How do new public officials perceive the citizens they will serve? Asymmetric relations between PSM, trustworthiness perceptions and intention to control taxpayers

While citizens’ trust towards public services has been the topic of much public administration research, public officials’ attitude towards citizens is a more recent concern. However, “co-operative compliance frameworks”, which combine formal controls with a higher reliance of public officials on citizens’ trustworthiness, are increasingly used in European tax administrations. The first objective of this study is to get a better understanding of the relation between tax officials’ attitude towards tax control and their perceptions of taxpayers’ trustworthiness. In addition, as public officials’ initial attitudes towards citizens exert an important influence on their posterior attitudes, the second objective of this study is to examine the effects of public service motivation, a typical selection tool of HRM managers, on those attitudes. Structural equation analyses were conducted on a sample of 256 respondents to a survey among newly-recruited Belgian and Dutch tax officials. The results show that higher trustworthiness perceptions result lower intentions to control citizens. Public service motivation acts as a “leap of faith” for newly-recruited officials: higher levels of compassion and self-sacrifice – the affective dimensions of public service motivation – improve new public officials’ perceptions of citizens’ trustworthiness. In contrast, new officials’ commitment to public values exerts a negative influence on their perceptions of citizens’ benevolence and increases their willingness to control them. Overall, the results support the study’s basic intuition that the different dimensions of public service motivation exert asymmetric influences on the different dimensions of trustworthiness perceptions