How public sector employees feel about their work environment is key to motivation. Image: Moon Safari, iStock.
From frontline emergency service workers to policy professionals, teachers, and nurses, the public sector is filled with everyday heroes. But how motivated is your friendly neighbourhood public servant? Findings from a new study conducted across Australia and New Zealand has discovered that the answer is in their work environment.
Lead author Dr Esme Franken, Senior Lecturer in the School of Business and Law at Edith Cowan University (ECU), said the research revealed how public sector employees feel about their work environment is key to motivation.
"Taxpayer funded employment in the public sector aims to fulfill an integral public service to our communities, but how individual public sector employees feel about their work environment is key to their motivation to get the job done, go above and beyond—or fall flat," Dr Franken said.
The study of 222 Australasian public servants used a framework known as the circumplex model of affect (CMA) to determine its connection to public service motivation (PSM).
"By using a novel framework and applying it to specific public sector contexts, our study revealed insights that explain how multiple states of affect such as underlying feelings, emotions, attitudes, and moods cluster together and are shaped by one's work environment," she said.
"What we discovered in terms of motivation is that four distinct, yet underlying profiles of public servants emerged—which shape and are shaped by their individual underlying psychology and work environment."
Dr Franken said the mistaken assumption that public servants can enact their intrinsic motivation in their job revealed nuanced patterns in responses.
"What became clear is employees who have an innate motivation and a desire to serve the public, didn't experience it equally. Some public servants experience high PSM but really felt thwarted in their motivation and ability to achieve desired outcomes, because they are unable to enact their motivation due to systemic and environmental constraints."
Disillusioned or empowered
The researchers looked at job satisfaction, affective commitment, and turnover intention to identify four profiles of respondent PSM and their associated attitudes and feelings:
- Enacted (55 per cent)
- Motivated and Coping (27 per cent)
- Resigned (14 per cent)
- Thwarted (4 per cent)
"What was positive to note is that the majority of those profiled belonged in the enacted group—where high PSM and related positive affect exist within a supportive organisational environment, likely in an interconnected loop where employees are operating with integrity," Dr Franken shared.
"Our key finding was that we identified profiles of public servants who possessed high PSM but operated in an unsupportive work environment which had a negative impact on their job satisfaction, affective commitment, and turnover intention."
Impacting factors related to the inhibiting role of bureaucracy, reactive nature of public service organisations (PSOs), and volatility of the work environment through public sector reforms, election cycles, and continuous change.
"When a respondents' desire to serve the public was impacted by organisational factors, they described a range of subjective psychological outcomes, such as experiencing a "struggle," feeling frustrated, and self-blaming," she said.
Second author Professor Ben Farr-Wharton from ECU's School of Business and Law said the findings pay homage to the expression that great employees don't quit jobs, they quit bad workplaces and managers.
"We know that if you work in a supportive work environment or have high PSM, your wellbeing is likely to be 30 per cent higher than average. Contrastingly, if you have a bad boss, your wellbeing is likely to be 50 per cent lower. A bad public service work environment is counterproductive to everyone," Professor Farr-Wharton said.
"Our findings show that you can be in a supportive environment with a bad line manager and still have high PSM but experience low wellbeing. They are not mutually exclusive and can occur simultaneously. The truth is we feel multiple things at once and workforce psychology and ecology is complex—the notion of 'wellbeing' or 'burnout' is not a one-size-fits-all."
Employees may love the public service, have a good attitude, strong work ethic and believe in their purpose, but a negative work environment places boundaries on their ability to fulfil their purpose and achieve outcomes.
"Unless employees are afforded the ability to enact their motivation and contribute positively to service their communities, PSOs are at high-risk of producing negative outcomes for both individual employees and the organisation, through lower job satisfaction and increased turnover," Professor Farr-Wharton said.
"Although PSOs can select a workforce of individuals who possess personality traits of high PSM, creating an environment and providing experiences conducive to strengthening this can be aspirational. But the opportunity is there to empower the public service to keep making our society better and stronger."
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.
