The Persistence of Prosocial Work Effort as a Function of Mission Match

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12882
• Author: John D. Marvel,William G. Resh,Bo Wen
• Date: 01 January 2018
• Published date: 01 January 2018

116 Public Administration Review • January | February 2018

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 78, Iss. 1, pp. 116–125. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12882.

The Persistence of Prosocial Work Effort as

a Function of Mission Match

Bo Wen is a doctoral candidate in public

policy and management in the Price School

of Public Policy at the University of Southern

California. His primary areas of study are

public management, organization theory,

Chinese politics, and policy implementation.

E-mail: wenb@usc.edu

John D. Marvel is assistant professor in

the Schar School of Policy and Government

at George Mason University and a fellow

in the U.S. federal government’s Office of

Evaluation Sciences. His research focuses

on public management, work motivation,

and the public opinion of government

performance.

E-mail: jmarvel@gmu.edu

William G. Resh is assistant professor

in the Price School of Public Policy at the

University of Southern California. His

research focuses on public management,

organizational behavior, and executive

politics. His recent book,

Rethinking the

Administrative Presidency

(Johns Hopkins

University Press, 2015), was awarded the

Best Book in Public Administration Research

award by ASPA in 2017.

E-mail: wresh@usc.edu

Abstract : The authors use an online experiment to test the proposal that “mission match” leads to persistent prosocial

work effort, whereby employees go above and beyond remunerated job responsibilities to deliver a public good. First,

the importance of mission match to persistent prosocial work effort in public and nonprofit organizations is discussed.

Then a real-effort experiment is used to test whether mission match is associated with the persistence of individual

work effort under conditions of unreasonable performance expectations. Findings show that subjects’ narrow

identification with the mission of the particular organization on whose behalf they are working is a more important

determinant of persistence than the extent to which one reports self-sacrifice as a motivation toward service. Moreover,

reported self-sacrifice does not appear to reinforce the relationship between mission match and persistent prosocial work

behavior .

Evidence for Practice

• Matching workers with missions can increase the persistence of employees’ prosocial work behaviors.

• Results suggest that specific identification with organizational mission is more substantively significant in

prosocial work than more broad-based, other-regarding orientations to society.

• Managers may focus more readily on workers who highly identify with the organization’s mission on both

a personal basis and on its perceived societal impact than on screening employees on their general prosocial

proclivities.

William G. Resh

University of Southern California

John D. Marvel

George Mason University

Bo Wen

University of Southern California

W hat motivates individuals not only to work

hard but to go above and beyond their

formal job requirements when working on

behalf of organizations that deliver social goods? Why

do individuals persist in these efforts? Answers to these

questions are of considerable theoretical and practical

importance to public administration. While public

work involves a range of tasks that vary in complexity

and substance, real prosocial benefits can be derived

by citizens from ostensibly simple acts of discretion

by public administrators. In this study, we build on

the work of Smith ( 2016 ) and others to explore the

potential of “mission match” as a motivating factor

in these kinds of prosocial work efforts. We use an

online experiment to examine whether individuals

who are randomly assigned to work on behalf of

an organization whose mission they identify with

strongly are more likely to persist when confronted

with undue performance expectations than individuals

who are randomly assigned to an organization whose

mission they identify with weakly.

Secondarily, we are interested in whether public service

motivation (PSM)—often defined as a “motivational

force that induces individuals to perform meaningful

public service” (Brewer and Selden 1998 , 417)—

strengthens the relationship between mission match

and persistence. More specifically, we are interested in

whether the self-sacrifice dimension of a common PSM

scale (Coursey et al. 2008 ) strengthens this relationship.

While a great deal of nonexperimental research

suggests that PSM is associated with individual-level

work behavior, causal evidence that connects PSM to

observable behavior is relatively rare (Bellé 2013 , 2014 ;

Esteve et al. 2016 ; Pedersen 2015 ). Moreover, most of

the work that does test this relationship fails to account

for the potential confounding variable of organization-

specific mission match (Wright 2007 ).

We first discuss the importance of mission match and

public service motivation in the public and nonprofit

sectors. We then describe the structure of our online

experiment, which is designed to test how likely a

subject will be to persist in working on behalf of

a randomly assigned organization with a prosocial

mission. Next, we describe our analysis sample, the

measurement of variables, and the results of our

experimental analyses. We conclude by discussing the

implications of our findings for theory, practice, and

subsequent research in this area.