Public Service Motivation and Servant Leadership

Public Service Motivation (PSM) has been linked to a wide variety of beneficial attitudes such as job satisfaction (Homberg et al., Public Admin Rev 75(5):711–722, 2015), organizational citizenship (Shim & Faerman, Int Public Manage J 20(4):531–559, 2017), and job performance (Belle, Public Admin Rev 73(1):143, 2013). PSM was proposed by Perry (J Public Admin Res Theory 6:5–22, 1996, J Public Admin Res Theory 7(2):181–197, 1997) and is an attitudinal orientation of altruism to help others and improve societal well-being. One leadership approach that possesses intrinsic consistency with the ethos of PSM is servant leadership (Greenleaf, 1977; Roberts, Christian scripture and human resource management: Building a path to Servant leadership through faith. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and this chapter demonstrates their conceptual and empirical symmetry and the value of servant leadership in cultivating PSM, especially as it relates to enhancing trust in its various forms. The quality of leadership is a vital element in promoting PSM. As such, it is essential for public sector organizations to more fully assess the style of leadership to more completely promote PSM. This analysis of the servant leader and PSM literature demonstrates a preliminary direct linkage of servant leadership’s ability to cultivate higher levels of PSM and a conceptual dimensional overlap between PSM and servant leadership as they share common intrinsic motivational attributes. The more detailed analysis highlighted the overlap in the attitudinal, behavioral, and performance outcome variables linked to both PSM and servant leadership.