Working for a Good Cause

• Author: Robin Zoutenbier,Robert Dur
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12183
• Date: 01 March 2014
• Published date: 01 March 2014

Public

Administration

and the

Disciplines

Robert Dur is professor of economics

at Erasmus University Rotterdam and a

research fellow at the Tinbergen Institute,

CESifo Munich, and IZA Bonn. He has held

visiting positions at Bocconi University, the

University of Munich, and the University

of Vienna. His research interests include

personnel economics, organizational eco-

nomics, public economics, and behavioral

economics.

E-mail: dur@ese.eur.nl

Robin Zoutenbier is a PhD student in

the Department of Economics at Erasmus

University Rotterdam and the Tinbergen

Institute. He is writing a dissertation on

work motivations and incentives in the

public sector.

E-mail: zoutenbier@ese.eur.nl

144 Public Administration Review • March | April 2014

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 74, Iss. 2, pp. 144–155. © 2014 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12183.

Rosemary O’Leary, Editor

Robert Dur

Robin Zoutenbier

Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands

A rich literature in public administration has shown that

public sector employees have stronger altruistic motiva-

tions than private sector employees. Recent economic

theories stress the importance of mission preferences and

predict that altruistic people sort into the public sec-

tor when they subscribe to its mission.  is article uses

data from a representative survey of more than 30,000

employees from 50 countries to test this prediction.  e

authors f‌i nd strong evidence of a mutually reinforcing

role of altruism and mission alignment in sorting into the

public sector, particularly among highly educated workers

and among workers in less-developed countries.

Many jobs in the public sector involve tasks

that help people in need or contribute to

society at large. Such jobs presumably are

attractive to people with strong altruistic motivations.

A rich literature in public administration has provided

empirical evidence in line with this idea. Using a

variety of data and methods, it has been shown that

public sector employees are more inclined to help

others or serve the public interest compared to private

sector employees (see Perry, Hondeghem, and Wise

2010 for a recent overview of the literature).

Inspired by these f‌i ndings, a theoretical literature has

recently emerged in economics studying the sorting of

dif‌f erently motivated people into the public sector and

the consequences of this for optimal pay policies and

organizational design (see Francois and Vlassopoulos

2008 for a survey). A prominent study in this f‌i eld

is that by Besley and Ghatak (2005). In their model,

workers are heterogeneous in “mission preferences”;

that is, workers dif‌f er in what they consider to be a

good cause. Besley and Ghatak show that there is a

premium on matching of mission preferences, imply-

ing that workers will sort into organizations with

which they share a mission.

Concurrently and independently, a new strand in

the public administration literature has emerged

that, like Besley and Ghatak (2005), stresses “mis-

sion matching” or “value congruence.” Inspired by

the organizational psychology literature on person–

organization f‌i t (Kristof 1996), several recent studies

have shown that public sector employees who have a

strong willingness to do something useful to society

and, in addition, f‌i nd the work that they do valuable

to society report higher job satisfaction and a stronger

willingness to exert high ef‌f ort (see Bright 2008;

Leisink and Steijn 2009; Steijn 2008; Taylor 2008;

Wright and Pandey 2008).

 is article contributes to these literatures in two

ways. First, building on Besley and Ghatak (2005),

we develop a simple model of sorting into the public

sector in an economy populated by agents who dif‌f er

in both altruism and mission preferences. We examine

how an individual’s altruism and the alignment of

his or her mission preferences with the public sector’s

mission af‌f ect the likelihood of being employed in the

public sector. Our model predicts that altruism and

mission alignment are mutually reinforcing. When a

worker’s mission preferences are well in line with the

mission of the public sector, the likelihood of working

in the public sector increases in the worker’s altruism.

 e reverse holds when a worker’s mission prefer-

ences conf‌l ict with the mission of the public sector.

Altruism does not af‌f ect the sorting of people who feel

that the public sector neither serves nor damages the

public interest. Likewise, mission alignment increases

the likelihood of working in the public sector for

altruistic people but decreases it for spiteful people.

Our second contribution is to test these predictions

using survey data covering employees in both the

public sector and the private sector in a broad range

of countries around the world.  e existing studies

that we mentioned earlier on person–organization f‌i t

have used survey data on public sector employees only

and have been restricted to well-developed countries,

in particular the United States and Western European

countries. We use data from the World Values Survey

conducted between 2005 and 2008. Our sample con-

tains representative data on more than 30,000 work-

ers from 50 countries, ranging from wealthy countries

Working for a Good Cause