Responding to Unethical Demands by One’s Leader: The Role of Public Service Motivation

Research shows that public service motivation (PSM) may serve as a buffer of unethical decision-making. We expand research by studying whether PSM is also related to ethics in situations where supervisors demand unethical behaviours from their employees. Our results show that PSM as a global concept and the PSM-dimension “Commitment to Public Values” are both negatively associated with the acceptance of unethical guidelines by one’s supervisor. Our study contributes to a better understanding of the ethical outcomes of highly public-service motivated individuals, while also looking at the dimensionality of the concept of PSM. This research is important because we contribute to a better understanding of how public workers might react when being confronted with unethical demands in their workplace, which presents worrisome issue across many countries around the world.