Public Service Motivation and Reality Shock

The concept of public service motivation has received a lot of attention from both public administration scholars and practitioners over the last 30 years. To this day, there is vast body of literature on the antecedents and outcomes of public service motivation (Ritz, Brewer and Neumann 2016). Frequently studied outcomes of public service motivation are organizational and individual performance, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. Transformational leadership, specific human resource practices, and higher levels of education have been found to stimulate public service motivation. However, “only limited progress (e.g., Perry and Vandenabeele 2008) has been made in providing an adequate set of explanations or hypotheses about how PSM develops and why” (Bozeman and Sue 2014:6). Put differently, the dynamics of public service motivation have been investigated in only a small number of longitudinal studies, which – moreover – found mixed results. Some studies found the concept of public service motivation to increase over time, some found it to remain stable, and there are also studies in which the level of public service motivation was found to drop.
Increases in public service motivation can be explained by Schneider’s (1987) frequently studied attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) model and, related to this, the mechanism of organizational socialization (Kjeldsen and Jacobsen 2013). Stable levels of public service motivation have been explained by public service motivation being a trait-like concept or stable predisposition (Bakker 2015). A theoretical explanation frequently cited for the often found decrease in public service motivation is the so-called ‘reality shock’ (e.g., Brænder and Andersen 2013; Kjeldsen and Jacobsen 2013). This explanations, even though being a promising one, has only been tested by one small-scale empirical study to this date (Schott, Steen and Van Kleef 2018).