The New Public Service? Applying the Public Service Motivation Model to Nonprofit Employees

Abstract

Research in the for-profit and public sectors has long sought to understand the factors affecting employee motivation but little is known concerning motivation of the nonprofit workforce. It has been suggested that nonprofit employees are an integral part of the new public service and are in many ways motivated to serve similar to public employees. To test this notion, this research presents an adapted version of Perry’s Public Service Motivation (PSM) Scale to examine motivation of nonprofit sector employees and empirically measures the level of service motivation of the nonprofit employees surveyed. The findings suggest that the modified version of Perry’s PSM Scale provides a good empirical model of nonprofit service motivation (NPSM). This provides support for the idea that nonprofit employees are largely attracted to their jobs because of the intrinsic rewards involved. In addition, the level of NPSM was found to be affected by attraction to mission, race, depth of involvement in the nonprofit sector and state context.