Public Service Motivation and the Big Five Personalty Traits

The Case of Provincial Services of Pakistan

Abstract

Public service motivation as an important area of study is
receiving an increased attention among organization behavior and
public management researchers. There is a growing concern for
declining motivation level of public officials working at different levels in
organizations. The paper based on the findings of empirical data
presents the relationship of Big Five personality traits including;
extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and
openness to experience with Public Service Motivation (PSM) and its
four dimensions i.e. attraction to public policy, compassion, self-sacrifice
and commitment to public institutions. The paper adopts a Crosssectional, descriptive and single sample design as a basic research
design. Expert sampling technique is used as the main sampling method,
which is a type of Non-probability purposive sampling, where the data
have been collected from the secretaries of all the departments of Punjab
Government. PSM questionnaire (Perry, 1997) along with Ten Items
Personality Inventory (TIPI) (Gosling, Rentfrow& Swann, 2003) has
been used as the questionnaire tool for data collection. The correlation
results indicated that Personality was closely linked to Public Service
Motivation. It was found that extraversion indirectly related to the
attraction to policy making dimension, Agreeableness trait was also
positively associated with PSM; neuroticism was positively linked to the
PSM especially the compassion dimension. Conscientiousness was found
to be negatively related to PSM especially with its commitment to public
interest dimension; whereas openness to experience showed a varying
trend. Briefly stating, the Big Five of personality had a close linkage with
PSM which may vary from one context to another as pointed by the cross
cultural comparison with Taiwan. The paper provides useful policy
recommendations to enhance public service motivation through
strengthening the positive personality dimensions among the civil
servants and improving the best person job fit at workplaces