Does Person-Job Fit Mediate the Relationship Between Public Service Motivation and Work Engagement? The Case of Chinese Civil Servants

Abstract

China’s public sector personnel management is becoming increasingly strict, incumbent employees have insufficient motivation to work, and the attractiveness of agencies and institutions has relatively decreased. The dedication of public sector employees has become a new challenge. To explain the issue of public sector employees’ behaviors, scholars have conducted extensive research in the two fields of public service motivation and engagement, but the question of whether the public service motivation level of public sector employees will affect their engagement is limited attention. In this paper, we attempted to introduce the mediation variable of person-job fit and construct a three-factor impact model to discover the potential connections. Based on the data of 726 public sector employees in eastern China, the structural equation model (SEM) analysis found that public service motivation is positively correlated with engagement, and person-job fit fully mediates the two groups of public service motivation and work engagement. This finding confirms that the dedication of public sector employees is mainly influenced by internal factors such as public service motivation and indicates that China’s public sector employees are more concerned with whether their abilities and cognitive characteristics match their jobs. The value of this finding is to provide a theoretical explanation for the noncommitment behavior of some civil servants, which may provide a new perspective for public sector managers from the micro level to study how to improve the level of engagement of public sector employees.KeywordsPublic service motivationEngagementPerson-job fitPublic sector