Public Service Motivation and Prosocial Rule-Breaking – An international vignettes study in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands

We theorize that people with high Public Service Motivation (PSM) are especially prone to engage in prosocial rule-breaking (PSRB) behavior, which ultimately leads to discriminatory practices, particularly for clients associated with positive affect. We conduct an original vignette study in three countries (Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands) with 928 observations in total. Our findings provide tentative behavioral evidence on a linear relationship between PSM and the likelihood of PSRB and a strong positive association with client likeability, which is an asymmetric relationship: Negative... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Weißmüller, Kristina S.
De Waele, Lode
van Witteloostuijn, Arjen
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
Verlag/Hrsg.: University of South Carolina Bureau of Governmental Research and Service
Schlagwörter: 330 Economics / 350 Public administration & military science
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-28956962
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
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Link(s) : https://boris.unibe.ch/148819/1/Weissmueller_et_al_2020_RoPPA_PSRB_preprint.pdf

We theorize that people with high Public Service Motivation (PSM) are especially prone to engage in prosocial rule-breaking (PSRB) behavior, which ultimately leads to discriminatory practices, particularly for clients associated with positive affect. We conduct an original vignette study in three countries (Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands) with 928 observations in total. Our findings provide tentative behavioral evidence on a linear relationship between PSM and the likelihood of PSRB and a strong positive association with client likeability, which is an asymmetric relationship: Negative affect cues have a larger negative effect than positive affect cues have a positive effect on PSRB. Although our results vary across the three country studies regarding the effects of PSM, overall, the results imply that high-PSM individuals have a tendency to being more likely to engage in PSRB and that clients who are perceived as more favorable will receive a less strict application of bureaucratic rules compared to less favorable clients.