Government Calling Revisited: A Survey-Experiment on the Moderating Role of Public Service Motivation in Assessing Employer Attractiveness.

Employer attractiveness is an important variable for any organization. It is therefore not surprising that organizations try to control this facet when communicating recruitment messages for positions to be filled. This study aims to capture this process for public sector organizations, while looking at the role that a particular type of prosocial motivation - public service motivation: the motivation people have to contribute to society - plays in this process. To this end, a survey-experiment (N = 192) with prospective employees is carried out in which recruitment messages with three different value statements (public, private, neutral) are presented to the respondents. The effect of these message on both attractiveness and person-organization fit, as moderated by public service motivation, is tested. The results indicate that public service motivation indeed moderates the effect of these messages. However, the results do not fully corroborate the theoretical expectations. Therefore, additional exploratory analyses are performed in order to better understand the variables included in this process. This provides a direction for further research. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Only When the Societal Impact Potential Is High? A Panel Study of the Relationship Between Public Service Motivation and Perceived Performance.

Many studies find positive associations between public service motivation (PSM) and performance, but much of this literature is based on cross-sectional data prone to endogeneity and common method bias. Moreover, we know little about potential moderators. In this study, we test the moderating role of societal impact potential (SIP)-the degree to which the job is perceived to provide opportunities to contribute to society. We use cross-sectional data from 13,967 employees in 2010 and 2012 aggregated to construct longitudinal data for 42 organizations. As expected, the association between PSM and individual perceived performance is positive when SIP is high. However, when SIP is low, PSM is only weakly or not at all related to performance. This is an important insight for organizations that try to enhance performance through PSM. Our findings suggest that this can only be done when the employees think that their jobs allow them to contribute to society.