“I want to serve but the public does not understand:” Prosocial motivation, image discrepancies, and proactivity in public safety

Shefali V. Patil and R. David Lebel

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2019, vol. 154, issue C, 34-48

Abstract: Scholars typically find that prosocial motivation is positively related to employee proactivity. However, we argue that in highly visible contexts such as public safety, this relationship is contingent on how employees think the public sees their jobs. Specifically, drawing on image discrepancy theories, we hypothesize that the relationship between prosocial motivation and proactive behavior is weakened when employees believe that the public fails to understand the difficulties of their jobs. This interaction is supported in multisource studies of 183 police officers across six agencies (Study 1a) and 238 firefighters across eight stations (Study 1b). In a time-separated, multisource study of 203 police officers at a metropolitan agency (Study 2), we further find that the interaction indirectly relates to proactivity via employees’ physical engagement. Overall, our studies highlight the importance of accounting not only for employees’ prosocial motivation, but also their perceived public image, especially in highly visible, high-risk contexts.

Keywords: Prosocial motivation; Proactivity; Image discrepancy; Engagement; Public service (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597817300675
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jobhdp:v:154:y:2019:i:c:p:34-48

DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2019.07.002

Access Statistics for this article

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes is currently edited by John M. Schaubroeck

More articles in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().