Personality Traits as Antecedents of Public Service Motivation – revi...

Public Service Motivation (PSM) has been at the core of research on public employees for decades, and a growing number of studies have been concerned with its dimensions, effects or outcomes, its dark sides, as well as antecedents of PSM. However, there is only little research on the relationship between basic individual values or personality traits and PSM (see Korac, Saliterer, and Weigand 2018). Building on the seminal work by Van Witteloostuijn et al. (2017) who provide one of the rare studies addressing the question of how core personality traits are related to PSM, this contribution revisits the source of the motivation to serve the public interest. In doing so, we aim to determine the representativeness of the results for a different country context.