5Working for America Does Public Service Motivation Make a Difference?

Considerable research has asked whether public sector employees have different values and respond to different incen-tives than private sector employees Recently, Jim Perry developed a scale designed to measure this construct, which he calls "public service motivation " We examine the relationship between public service motivation and federal employ-ees ’ attitudes and behavior by examining responses of nearly 10, 000 federal employees to a recent survey Even though the survey only contained a subset of Perry’s scale, we found significant relationships between public service motivation and federal employees ’ job satisfaction, performance, intention to remain with the government, and support for the government’s reinvention efforts ecently, James Perry (1996, t- ~ 1997) argued for the need toclose the gap between assertion and empirical research as to the nature and conse-quences of a public service ethic, or what he calls &dquo;public service motivation.&dquo; Noting that scholars have posited that public service moti-vation influences such things as job choice, per-formance, and organizational effectiveness, he attempted to identify the construct by devel-oping a valid and reliable measure of public service motivation (Perry, 1996). In an era where the desirability of public sector employ-ment may be overwhelmed by the persistent poor image of government and noncompeti-tive pay, it is important to examine whether there exists such a construct as public service motivation and, if so, whether it contributes to employees ’ performance and attitudes to-ward work in the public sector. In this paper, we make a contribution to answering this ques-tion by analyzing the responses of nearly 10,000 federal employees to a recent governmentwide survey that included a modi-fied version of Perry’s scale. CONCERNS ABOUT WORKFORCE QUALITY During the 1980s, a number of reports warned of a &dquo;slowly emerging crisis of competence&dquo; (Hudson Institute, 1988, 29) in the federa