Have you noticed that many of Canada’s public sector organizations, at all levels of government and right across the country, are not operating at their best, to put it gently? Ministries, departments, and agencies are perpetually hobbled by any number of ‘emergencies’, ‘situations’ or ‘issues’ hampering their daily operations, hamstringing their management and staff, and holding everyone back from excelling in their roles as committed civil servants.
Instead, Canadian bureaucracies have become adroit at maintaining the status quo and avoiding risky endeavors or stirring up potential political controversies. They excel at catering to powerful ministers, especially the Prime Minister’s Office. Canada’s public sector has also mastered basic addition; add more procedures and more regulations, more staff and more managerial layers. The plethora of issues plaguing Canada’s public service would need a whole book to list and discuss. Indeed, the renowned Canadian political scholar Donald J. Savoie has written several such books. Ultimately though, it’s Canadian citizens who suffer the subpar and costlier public services.
All levels of Canadian governments can and must do better in delivering the services for which Canadians pay such hefty taxes. Many of the issues require a sustained determination to fix at the very top political echelons, which is beyond the control of even the most senior departmental leaders inside the public service itself, much less that of any rank-and-file public servant. But there are tools squarely within the public service’s purview that can be used to help remediate the situation, at least partly. One of these tools is leveraging the unique workplace opportunities that attract certain people to jobs in the public sector. Their career choices and personal ambitions, to do the kind of work that’s done in the public sector, has been attributed to what’s now known as Public Service Motivation (PSM). Though it’s no panacea, actively fostering PSM within Canada’s beleaguered public sector can potentially improve organizational performance.
PSM is a particular workplace motivation that shapes and influences the career paths and many job outcomes of individuals with a strong inclination to working in the public service. Originally conceived by James Perry and Lois Wise several decades ago, the notion of PSM comprises four distinct individual-level interests and ambitions that typify public servants. These are: (1) an attraction to public policy making, (2) a commitment to furthering the public interests, (3) a commitment to performing civic duty, and (4) a strong sense interpersonal compassion. A large and growing body of evidence shows that raising the level of PSM at the individual employee level, and vis-à-vis that at the organizational level, can improve job performance and organizational outcomes, which in turn portend better services for Canadians.
A recent review of academic research focusing on PSM in Canadian public sector organizations was striking because the authors, Dr. Dominika Wranik and other colleagues of mine at Dalhousie’s Professional Motivations Research Lab, managed to turn up a dearth of empirical work carried out in a Canadian setting – a mere twenty-four studies to be exact. Moreover, not one of the studies properly measured PSM using an empirically valid questionnaire or survey.
The authors found a few studies documenting the existence of PSM among Canadian civil servants, both those currently employed as well as individuals aspiring to civil service careers. More specifically, their review of the (limited) evidence shows that Canadian public servants – current, and aspiring – want to influence public policies, uphold prosocial and ethical norms, make a difference on behalf of society even when it entails personal sacrifice, and to work on behalf of other persons, even complete strangers. As Dr. Wranik and her colleagues found, “public [sector] employees valued contribution to society, intellectually stimulating work, and displayed less organizational commitment compared to private [sector] employees”.
Beyond these few findings, applied research has little else to say about PSM in Canada. The authors call for more scholarship on PSM, especially how to leverage PSM in the Canadian public sector given its unique institutional features. I echo that call here.
Ultimately, what Canadians deserve is a more responsive and innovative public sector, and higher quality services delivered by those same public sector organizations, including better healthcare and education. One way for public organizations to improve their operations is by leveraging personal values, career ambitions, and a desire to affect positive societal change evinced by public servants with demonstrably high PSM. In other words, turn the PSM key. While actively instilling PSM among current public servants, or purposefully recruiting staff who already have high PSM, is not a silver bullet that will cure all the ills ailing Canada’s wider public sector, it’s a start in the right direction.
- James Perry, Anne Hondeghem, and Lois Wise (2010). Revisiting the motivational bases of public service: Twenty years of research and an agenda for the future. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2010.02196.x
- Donald Savoie (2015). What Is Government Good At? A Canadian Answer. https://www.mqup.ca/what-is-government-good-at–products-9780773546219.php
- Donald Savoie (2021). Democracy in Canada: The Disintegration of Our Institutions. https://www.mqup.ca/democracy-in-canada-products-9780228006664.php?page_id=106878&
- Donald Savoie (2022). Government: Have Presidents and Prime Ministers Misdiagnosed the Patient? https://www.mqup.ca/government-products-9780228011095.php?page_id=106878&
- Dominika Wranik, Michelle McPherson, Isabelle Caron, and Huiyan Liu (2024). Frontiers of public service motivation research in Canada: A scoping review. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/capa.12557?af=R
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