Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Need For Richer Public Service Motivation, Adam Dallas Levitus

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

While there are many outstanding questions surrounding the motivations of employees, a key problem is that there is not a defining construct to explain why public employees behave as they do. Although the concept of Public Service Motivation (PSM) has developed over the past three decades to help explain these motivations, there are still disagreements as to the definition, characteristics, and value of PSM. Moreover, this lack of congruity in the literature suggests that the underlying components of PSM, historically studied via cross-sectional quantitative surveys, have not yet been well-defined via rigorous theory-building. Accordingly, this study looks at PSM from …