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In October 2020, President Donald Trump sought to convert many US federal civil servants to at‐will employees by executive order. Trump's initiative, referred to as Schedule F, has stimulated a partisan debate about dismantling the merit system in the US federal government. A substantial international body of evidence has developed during the last three decades about the effects of administrative practices associated with meritocracy and the likely consequences of changes to civil service systems, such as those embedded in Schedule F. This article employs guidelines established under the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta‐Analyses (PRISMA) to conduct a systematic review of the evidence to address the question: What does the evidence tell us about merit principles and government performance? This systematic review summarizes what empirical research tells us about effects of civil service practices, such as meritocratic appointments, meritocratic advancement, and tenure protection, for government performance and the quality of government. The findings indicate that factors such as meritocratic appointments/recruitment, tenure protection, impartiality, and professionalism are strongly associated with higher government performance and lower corruption. We conclude by discussing implications of our findings for public policy and management and for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pay variation across positions, functions, and ranks can affect government performance by influencing the ability of the government to recruit and incentivize civil servants, but this proposition has not been systematically examined. Taking advantage of a new panel dataset, we develop and test the theoretical linkage between pay variation of civil servants and government performance. Our findings show a contingency-based relationship between pay variation and government performance. On average, neither total pay variation nor vertical pay variation is significantly related to government performance measured by the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators. However, total pay variation is consistently and negatively correlated with government performance in low-income countries. The findings suggest the importance of accounting for national contexts in implementing administrative reforms and are a cautionary lesson about applying theories based on research on private firms to the public sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employee accountability is a phenomenon of central importance to public administration. The volume of empirical research, however, has been modest given the absence of valid measures. This article develops a reliable and valid five-dimension scale to measure public employee accountability. The measure is distinguished from prior scales in that it fully captures the five distinct dimensions along which employee accountability varies. To test a higher-order factor model of the multidimensional scale, data representing the population of U.S. public sector (government and nonprofit) employees was utilized. A series of scale construction tests, including convergent and discriminant validity tests and multi-group analysis, confirmed that a best-fit model was a five-dimensional, reflective scale with 15 indicators. The article concludes by discussing theoretical and practical implications and future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public service motivation research has proliferated in parallel with concerns about how to improve the performance of public service personnel. However, scholarship does not always inform management and leadership. This article purposefully reviews public service motivation research since 2008 to determine the extent to which researchers have identified lessons for practice. The results of the investigation support several lessons-among them using public service motivation as a selection tool, facilitating public service motivation through cooperation in the workplace, conveying the significance of the job, and building leadership based on public service values. These results are important because they offer evidence that the field is coalescing around tactics that managers and leaders can use to address enduring concerns about employee motivation in the public sector. They also prompt us to articulate ideas that can guide a tighter integration of research and practice moving forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on public service motivation has garnered significant attention from scholars, especially in the last two decades. This article divides the evolution of the research into three waves: definition and measurement; assessing and confirming construct validity and diffusion of the construct; and learning from past research and filling shortcomings and gaps. Significant contributions and benchmarks of the first two waves are identified. Four foundational activities are discussed that are present and will be important for advancing public service motivation research during the third wave. Some aspects of the research in the Asia Pacific region are highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The latter 20th and beginning of the 21st century have ushered in new forms of governance, opening the gates to what has been variously described as a “new public service,” a “multisectored public service,” and a “state of agents.” As government authority is dispersed, we increasingly rely on these new public servants for service delivery and policy implementation. But who are now the agents of the state? How might the changed makeup of a new public service alter our expectations about democratic governance? The questions we investigate in this study are, first, now that the public sector has been transformed, what are the characteristics of the agents of the new governance? And are the new public servants, in the words of Charles Goodsell, “ordinary people”? We use the General Social Survey to shed light on our focal question. Our results suggest that public servants in for-profit settings resemble traditional civil servants in many ways. The growing ranks of social, health, and education public servants in nonprofit settings are distinct in many ways from civil servants and for-profit public servants. Implications of the changing composition of the public sector in an era of transformed governance are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Functional theory suggests that people choose activities based on their perception of how well the work matches their personal motives.This process implies that worker motivations vary by activity even when controlling for typical motivational antecedents. Although this perspective is common in the volunteering literature, the public service motivation (PSM) literature has not formally considered functional theory hypotheses.Yet PSM theory asserts a relationship not to government work itself, but to activities related to public service such as volunteering.This study evaluates functional theory in regard to PSM based on using a survey of recipients of the Daily Point of Light Award (DPOL) and the President’s Community Volunteer Award (PCV). After controlling for common PSM antecedents such as gender, level of education, religious participation, and age, PSM and its subdimensions exhibit some variance across volunteering domains (viz., religious, educational/school, human services, and other), though most differences involve religious organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article develops a strategic research agenda for public human resource management. The agenda originates from the perception that research about public human resources has matured during the Review of Public Personnel Administration's 30 years of publication and now is an appropriate juncture to initiate an intentional and strategic agenda. The author identifies criteria for developing a strategic research agenda that seeks to advance useable knowledge about public human resource management, build theory, and mark out content distinctive to public institutions. The article inventories research as reported by the Review of Public Personnel Administration and two other leading human resource management journals. These inventories help to anchor the agenda in timely issues and to triangulate on distinctively public issues. The article concludes with five priority research agenda based on the criteria the author developed and the inventory of research: direct compensation, motivation, culture and political context, efficacy and effectiveness, and training and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the use of pay-for-performance systems in the United States government. It is noted that such systems are not unique to the U.S. Several previous studies on the topic are cited and the results of a meta-analysis are presented, which indicate that these systems typically do not work well. The history of pay-for-performance systems in the U.S. is discussed, including the Merit Pay System which was part of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, the Performance Management and Recognition System (PMRS), which lasted from 1984 to 1991, and 21st-century approaches used by the U.S. military and the Department of Homeland Security.

This study investigates cross-national diffusion of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (CSRA). Two theoretical lenses are used to analyze the diffusion of performance appraisal, merit pay, the Senior Executive Service (SES), and the separation of positive and regulatory functions. The analysis indicates that most CSRA provisions have diffused more broadly internationally than would be expected based on their technical efficiency and effectiveness in the United States. Both the extent and patterns of diffusion indicate that institutional theory better explains diffusion than does communication theory. Although communication theory is helpful for explaining the early diffusion of CSRA provisions, primarily to English-speaking countries, later diffusion appears to be the result of institutional isomorphism. Regardless of which theories account for their diffusion, provisions from CSRA have diffused widely among OECD countries. The analysis suggests that CSRA has profoundly influenced civil service systems around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the relationship between public service motivation and antecedents believed to be important determinants of moral commitment. Research conducted during the past decade indicates that public service motivation is a valid construct that is useful for predicting outcomes that are important to public organizations and to society. The sample for the empirical study consists of winners of the Daily Point of Light Award and the President’s Community Volunteer Award. Antecedents studied are volunteer experience, religious activity, and parental socialization. Quantitative and qualitative analyses are used to identify key determinants of public sector motivation. Religious activity is positively related to formal and informal volunteering. Interviews strongly support the quantitative findings, especially the importance of religion, but also highlight the role of life-changing events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a building theory and empirical evidence on public service motivation. The global public management revolution, driven by governments' search for continuously higher levels of productivity, service orientation, and accountability is one of the recent developments in the topic. The consistent failure of financial incentive schemes that were adapted from the private sector beginning in the late 1970s is another development. The increasing attention to the merits of bureaucracy as an institution and normative order is the third development, which was given impetus by the first two.

This article explores the process by which formal management systems foster the creation of shared organization values, addressing the basic question: Can workplace values be "managed?" Drawing upon interviews conducted at a Department of Defense installation with civilian employees and managers over a 5-year period, we use comparative case analysis to explore differences in the relationships between installation practices and social values across high-performing and low-performing work units. Our findings suggest that strategic values are motivating to employees to the extent that they reflect employees' internal affective, normative, and task-oriented values, a zone of existing values. Although values management is a social process that results from routine interactions, formal management systems provide opportunities to enhance the social interactions that are motivating to employees. Middle managers play key roles in using formal management systems to integrate the organizations strategic practices with values that derive from employees societal, cultural, and religious experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1968, Frederick Mosher published his influential book "Democracy and the Public Service." This article revisits themes Mosher developed in the book to assess the status of our democracy in the context of a new public service. The author argues that the new public service poses significant challenges for democracy. One is that new public service is simultaneously more heterogeneous and more loosely tied to traditions of public service. Another attribute is that the rules embedded in new governance structures, which are tied to market forces, are likely the most compelling influences on behavior in the new public service. A third attribute is that the flexibilities of the new public service create a work world in which attachments are temporary and their temporariness may break down bonds among citizens and public servants. The author offers four proposals for reconciling democracy and the new public service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents reflections about public affairs education. Trends in the context and content of public affairs education; Issues in civic engagement that confront public affairs educators; Preparation of students for professional lives in democracies; Future directions for public affairs education research.

The idea of citizen service has been given increasing attention as a remedy for problems of civic disengagement. This study reviews 37 empirical studies about the relationship between service and citizenship. A formal model of change is used to guide the review. Six types of citizenship outcomes are discussed: citizenship-related cognitive understanding, citizenship attitudes, citizenship skills, institutional change, philanthropic and civic behaviors, and political behavior. Based on the review, several conclusions are drawn about what is known about the service-citizenship relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Senior Executive Service (SES) was considered the cornerstone of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 by its framers. A longitudinal investigation of the SES, among employees in grade levels 13 and above in five federal agencies, reveals that after the first two years virtually none of the major objectives of the architects of the SES are perceived as having been met. The theoretical underpinnings of the SES are reviewed and provide a basis for the investigation, which indicates that a number o f factors appear to be producing an increasingly stronger negative affect toward the program over time. The likely causes of this negative affect are discussed and an approach is offered for reversing the trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study takes a task environment approach to organizational assessment by using data gathered from knowledgeable government officials external to the agencies being assessed. These officials were asked to rate the performance of seven federal organizational units in the summer of 1980 and again in 1981 in order to test hypotheses under two different administrations. The study seeks to address the following three questions. (1) Does field office or headquarters status affect the evaluation of an agency or its employees? (2) Does the type of service provided, physical or human, affect the evaluation of employees or agencies? (3) Do employees and the agencies they work for receive different performance ratings? Our findings suggest that the location and type of service provided by agencies as well as the focus of evaluation affect the results of organizational assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Merit pay for the federal employees is a controversial personnel program that bases compensation of grades 13-15 supervisors and managers on their rated performance. Under the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, merit pay was implemented concurrently with a new, untested, objectives-based performance appraisal system. The motivational model of behavior on which merit pay is based is used here to analyze data from five federal agencies. The results indicate that, as perceived by affected employees, the new performance appraisal system does not effectively measure performance and therefore does not serve the purpose of the merit pay program to link pay to performance. Other implementation contingencies, such as the pay cap on managerial salaries, uncertainties associated with the presidential transition, and an eleventh-hour change in the merit pay formula, also appear to have contributed to the perceived ineffectiveness of merit pay. From a policy perspective, the results suggest that performance appraisal systems need to be improved to accomplish the motivational objectives of merit pay. Furthermore, there is no indication that the merit pay experiment at grades 13-15 has been sufficiently successful to proceed with plans to include employees in Grades 1-12. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the relationship of public service motivation (PSM) to various sets of correlates. Review of literature; Parental socialization; Religious socialization; Professional identification; Political ideology.

Presents a scale to measure public service motivation of American government employees using confirmatory factor analysis. Conceptual link of the scale with six dimensions; traction to policy making; Commitment to public interest; Social justice; Civic duty; Self-sacrifice.

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses various essays written by U.S. public administration practitioners that appear in this issue and previous editions of the "Public Administration Review" periodical, and it mentions authors such as Michael Willis and Paul "O'Neill.

Perry Podcast Episode [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes stock of public service motivation research to identify achievements, challenges, and an agenda for research to build on progress made since 1990. After enumerating achievements and challenges, the authors take stock of progress on extant proposals to strengthen research. In addition, several new proposals are offered, among them conducting more research on the disaggregated construct, developing grounded theory of public service motivation to understand contextual variations across cultures and political institutions, and improving current measures to better capture loyalty to governance regime as an institutional dimension of the public service motivation construct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]