Core values for ideal civil servants: Service‐oriented, responsive and dedicated

• Published date: 01 July 2023
• Author: Sheeling Neo,Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen,Lars Tummers
• Date: 01 July 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13583

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Core values for ideal civil servants: Service-oriented,

responsive and dedicated

SheelingNeo | StephanGrimmelikhuijsen | LarsTummers

Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Correspondence

Sheeling Neo, Utrecht University,

Bijlhouwerstraat 6, 3511 ZC Utrecht, The

Netherlands.

Email: s.l.neo@uu.nl

Funding information

National Research Foundation of Korea,

Grant/Award Number: NRF-2017S1A3A2067636

Abstract

What do citizens want? How do citizens think public servants should behave?

Although such questions seem straightforward, little is known about the values cit-

izens expect public servants to uphold. This paper therefore identifies such values

through extensive coding of qualitative data from representative samples of

United States (n=395), Dutch (n=369), and South Korean (n=379) citizens. Sur-

prisingly, and contrasting to assumptions in the literature on citizen satisfaction,

citizens hardly value effectiveness, efficiency, and accountability. In contrast, we

found that the top three universal values that citizens desire from public servants

are serviceability, responsiveness, and dedication. These values are generic across

countries, age, gender, and education level. However, some values are more

important in some countries than in others. These differences show the influence

of a country’s longstanding public administrative tradition and its current situation.

Our findings challenge scholars and government officials to rethink what citizens

want from their civil servants.

KEYWORDS

administrative traditions, normative expectations, public values

Evidence for practice

•In a representative survey of US, Dutch, and South Korean citizens, we found

that citizens want public servants to be responsive to citizen questions, provide

them with proper service, and be dedicated to their work.

•Although the overall trend is similar across countries, there are some values—

such as morality, expertise, and impartiality—that are more valued in some

countries than in others. These values reflect the public administrative traditions

of their country. Public managers should consider the relevance of traditions

before introducing new reforms for public servants.

•To improve the quality of interactions with citizens, solutions may be found in

an approach centered on these values. Public organizations should reflect on

how they can orient the actions of their employees to be more in line with that

of the citizens.

Many problems of the state, including inequity in service

delivery, citizen dissatisfaction, and difficult working con-

ditions for public servants (Goodsell, 2004; Hand &

Catlaw, 2019), have often been defined with respect to

the deteriorating relationship between public servants

and citizens: governments are seen as impersonal and

being bound in red tape (Bozeman & Feeney, 2011;

Tummers et al., 2016). The problem of the relationship

between public servants and citizens fuels an environ-

ment of declining trust in government and low reputation

for public institutions (Erber & Lau, 1990). This subse-

quently creates a climate that engenders myriad citizen

Received: 3 May 2021Revised: 9 November 2022Accepted: 18 November 2022

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13583

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribu tion and reproduction in any medium, provided the

original work is properly cited.

© 2022 The Authors. Public Administration Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Public Administration.

838 Public Admin Rev. 2023;83:838–862.

wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar

participatory problems such as their unwillingness to par-

ticipate in policy activities (Lee & Schachter, 2019;

Uslaner & Brown, 2005).

Much of the research done in examining the relation-

ship between citizen and public servants has taken the

perspective of the evaluation of service quality (van de

Walle, 2017) instead of the quality of public servants pro-

ducing those services. Although service quality is partly

determined by how citizens experience the people deliv-

ering that service, there has been limited attention on

how citizens view individual public servants who deliver

those services (de Boer, 2020).

While there have been studies focusing on citizen atti-

tudes toward public servants, they mostly focus on exist-

ing images and stereotypes, not on what citizens find

desirable in public servants (de Boer, 2020; Garrett

et al., 2006; Willems, 2020). For instance, Willems (2020)

found that US citizens generally view their public servants

as caring, helpful, and dedicated. This provides a better

understanding of how people view public servants as is.

However, it does not tell us how people think public ser-

vants should be.

The expectations citizens have of public servants

undergird citizens’interactions with public servants and

are important determinants of their attitudes and behav-

iors on a wide range of issues, including their satisfaction

with government performance (van Ryzin, 2015) and insti-

tutional trust (Grönlund & Setälä, 2012). These expecta-

tions could also affect the attitudes, behaviors, and

decision-making processes of public servants themselves

during service delivery (Trinkner et al., 2019). The out-

comes of these interactions impact the delivery of public

services and the livelihood and life of citizens

(Goodsell, 2004). These expectations may be particularly

relevant for public servants who are in continual direct

contact with citizens.

Therefore, this study analyses the content of citizen

expectations. It asks the following questions: What do citi-

zens want? How do citizens think public servants should

behave?

A second notable gap in the literature is that most stud-

ies on citizen expectations have been carried out in single

countries, mostly in the Western hemisphere (Favero &

Kim, 2020; Grimmelikhuijsen & Porumbescu, 2017; van

Ryzin, 2004). This is important because these expectations

may differ greatly between countries. The social environ-

ment can shape the expectations that people have of other

people around them. For example, Ott and Xiao (2017)

found that US and Chinese consumers differ in their expec-

tations of what companies should communicate to the pub-

lic in terms of their corporate social responsibility efforts.

They attributed this difference to the extent to which the

prevailing culture of the two countries tolerated ambiguity

and assertiveness. Citizen’s expectations of how public ser-

vants ought to be, may be similarly influenced by their envi-

ronment. However, to date, no comparative data of this

kind exist. A reliance on American and Eurocentric research

assumesthatpeoplefromacrosstheworldsharethesame

expectations with regard to their public servants and

ignores the role that the social environment plays in the for-

mation of such expectations.

Therefore, this article has the following central

research questions:

1.What do citizens in the United States, South Korea,

and the Netherlands believe are the values of an ideal

public servant?

2. Are there differences in these ideal public servant

values across the three countries?

We present an inductive, citizen-driven approach, which

allows us to identify the values citizens generate themselves.

This study advances our understanding of the relationship

between citizen and public servants in the following ways.

First, this study contributes to the literature on citizen expec-

tations by adopting a perspective that has received less

attention in mainstream citizen expectations literature.

Instead of focusing on citizens’expectations of public orga-

nizations and services, we focus on citizens’expectations of

the people that provide such public services—public ser-

vants. By doing so, we provide a way to identify such expec-

tations. This has been a problem with current measurement

tools (Favero & Kim, 2020). An inductive approach allows for

the identification of values that may have been overlooked

by deductively asking people about predefined values. Sec-

ond, this is the first study that systematically identifies and

compares citizens’expectations of public servants in three

countries across various parts of the world, namely the

United States, the Netherlands, and South Korea. This study

advances our understanding of the universality of the

expectations of citizens in different countries.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Normative expectations in public service

delivery

A person’s attitude and behavior are often governed by

prior expectations (Bandura, 1986). There are multiple

ways to form these expectations, such as comparing prior

performances of the organization (Hjortskov, 2020), per-

formances of other peer organizations (Olsen, 2017), or

stated goals or claims made by the organization and pub-

lic perception of the organization (Oliver, 2010). One

important way in which these prior expectations can be

formed is by establishing an ideal. People do so by con-

structing a mental picture of what the ideal should look

like and mapping the qualities of a given target to the

qualities believed to be embodied by the ideal bench-

mark (Miller et al., 1986). The closer the perceptions about

the target match relevant anchors, the more positively

they feel with regard to the target and their relationship

(Bonito, 2004; Hall, 2012).

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW839