Working for America

Considerable research has asked whether public sector employees have different values and respond to different incen tives than private sector employees Recently, Jim Perry developed a scale designed to measure this construct, which he calls "public service motivation " We examine the relationship between public service motivation and federal employ ees' attitudes and behavior by examining responses of nearly 10, 000 federal employees to a recent survey Even though the survey only contained a subset of Perry's scale, we found significant relationships between public service motivation and federal employees' job satisfaction, performance, intention to remain with the government, and support for the government's reinvention efforts