New Zealand's Public Service does not lack motivated employees. But for many public servants, this motivation may be going to waste. Credit: Natalia Catalina.
Job cuts across Aotearoa New Zealand's public sector have undoubtedly undermined many workers' motivation to serve the public, with roughly 8,700 roles set to go by 2029. This matters because the motivation to serve, or public service motivation (PSM), drives many workforce outcomes. But this isn't the full story. Our recent research on Australasian public servants shows that having a motivated public sector workforce is only a very small part of a much larger puzzle about how to nurture committed, passionate, and hard-working employees.
PSM has long been defined as an "individual's predisposition to respond to motives grounded primarily or uniquely in public institutions and organizations”. On the surface, this seems like an uncomplicated, desirable state for a public servant to find themselves in, but there are a few caveats. The first is that considerable research has explored the 'dark side' of PSM – where a public servant might experience negative outcomes as a result of high PSM, such as work stress, low job satisfaction, and burnout. It can also be frustrating and distressing for those who want to serve but cannot, due to organisational constraints, resource scarcity, and red tape. It might even justify integrity violations that are seen to promote the public interest.
Another important caveat is that an intellectual war has been waging for decades over whether PSM is a trait or a malleable state. The evidence increasingly suggests PSM is both: a stable trait that predisposes people towards public service, and a state that responds to the conditions they work in.
Taking PSM's conceptual ambiguity as our starting point, we sought to understand how Australasian public servants actually experience this motivation in their work, including whether PSM might cluster together with other affective states, such as commitment, turnover intentions, and job satisfaction, and whether this clustering might differ across a workforce, forming different 'profiles' of PSM.
What public servants told us
We started with interviews with policy analysts, frontline service workers, and public managers (n=29) to explore the affective experience of PSM. One strong example from New Zealand was the motivation derived from working with Māori to improve land productivity, where the participant stated that "I just feel that we do some really important on the ground work in changing their lives”.
On the other hand, public servants also spoke about how their work environment could shape – or actively undermine – their motivation to serve. Three factors came up repeatedly: bureaucratic red tape, organisations that reacted to problems rather than getting ahead of them, and a general sense of volatility in how the sector operates. When these factors got in the way of people's desire to help, workers described struggling, feeling frustrated, and – perhaps most troublingly – blaming themselves for outcomes that were often outside their control. From this phase of research, we established that public sector work environments can quell, thwart, or suppress PSM.
We followed this with a quantitative phase (a sample of 222 New Zealand public servants), and used latent profile analysis to examine how PSM clusters alongside other affective states – commitment, satisfaction, and turnover intentions – across the workforce.
Four profiles, one dividing line
Just over half of the sample (55 per cent) fell into what we call the 'Enacted' profile: high PSM paired with genuinely positive attitudes towards the job and organisation – strong job satisfaction, strong affective commitment, and low intention to leave.
The smallest group – but a clearly distinct one – is 'Thwarted'. These respondents still score reasonably well on PSM, but everything else tells a different story: low commitment, low satisfaction, and the highest turnover intention of any group.
The third group, 'Motivated and Coping' (27 per cent of the sample), is the most motivated of the four profiles, but their attitudes towards work (particularly turnover intentions) are markedly worse than those who belonged to the Enacted profile. We see this as an at-risk group: they could easily slide into Thwarted.
The final group, 'Resigned', has the lowest PSM overall, with attitudes sitting closer to the middle of the range. They appear to cope better day-to-day than the Thwarted group; they care less in terms of motivation, so seem to suffer less.
Statistically, the Thwarted, Motivated and Coping, and Resigned profiles all reported significantly lower perceived organisational support than the Enacted profile (our reference group). In other words, the Enacted profile stands out for higher perceived organisational support across the board. Thus, the perception of the degree to which one's organisation supports them is crucial to the enactment of their PSM.
Our research delivers a clear message: New Zealand's Public Service does not lack motivated employees. But for many public servants, this motivation may be going to waste, and what is missing is the organisational support needed to translate that motivation into sustained, positive outcomes. As the sector absorbs job cuts, the task for its leaders is not to search for public servants who want to serve, it is to build the conditions that let that motivation translate into practice.
Dr Esme Franken is a Senior Lecturer at Edith Cowan University's School of Business and Law, where she researches public sector work environments, leadership, and employee wellbeing. She earned her PhD in Human Resources and Industrial Relations from Victoria University of Wellington in 2019. Her work has appeared in journals including the Australian Journal of Public Administration, the International Journal of Human Resource Management and the Review of Public Personnel Administration.
This opinion piece was published in the Hāpai Public Public Sector Journal 49.3, Spring 2026.
The research article Public Service Motivation and the Circumplex Model of Affect: Profiling Australasian Public Servants is published in the Review of Public Personnel Administration.
