 2013 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. The research divides telework programs for public employees by two criteria: (a) whether or not federal agencies have officially adopted the program, and (b) whether or not public employees actually participate in the program. We find that both organizational adoption and employee participation in telework have a positive relationship with job satisfaction, and these results support the social exchange theory. We also observe that the effects of decoupling of telework on job satisfaction are more significant for female public employees than for male public employees. The results imply that female employees have the lowest levels of job satisfaction when agencies officially adopt telework but employees cannot utilize the program. However, male employees have the lowest levels of job satisfaction when they are unable to utilize a nonexistent telework program.