Bridging the Public Service Motivation and Calling Literatures

• Author: Jeffery A. Thompson,Robert K. Christensen
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12913
• Published date: 01 May 2018
• Date: 01 May 2018

444 Public Administration Review • May | June 2018

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 78, Iss. 3, pp. 444–456. © 2018 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12913.

This manuscript was originally

submitted and accepted as an Public

Administration and the Disciplines

article. The feature editor, Rosemary O’Leary,

is gratefully acknowledged for their work

in soliciting and developing this content.

Effective with Volume 78, the Public

Administration and the Disciplines

feature has been discontinued.

Research Article Bridging the Public Service Motivation and

Calling Literatures

Jeffery A. Thompson

Robert K. Christensen

Brigham Young University

Abstract : Public administration research suggests there may be disparity in the extent to which public servants

experience their work as a calling. The purpose of this article is to better illustrate and integrate calling research,

which grows out of the positive organizational scholarship movement, into how we understand public service motives.

The calling scholarship offers a productive way to view differences in public servants ’ orientations toward their

work. Integrating calling into the public administration scholarship—particularly the public service motivation

scholarship—provides insights to researchers and managers about how to help employees discover a deeper sense of

meaningfulness in their work. In presenting the arguments and corresponding conceptual framework, the authors seek

to supplement rather than replace the public service motivation construct. The authors articulate a research agenda

that they believe will strengthen and enrich research on public servants ’ experience with their work.

Evidence for Practice

• From a practical perspective, public service motivation (PSM) and calling differ in terms of the tools that

managers might use in supervising people who are engaged in other-oriented work. Because PSM is portrayed

as a disposition to render public service, it suggests that managers can best motivate employees by articulating

a vision of the benefits of public service, demonstrating transformational leadership, and highlighting mission

valence.

• The calling literature suggests some different managerial levers to assist in motivating service-oriented

workers. While it may be possible for managers to use compelling communications to infuse their employees

with greater PSM, a manager cannot intentionally infuse another person with calling, because calling

is rooted in inherent individual gifts. The idea of painting a vision of public service is not alien to the

experience of calling—because people need to discover what external needs they can serve. However, the

calling lens encourages employees to look inward to inventory what they are suited to do.

• Calling centers on idiosyncratic attachment to specific types of work. Consequently, managers who adopt

the calling perspective to boost employee motivation will focus heavily on placing people in roles that they

are naturally inclined toward and on ways that employees can tailor their work to best align with their gifts.

They will encourage, for instance, job crafting, whereby employees strive to shape their work to fit their own

strengths and passions.

Jeffery A. Thompson is associate

professor in the Romney Institute of Public

Management at Brigham Young University.

His research on meaningful work and

“work as a calling” has been published

in top management journals, including

Administrative Science Quarterly,

Academy of Management Review,

Organization Science, and Journal of

Applied Psychology .

E-mail: jeff_thompson@byu.edu

Robert K. Christensen is associate

professor in the Romney Institute of Public

Management at Brigham Young University.

His research focuses on prosocial and

antisocial motivations and behaviors in

the public and nonprofit sectors. He is a

research fellow in Arizona State University ’ s

Center for Organization Research and

Design and a researcher in Seoul National

University ’ s Center for Government

Competitiveness. He and James L. Perry are

editors of Wiley ’ s Handbook of Public

Administration .

E-mail: rkc@byu.edu

P ublic servants are often maligned as unmotivated

or uninspired (Rosenbloom 2014 , vii), but

many scholars, including Goodsell in his classic

polemic The Case for Bureaucracy (2004), describe a

different picture. Empirical studies suggest that many

public servants are highly motivated to serve the public

and find significant meaning in their work. Public

servants, so motivated, are more likely to exhibit high

“job satisfaction, [increased likelihood of] public sector

job choice, individual and organizational performance,

organizational and job commitment, and low

turnover” (Ritz, Brewer, and Neumann 2016 , 421).

These findings—largely from public service

motivation (PSM) scholars and predominantly

focused on the public sector—are beginning to

work their way into practice. Notwithstanding PSM

scholars ’ attention to an other orientation “with a

purpose to do good for others and society” (Perry

and Hondeghem 2008 , vii), PSM research continues

to appear in the public administration literature

with relatively little attention to related concepts

from other disciplines (Bozeman and Su 2015 ). In

this article, we hope to strengthen the movement of

PSM research toward practical and scholarly insights

by integrating the work on calling from the general

management literature.

Calling refers to an individual orientation toward

one ’ s specific work (Wrzesniewski et al. 1997 ),