An Investigation of New Mid-level Civil Servants’ Public Service Motivation and Its Antecedents
Ying-Ju Pan, Lung-Shen Lee*
Abstract
How to make civil servants more enthusiastic about the public service in the face of rapid social changes and technological advances has become an important issue in contemporary public administration. The public service motivation (PSM) drives public service behavior but what are the PSM and its antecedents in Taiwan? This study adopts the PSM scale developed by Perry and Wise to conduct a questionnaire survey on trainees who have just passed local special examinations or been promoted from elementary level (collectively, the two groups are called “new mid-level civil servants”) to assess their PSM and to compare PSM among civil servants with different backgrounds to clarify antecedents of PSM. The results indicate that PSM of the new mid-level civil servants in Taiwan is comparable to the international level but there are significant differences in summated scores, the mean scores of constructs and a part of items of PSM between the Taiwan’s public servants and their international counterparts. It is also found that age, gender and educational level are antecedents of PSM. In order to build a highly effective government, these findings can be taken as an important reference not only for future civil service examinations and trainings. The findings can also be applied to develop strategies for motivating civil servants.
Keywords: public service motivation (PSM), commitment to the public interest, compassion, self-sacrifice, attraction to policy making
* Ying-Ju Pan, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Department of International and Comparative Education, National Chi Nan University, E-mail: lulu1017@gmail.com; Lung-Shen Lee, Professor of Department of Technology Application and Human Resource Development, National Taiwan Normal University, E-mail: lungshenglee@gmail.com.