Does Organizational Experience Shape Employees’ Public Service Motivation?

Abstract

Organizations are important venues for shaping and fostering public service motivation. This study adopts James Perry’s institutional perspective of public service motivation, and builds on Moynihan and Pandey to examine how organizational work environment shapes public service motivation. This study argues that structural and cultural factors in the organization are distal influences and serve to establish broad parameters of the work environment in organizations. Yet, modeling the organizational role in fostering public service motivation needs to account for proximal factors that reflect daily interaction between employees and their working environment. This study, therefore, proposes that the development of public service motivation is a result of day-to-day interaction between individuals and their jobs, teams and supervisors. Employing survey data from public and nonprofit organizations in Northern New Jersey, the empirical results provide strong empirical support for our model. The findings suggest that employees’ person-team fit, person-supervisor fit, person-job fit and perceived work impact exert direct and positive influence in fostering their public service motivation. More importantly, the findings indicate perceived work impact indeed bolsters the effect of person-job fit on public service motivation. Surprisingly, perceived work impact does not have effect on the relationship between person-team fit and public service motivation, while perceived work impact turns out to diminish the effect of person- supervisor fit on public service motivation.