Understanding the motivational mechanisms of administrative corruption is of paramount importance for public integrity. We propose and test a novel demands-resources model of civil servants’ corruptibility from a micro-level perspective, focusing on important personality and job-related demands and resources, i.e., personality traits, motives, and states. Drawing on experimental evidence (Obs.=263) from Swiss public administration, this study reveals how public service motivation and social value orientation function as integrity-enhancing resources but through different psychological mechanisms. Furthermore, Machiavellianism and psychopathy—but not narcissism—significantly stimulate civil servants’ capacity to morally disengage and hence increase corruptibility, serving as integrity-draining demands, while job-related burnout has no effect. These novel insights contribute to the ‘bright side’ discourse of PSM, advance the conceptual understanding of administrative corruption, and expand the state-vs-trait debate of public integrity, providing important insights for the effective design of anti-corruption strategies and public personnel selection for public integrity.
Weissmueller et al. (Thu,) studied this question.