A systematic review of the link between public service motivation and ethical outcomes

Euipyo Lee, Tinganxu Lewis-Liu, Shaun Khurana and Ming Lu

Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration, 2024, vol. 46, issue 3, 236-263

Abstract: Preventing unethical behaviour is a concern across cultures and is important for sustaining integrity and stakeholder trust in governance regimes. Encouraging self-regulation of ethical behaviour and accountability of public sector personnel has attracted multidisciplinary attention. A large body of literature has examined the link between public service motivation (PSM) and public personnel’s enactments of various ethics-related behaviours. Scholars disagree, however, about whether PSM is significantly associated with ethics-related outcomes. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, we conducted a systematic literature review of 59 articles focusing on the PSM-ethics linkage to provide an integrated summary of how PSM affects ethical outcomes. We conclude that the empirical evidence addressing the PSM-ethics linkage is growing, but the mechanisms by which PSM influences ethical behaviour are not yet clear. In this article, we use prosocial organisational behaviour (POB) model to explain how PSM can influence ethical outcomes for public sector employees based upon our systematic literature review.

Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1080/23276665.2023.2247101

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