Public Service Motivation and Ethical Conduct

This study examines the relationship between public service motivation and ethical behavior. It scrutinizes the issues of whether those who are highly motivated by public service values act in a morally high way. The results showed that only the variable of self-sacrifice in public service motivation was statistically significant in the post-conventional level of principled reasoning. The association was positive, but commitment to the public interest was not statistically significant in either model. This suggests that self-sacrifice in public service motivation is one of the critical factors that influence the ethical reasoning level of public administrators. Public servants with a higher sense of self-sacrifice employed principled reasoning to resolve ethical quandaries. Education and training of public administrators that focuses on the development of an active attitude in public service motivation can encourage public servants to behave in an ethically high way.