Public service motivation : publicness and network perspectives

Abstract

This study attempts to examine the extent to which an advice network of housing professionals working for different organizational groups, from both structural and behavioural perspectives, varies with the motivation for public service delivery in different publicness settings.

Over the last two decades, public service motivation has attracted considerable research attention with a wide-ranging discussion in the realm of construct, incidence, antecedent, outcome and organizational system. However, there has been far less research on its variations in different settings, and integrations with other disciplines. In the face of the growing complexity of sector blurring heightened by the new public management’s principles, the traditional organization theories are inadequate to give explanations for organizations which are neither public nor private. In this study, the concept of dimensional publicness has been employed to classify organizations into different levels of publicness along a continuum rather than a rigid dichotomous categorization for studying the variations of public service motivation in different publicness settings.

Research on networks has been growing apace recently by reason of its importance to knowledge transfer and management. Employees are eager to turn to others and maintain network relationships within and between organizations for advice favourable to work-related benefits. Through network activities, they may seek advice from others and realize afterwards that they may improve the quality of service delivery if they exhibit public service motivation related behaviour. While there is an assumption of a link between networks and public service motivation, it is an unexplored research area and therefore has no empirical evidence to support it. To shed light on the link, this study has examined the effects of networks from both behavioural and structural perspectives on public service motivation when publicness is taken into account.

A survey study was used to collect data from all Corporate Members of the Hong Kong Institute of Housing. In total, 357 out of 1,649 questionnaires were returned, fully completed and usable. The findings are summarized as follows: First, publicness has a positive and significant effect on public service motivation. Second, network behaviour is found significantly varying with public service motivation when publicness applies. Third, network structure has a strong and significant effect on public service motivation. No matter which of the perspective of networks is examined, public service motivation always varies positively with the degree of network activities. Last, there is an interaction effect of publicness and network characteristics on public service motivation, but the significance focuses on the structurally equivalent classes, no matter which network behaviour they exhibit, in the low publicness setting. The discussion gives implications of these findings for the study of public service motivation from the perspectives of networks and publicness in the context of Hong Kong.