Micro-level Studies

Over the last three decades, public service motivation (PSM) has become the most central theoretical construct to explain why people chose public sector employment. Although the positive effects of PSM on employee motivation, self-selection, and job-attraction are well researched, scholars recently started to challenge this “rosy view” on PSM by highlighting that the common scholarly conception of PSM might not cover the full spectrum of behavioral implications related to this type of public servants’ motivation (Schott & Ritz 2018). Although Perry and Wise (1990) already warned that high levels of PSM might produce negative outcomes, the so-called dark sides of PSM are severely understudied – especially on the micro-level of behavior. We close this research gap by conducting a multi-national research project (CorPuS) to further explore the relationship between public servants’ motivation and the likelihood of engaging in institutional deviance in the form of corruption, bending or breaking institutional rules, neglecting bureaucratic, egalitarian core-principles for pro-social as well as pro-self reasons. Specifically, we investigate whether PSM functions as a buffer variable reducing deviant behavior (bright side) or whether high levels of PSM might function as a resource to morally justify such behaviors.

Using a comparative research strategy among 15 countries in five different administrative cultures, this study employs an experimental multi-lab design using vignettes that accounts for a broad spectrum of behaviors and contexts of public sector corruption. In doing so, this study contributes to the severely under-studied dark sides of PSM-discourse by adding unique quantitative data from a novel experimental procedure. Its multi-culture, multi-lab, multi-context replication strategy will increase the external validity of its findings and of the theoretical implications derived from the data.