Does the Love of Money Moderate the Relationship between Public Service Motivation and Job Satisfaction? The Case of Chinese Professionals in the Public Sector

By Bangcheng Liu, Thomas Li-Ping Tang. Public Administration Issues, 2011

163 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To what extent do attitudes toward money – specifically, the love of money – moderate the relationship between public service motivation and job satisfaction among public sector professionals in China? The authors collected data from full-time public sector professionals who also were part-time students in a master of public administration program in eastern China. After confirmatory factor analyses, the regression results show that a public servant’s love of money moderates the relationship between public service motivation and job satisfaction – that is, individuals with a strong love of money have a significantly stronger relationship between public service motivation and job satisfaction than those without, a finding that supports the “crowding-in effect”. Alternatively, for high love-of-money civil servants with a "steel rice bowl" mentality, high job satisfaction is explained by the best offer (output) for the minimum amount of effort (input), at least within Chinese culture. Such findings are counterintuitive in light of Chinese personal values, equity theory, public servants’ institutional background, ethical organizational culture, and corruption.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Public Administration, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dd498ca253043e6b6b777ff57107663078ec5a13

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. Bangcheng Liu
2. Kaifeng Yang
3. J. Perry
4. Thomas Li-Ping Tang
5. Yuh-Jia Chen
6. Alexander Newman
7. D. Shim

In Public Administration

1. Kaifeng Yang
2. Bangcheng Liu
3. J. Perry
4. Thomas Li-Ping Tang
5. D. Shim

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Bangcheng Liu
2. Kaifeng Yang
3. Thomas Li-Ping Tang
4. J. Perry

Citations in the corpus

• The Psychological Mechanisms of Public Service Motivation (2016, background): “It would also be useful to examine the interactive effects between PSM and other motives (e.g., love of money) on individual attitudes and behaviors (Liu & Tang, 2011).”
• When Does Public Service Motivation Fuel the Job Satisfaction Fire? The Joint Moderation of Person–Organization Fit and Needs–Supplies Fit (2015, methodology): “It was revised to fit the Chinese public sector context (Liu and Tang 2011; Liu et al. 2008).”