Introduction

A theory of motivation is a helpful start. But public servants make decisions – about ‘who gets what, when, how’ (Lasswell, 1936), and they take action. Their decisions affect whether and what public services are available, who can access these services, whether some are excluded from services. They make individual decisions, and they make collective decisions. Thus, for many public policy and public administration scholars, it is not just the motivations of public servants that are of interest, but ‘the decisions that public services make, how they are made, by whom and to what end, that is of primary interest’ (O’Leary, 2019). Or, as Glendon Schubert (1957) argued, ‘a theory of “the public interest” in administrative decision-making ought, one supposes, to describe a relationship between a concept of the public interest and official behaviour’ (p 346).

In this chapter, consideration is given to how PSMT deals with administrative decision-making; with how public employees put their public service motivation into practice in their work. The chapter explores how PSMT explains (or does not discuss) the causal relationship between motivation and behaviour, and how it discusses the individual and collective behaviours of public servants. To do so, the analysis set out in this chapter focuses on the attraction to policy making domain within PSMT. Specifically, a comparison is made between how PSMT treats behaviour and decision-making that is motivated by an attraction to policy making, and how this is explained in the key Public Choice model, the bureau-shaping thesis (Dunleavy, 1991).

Behaviour and decision- making in public service motivation theory

As Carina Schott and colleagues (2018) make clear, working in the public sector involves making difficult decisions, often when facing significant dilemmas. The behaviour of public employees, how they make such decisions and what effect their levels of public service motivation have on how and what decisions they make, are therefore fundamental questions.

PSMT is about individual motivation, the ‘forces that energize, direct, and sustain behaviour’ (Perry and Porter, 1982); that determine the ‘form, direction, intensity, and duration’ of behaviour and action (Horton, 2008).