Motivation and mission in the public sector: Evidence from the World Values Survey

Edd Cowley and Sarah Smith

The Centre for Market and Public Organisation from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK

Abstract: It is well-recognised that workers may have intrinsic – as well as extrinsic – motivations. Previous studies have identified that public sector workers typically have a higher level of intrinsic motivation, compared to workers in the private sector. This paper compares (measures of) intrinsic motivation among 30,000+ workers in the two sectors across 51 countries using data from the World Values Survey. We find that public sector workers exhibit higher intrinsic motivation in many countries, but that this is not a universal relationship. One possibility is that public sector mission may influence whether or not motivated workers choose to work in the sector. In support of this, we show that the level of (public) corruption – which plausibly affects mission – can explain some of the variation across countries in the proportion of motivated workers in the sector.

Keywords: Intrinsic motivation, public sector, corruption; worker selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D64 D73 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2013-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/cmpo/migrated/documents/wp299.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Motivation and mission in the public sector: evidence from the World Values Survey (2014)
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:bri:cmpowp:13/299

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in The Centre for Market and Public Organisation from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().