The Benefits of PSM: An Oasis or a Mirage?

Scholarly interest in Public Service Motivation has yielded a vast amount of research, exploring its potential for benefitting public-sector organizations through increased employee job satisfaction, enhanced individual performance, employee retention, and enhanced organizational commitment and citizenship behavior. However, a closer inspection of the literature reveals mixed empirical evidence for each impact of PSM. The present study carries out a meta-analysis of five key impacts of PSM to explain the divergence of results in the existing literature. We find evidence of the existence of a true effect for PSM over all the dependent variables, except for turnover intentions. In addition, we find a possible explanation for the mixed empirical evidence found in previous studies. Our results show the importance of the contextual variables legal origin and endemic countrywide corruption, along with measurement-related variables. We conclude by discussing the importance of context for the theory of PSM.