Incentives and Workers' Motivation in the Public Sector

By Josse Delfgaauw, Robert Dur. Social Science Research Network, 2004

387 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Civil servants have a bad reputation of being lazy. However, citizens' personal experiences with civil servants appear to be significantly better. We develop a model of an economy in which workers differ in laziness and in public service motivation, and characterise optimal incentive contracts for public sector workers under different informational assumptions. When civil servants' effort is unverifiable, lazy workers find working in the public sector highly attractive and may crowd out workers with a public service motivation. When effort is verifiable, the government optimally attracts motivated workers as well as the economy's laziest workers by offering separating contracts, which are both distorted. Even though contract distortions reduce aggregate welfare, a majority of society may be better off as public goods come at a lower cost.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/148b5b98200850a8babd0afc29f2480d21387f94

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Citations in the corpus

Managerial Talent, Motivation, and Self-Selection into Public Management (2008, methodology): “…literature in economics on intrinsic motivation examines the assignment of differently motivated workers to jobs that vary in intrinsic qualities (e.g. Handy and Katz, 1998; Dixit, 2002; Besley and Ghatak, 2005; Francois, 2007; Prendergast, 2007; Delfgaauw and Dur, 2007, 2008a; Macchiavello, 2008).”
A meta-analysis of the relationship between public service motivation and job satisfaction (2015, background): “…home in the fi eld of public administration (Coursey et al. 2011; Leisink and Steijn 2009), researchers in adjacent disciplines such as economics (Delfgaauw and Dur 2008; Francois 2000; Francois and Vlassopoulos 2008; Georgellis and Tabvuma 2 Public Administration Review • xxxx | xxxx 2015 We…”
Crowding out intrinsic motivation in the public sector (2011, background): “In fact, although higher monetary rewards increase the probability of filling a job vacancy, they often reduce the average quality of applicants as employees with lower levels of intrinsic motivation apply (Delfgaauw and Dur 2007, 2008).”