Transcript
Transcript: Leveraging Public Service Motivation to Facilitate Transformation
Leveraging Public Service Motivation to Facilitate Transformation
[0:00-0:03 The title appears on screen: Leveraging Public Service Motivation to Facilitate Transformation.]
[0:04-1:09 John Medcof, Lead Faculty, Canada School of Public Service, is seated in a chair. Next to him in another chair is Dr. James L. Perry.]
John Medcof: My great pleasure to introduce our guest, Dr. James L. Perry. Dr. Perry is the distinguished professor emeritus, at the Paul H. O'Neill School of Public Affairs, Public and Environmental Affairs, at Indiana University. Dr. Perry is an award-winning, internationally recognized, leader in the field of public administration and public management. We had the pleasure of welcoming him to a panel we ran back in 2021 as part of our Virtual Café series, where we were talking about public service motivation with, a group of international academic experts. And our context has evolved a lot since 2021. And given the sort of recent renewed interest in our values, in the code of values and ethics in the Government of Canada, we thought timing was right to kind of maybe explore, a little bit further, the topic of public service motivation with Dr. Perry.
[01:10-01:12 Title card: Introduction.]
[01:13 Dr. Perry appears in the corner of the screen, at a podium, while a PowerPoint slide titled “Preview” appears, with the following bullets:
- Definitions
- Making public service the bottom line and
- Applications of public service motivation research to strengthen Privy Council values and ethics.]
Dr. James L. Perry: I'm going to talk about three things very quickly. And they said that I should plan to talk 20 minutes. Hopefully it'll be less. I want to talk one, about definitions. I want to differentiate what we mean by public service motivation from the way we typically think about motivation, even in the public sector.
[01:30-03:08 A new PowerPoint slide titled “Definitions” appears, with the following bullets:
- Public service motivation: An individual's predisposition to respond to motives grounded primarily or uniquely in public institutions and organizations (Perry & Wise, 1990)
- Prosocial motivation: desire to have a positive impact on other people, groups, and organizations and
- Self-orientation versus other-orientation.]
Dr. Perry: So, the definition. We used the definition in the 1990 article. The definition was an individual's predisposition to respond to motives grounded primarily or uniquely in public institutions and organizations. Why was that? Well, it started from when I was a graduate student at Maxwell School at Syracuse University in 197- in the early 1970s.
My professors would come to class and say, public service is different. And they would say that, and then they would move on to talk about whatever they wanted to talk about. And I sort of scratched, okay, that's interesting, I believe you. What do we know about that? Where's the evidence? And we didn't have any evidence. We didn't pay particular attention to the differences in public service.
So. Let me say that one of the, landmark events in my life was to get a contract from the US Office of Personnel Management, the new Office of Personnel Management in 1978. The first director of the Office of Personnel Management was Alan K. "Scotty" Campbell. Now I knew Dr. Campbell because he was my dean at the Maxwell School when I was a student. And we applied for one of the evaluation grants, and we got a very large contract that didn't last through the life of the contract because Ronald Reagan, replaced Jimmy Carter well before the end of the contract.
[3:09-3:22 The camera switches to Dr. Perry standing at a podium in front of the audience.]
Dr. Perry: But I studied the Civil Service Reform Act and one of the sort of the key provisions in the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 was something called merit pay, or what's come to be called pay for performance. It failed.
[3:23-3:49 Full screen of Dr. Perry standing at the podium.]
Dr. Perry: It came back again in the late 1980s. It failed. It came back again in the early 1990s. It failed. In part because we were sort of, engaging in something that Steve Kerr, a colleague at Ohio State University, in an article written in 1970 or 1975, said on the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B.
[03:51-04:04 The camera switches to Dr. Perry standing at a podium in front of the audience.]
Dr. Perry: And effectively, what merit pay did was to reward people with something that wasn't all that important to them, wasn't all that consequential, and didn't even adhere to the basic principles of the idea of merit pay.
[04:05-05:35 The screen switches back to Dr. Perry in the corner of the screen with the “Definitions” PowerPoint slide.]
Dr. Perry: Which was to give people rewards that were significant and meaningful. We, as I, travelled around the federal government evaluating the Civil Service Reform Act, one of the people, many of the people said to me, hey, why would I want to follow the lead of merit pay and work for the money I'm going to get? So I get an extra dollar $0.98 every two weeks. What difference does it make? It's not meaningful to me.
And that was one of the clear shortcomings of the merit pay principles. But, something about which I wrote, a lot, during the decade after the passage of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. By 1990, I had said, hey, listen, these ideas have failed. Where should we head? And we headed down this path of trying to isolate and define the distinctive motivators of people who come to public service.
That's not to say that pay's not important, but pay is not the beginning and the end for most people who come to public service. If I wanted to make a lot of money, for instance, I would not have become a professor. I would have become a stockbroker or gone to Wall Street, or done something of that sort that would have put a lot of money in my pocket. If I were looking, to reward myself financially, public service is not the direction I want to take. And we all know that.
[05:37-05:39 Title card: Making Public Service Central.]
[05:40-05:49 Full screen of Dr. Perry standing at the podium.]
Dr. Perry: You know, we talk about profitability or profit, the bottom line in the private sector. Well I think the bottom line for us is public service.
[05:50-06:32 Dr. Perry appears in the corner of the screen, at a podium, while a PowerPoint slide titled “Making Public Service Central” appears, with the following bullets:
- Recruit and select for high public service motivation
- Leverage the meaningfulness of public work
- Create a supportive work environment
- Align rewards to reinforce public service motivation
- Socialize newcomers to public service values
- Lead with mission, inspiration and communication.]
Dr. Perry: And the book talks about, I sort of spent six chapters in the book talking about various facets of public service. For instance, recruit and select for high public service motivation. Leverage the meaningfulness of public work. Now, one of the important sort of and I'm going to sort of cover each one of these, in a little bit more depth.
Create a supportive work environment. Align rewards to reinforce public service motivation. And one of the things we tend to do is misalign rewards, so that we don't support public service motivation. That's sort of one of the key points on which I spend a lot of time in the book. Socialize newcomers to public service values and finally lead with mission, inspiration and communication.
[06:33-06:35 Title card: Leverage Meaningfulness of Public Work.]
[06:36-9:37 Dr. Perry appears in the corner of the screen, at a podium, while a PowerPoint slide titled “Leveraging Meaningfulness of Public Work (respect for people value)” appears, with the following bullets:
- Design work to strengthen connections to beneficiaries
- Give employees discretion for job crafting to frame their work, physically, socially, cognitively
- Manage calling to enhance meaningfulness and employee well-being (aligns w/Privy Council, 2023)
- Increase internal capacity for career counseling
- Arrange external resources.]
Dr. Perry: Now. I've written a lot about motivation over the years, and one of the things before I sort of invented this term public service motivation. I talked about the design of work, and there's a lot of research going back to the early 1970s by organizational behaviour scholars on work design. And clearly, sort of the social impact of the work is an important element of the design. And we've done more recently a lot more research. For instance, Adam Grant, who's a sort of well-known scholar at the at the University of Pennsylvania, did something in the in the early 2000s called Relational Job Design, that was published in the Academy of Management Review. And one of the things he talks about in there, for instance, is, design work to strengthen connections to beneficiaries.
Let me sort of, share a little bit from that, from his first study, about connecting beneficiaries. One of the things he reports, in the 2007, I think it was on a, an experiment with people who worked in a, in a state university, I think it was the University of Michigan who were seeking scholarship funds for students at the university. So they would call up on the phone and they would say, hey, listen, can you give some money? My daughter did this when she was at Indiana University. Didn't last very long because she didn't generate enough money, I think, as a scholarship hunter.
But, clearly one of the things he did was to run an experiment where they would bring in the scholarship recipients to talk to a random selection of the individuals who worked in that job. And the other group was not exposed to the scholarship recipient. And individuals would come and students would come in there who were recipients of the scholarships, and they would talk about the great thing, great opportunities they had and the difference it made in their lives. What they, what he discovered was that after a month, those individuals who were exposed to the scholarship recipients were generating far more scholarship dollars than those people who were not. And the second point he discovered was there was a persistence of those results over time. This is sort of connecting beneficiaries.
Now, one of the points we didn't, weren't able to make before this research was done in the earlier research I did in writing, I did about public service motivation or public motivation was the design of work, you know, how do you sort of manipulate that? But clearly work design is important, and that's one element. Although at a fairly low level of the unit of analysis. We're talking about jobs or work, not the organization as a whole.
[9:38-9:40 Title card: Recruiting Motivated Public Servants.]
[09:41-9:51 Dr. Perry appears in the corner of the screen, at a podium, while a PowerPoint slide titled “Align Rewards to Reinforce Public Service Motivation” appears, with the following bullets:
- Use total compensation as benchmark for rewards (values: respect for democracy, respect for people)
- Use low-powered rather than high-powered incentives (values: integrity, stewardship)
- Avoid incentives that crowd out public service motivation (value: excellence).]
Dr. Perry: The Privy Council has identified five values that are key. Respect for people, respect for democracy, integrity, stewardship and excellence.
[9:52-10:00 The camera switches to Dr. Perry standing at a podium in front of the audience.]
Dr. Perry: But, you know, I think there's a huge correspondence between the values you are seeking, the ethics you are trying to create on behalf of the Privy Council.
[10:01-10:34 Full screen of Dr. Perry standing at the podium.]
And the idea of public service motivation because it throws out the window some of the things that lead us to lose our integrity and sort of, and it also substitutes stronger motivational devices than that which we can generate from extrinsic rewards like money or like pay for performance, which I think are far less influential than the difference that public servants make in the lives of the people for whom they work, and the causes for which they, run their organizations.
[10:34-10:37 Title card: Create a Supportive Work Environment]
[10:37-13:14 Dr. Perry appears in the corner of the screen, at a podium, while a PowerPoint slide titled “Create a Supportive Work Environment” appears, with the following bullets:
- Civil service rules create an environment for common pool resources, collective responsibility (values: respect for democracy, integrity, stewardship)
- A healthy civil service system creates a context to realize employees' basic psychological needs: competence, autonomy and relatedness (values: respect for people, excellence)
Dr. Perry: Create a supportive work environment. Civil service systems. Well-designed civil service systems are absolutely critical to providing a supportive work environment. This is a point I make, very extensively in chapter five of the book. Now. Two things about civil service systems. One is they generate an environment in which the people share collective responsibility for results. That's unlike the private sector where we say, you're in charge of this, you're responsible, nobody else is. Rather than that principle agent model, we have this model of collective responsibility embedded in the, writings of, Max Weber and others, many decades, if not more than a century ago. But they're very meaningful and they're very influential.
One of the things that we generate with civil service systems is this notion of collective responsibility. The other thing, which is embedded in the idea of self-determination theory, which is a very prominent theory of motivation, is that civil service systems provide a huge opportunity, create an environment, in which people can pursue their basic psychological needs.
What are those basic psychological needs? Autonomy, competence, relatedness. Those, according to the self-determination theory, which is started, which was started in the mid-1960s with Edward Deci, are very important for motivation of individuals. And one of the things we've overlooked is the beauty of civil service systems, because they put bureaucrats in a position where they are acting autonomously. Where they are put in place because of their competence, and they can pursue that, the use of that competence, for the jobs they've been given. And finally, this notion of relatedness, it's not just about them, it's about their connection to others. So basic.
So, civil service systems are highly consequential, for one, supporting this idea of collective responsibility and two, for providing an individual basic psychological needs. And we find very few institutions in the world and in the way we think about the management of organizations that are as supportive of creating an environment for action, responsible action, than we find with civil service systems. And they again, cater to many of those values that are at the core of the Privy Council.
[13:14-13:17 Title card: Transformational Leadership.]
[13:18-13:25 Dr. Perry appears in the corner of the screen, at a podium, while a PowerPoint slide titled “Lead with Mission, Inspiration and Communication” appears, with the following bullets:
- Develop and nurture transformational and servant leaders
- normative fit for public service
- personal growth, efficacy, worth of followers
- service at the center of leader-follower relationship.]
Dr. Perry: Now, one of the things I've come to a realization is that there are only a few leadership theories that fit normatively with the values that are important in public service.
[13:26-13:31 The camera switches to Dr. Perry standing at a podium in front of the audience.]
Dr. Perry: And they are what I talk about in chapter eight of the book, transactional or transformational leadership, not transactional, transformational leadership, charisma and servant leadership.
[13:32-14:00 Full screen of Dr. Perry standing at the podium.]
Dr. Perry: And I think and we've got a lot of research that says transformational leadership makes a difference in the public context. Servant leadership makes a difference in the public context. And among the sort of benefits of servant leadership, for instance, or transformational leadership, they pay a lot of attention to values. They put a lot of deference to the subordinates, to the followers, rather than the leaders.
[14:01-14:42 Dr. Perry appears in the corner of the screen, at a podium, while a PowerPoint slide titled “A Spirit of Service to the Community: Public Service Motivation in New Zealand” appears, with the following bullets:
- Scott & P. Hughes. (2023). A spirit of service to the community: public service motivation in the New Zealand public service. APJPA, DOI: 10.1080/23276665.2023.2233644. Free access.
- Spirit of service to the community: (1) putting citizens first; (2) having a higher purpose; and (3) acting with humility.
- Acknowledging public servants' motivations has reawakened an excitement about service
- From 2019, public service rewards and recognition reoriented around service.]
And applying the ideas in this book to reform the New Zealand public service. And that started with the Public Service Act of 2020, which was, sort of an effort to bring this idea of a spirit of service to the community, which is sort of their bottom. They say, our bottom line now in public service is a spirit of service to the community. That's what we ought to be driven by, not by the sort of the control of the executives for whatever they are, the agents, but for a much larger focus. And that is a spirit of service to the community, which may include many things that cannot be identified or captured by this principal agent model that they pursued in the 80s and 90s.
[14:42-14:48 Title card: Q& A, followed by text typed on screen: How can we recruit motivated public servants?]
[14:49-15:06 John Medcof is seated on a chair next to Dr. Perry, switching intermittently to only show John Medcof on screen.]
John Medcof: Starting with number one you know, recruit and select for high public service motivation. Are there things that we can do as leaders when we are looking to hire a new public service, particularly from outside of public service. What are some of the considerations we can bring to bear on our recruitment that will help us identify people who are motivated and committed?
[15:06-16:01 The camera switches to Dr. Perry seated in his chair, briefly switching to show him with John Medcof.]
Dr. Perry: One of our problems in the public sector is that we say it's all about the job. Now, I was, one of the things in writing the book, as I looked at the high performance literature and research that was very prominent in the 1990s. And one of the points it made was that you don't select just for the job, you select for the organization. Because after all, all of you started somewhere in your organization, maybe at the bottom of the organization and you've moved up, maybe because of your public service motivation, because of your commitment to the values and missions of the units within your agency or department, your directorate or whatever the Canadian terminologies.
[16:02-16:04 The camera switches to Dr. Perry seated in front of the audience with John Medcof.]
Dr. Perry: So, you know, I think it's important to have the sort of broader perspective of what it is that we, what attracts people to public service and what we want them to do in the long run.
[16:05-16:09 Title card with text typed on screen: How do we keep public servants motivated?]
[16:10-16:34 John Medcof is seated on a chair next to Dr. Perry, facing an audience, brief moments where camera is only on John Medcof.]
John Medcof: We've hired this bright, young, very motivated person, and then they joined the machine and the bureaucracy. And, how do we keep them motivated if they've arrived and they want to see immediate change. And immediate change is not always possible in our context. So how do we keep people motivated? How do we build those linkages, between the work that they're doing and that broader public service objective so that it feels real to them on a day-to-day basis?
[16:35-16:58 The camera switches to Dr. Perry seated in his chair.]
Dr. Perry: One of the things we, one of the things that Bruce Buchanan discovered in the 70s, which I think may still be a problem in many public service roles, is we think the work is so important. We got somebody new in the organization. We say wait, let's not push them a lot when they first come to the organization. The first thing we want to think about is creating job challenge early in a person's career.
[16:59-17:13 The camera switches to both John Medcof and Dr. Perry in their chairs.]
We want to sustain that motivation they bring to the workforce and bring to public service. We want to challenge them immediately. Because not doing so is going to sort of turn them off and will, diminish their public service motivation.
[17:14-19:17 Dr. Perry seated in his chair, switching intermittently to show him with John Medcof.]
Dr. Perry: So we want to start out with high job challenge. I think another, important point is that we also and this is related to some of the leadership theories, we want to give some attention to developing these people, because these are, the people are the future of our organizations, and we want them to feel as if they're being rewarded and supported and that they're, they will feel more rewarded and supported to the extent that we can sort of develop them as leaders and as also within their sort of the dimensions of their job.
Now, let me, know one other general point, and that is that one of the things we know from the research on public service motivation is that public service motivated people, people high in public service motivation tend to be more resilient, perhaps tend to be more forgiving. One of the studies I looked at by one ofmy former students yesterday was research on the adaptiveness to change, and they concluded that, people high in public service motivation sort of might invoke their willingness to self-sacrifice, that is, to give up, to give something of themselves for the greater good. Because the change makes a difference for the greater good. So there is sort of an element in the public service motivation research that says this is a good that helps us do a lot of - for instance, the other, another item was red tape. We have research that says people who are high in public service motivation are more tolerant of red tape. Maybe why? Because they recognize that there's some utility to the red tape. And it may generate benefits for the sort of the greater good that may not be readily transparent, but they are prepared to sort of set aside their reservations or, to work to overcome the limitations of red tape. And again, so I point to this notion of resilience, which I associate with public service motivation.
[19:18-19:21 Title card with text typed on screen: How can we restore pride in the work of public servants?]
[19:22-19:33 John Medcof and Dr. Perry are seated, facing the audience.]
John Medcof: One of the things that really struck me in in the report that came out on values and ethics, was that a lot of public servants are having, finding it challenging to take pride in their work.
[19:34-19:53 The camera switches back to John Medcof.]
I mean, you open the, the newspapers, if anybody still reads newspapers, you read the headlines online any day in Canada now, and there's likely to be an article that, that is maybe, you know, pointing out some of the challenges in public service that we've experienced in recent years and it's affecting people's pride in their work. So is there anything we can do from a motivation perspective to kind of help restore that pride in public service?
[19:54-20:40 Dr. Perry seated in his chair.]
Dr. Perry: There are, I think there are some downsides in public service motivation. One I talk about in the book, is to the extent that we embed our motivational scheme and values, when certain values go out of favour, or when, for instance, we have, political leaders who despise those values. Now, one of the other things and I talk about, for instance, in the context of leadership, is that leaders reinforce the pride and the achievements of the followers. And so, pride is something that's a leadership function. Generating pride is a leadership function. And so our leaders have some responsibility for reinforcing the good things and reminding people, hey, listen, everybody on the outside is saying you're bad guys. But for me, you're good guys. You're the people who have made a difference for your fellow citizens and whether or not that's appreciated, I appreciate it. And you ought to take some, you ought to value that and take some pride in that.
[20:41-21:35 The camera switches to both John Medcof and Dr. Perry in their chairs.]
There's something about the culture of public service where we're reluctant to take credit for it, partly because we have politicians and others shooting at the public servants saying, hey, listen, these public servants have taken, you know, have put one over on you. The fact is that they should be...they should be, diminished or they should be regretful as they've done some of the things they've done. But, so it's a little bit harder for us to take the pride in the achievements of what our organizations do.
[21:36-21:40 Title card with text typed on screen: How can we manage culture change and ties to accountability in the public service?]
[21:41-22:08 An audience member seated and holding the mic.]
Audience member: I work in Global Affairs Canada, and a lot of the values and these motivations around public service, they centre around culture and culture change. And I'm just wondering your perspectives on how we go about managing culture change in the public service, in public institutions and where the tie to accountability is for that? Do we hold leaders accountable to this culture change in a more formal sense, or is this something that we try to make a softer element in, in how we run our organizations?
[22:09-25:27 The camera switches to both John Medcof and Dr. Perry in their chairs, before intermittently switching to only Dr. Perry.]
Dr. Perry: Let me say that I think we ought to hold leaders accountable. The question is, can we measure it and can we identify what they're accountable for? So that's the real difficulty. You know, culture, strong cultures can come and they can go. The question, is how do we get there? How do you create cultures that, embrace public service motivation? Because it's not something that you get just by the rules, although clearly civil service rules that make meritocratic appointment, meritocratic advancement and job security as sort of central and are well-developed and well-formulated are sort of important design parameters of a strong public service motivation culture. But, for instance, one of the things we talk, I talk about in the book, and we also will talk about in this chapter, is storytelling. Let me share with you a great story that is prominent in the book. President John Kennedy went to Cape Canaveral in 1961, and he encountered a janitor. Mopping the floors, in the, holding area before the astronauts went in, up into the capsule. And he said, what are you doing? What's your job? And the janitor said, my job is putting a man on the moon. Now, that was a story that has been told many times in our federal government, because it was all about the meaningfulness of that person's work and recognizing that what they did may make a difference for whether we got a man on the moon, which we did, by the way.
But it was a story that was told and foretold or told many times in the US Federal Service to motivate people and to inspire people to say, there's a connectedness between what you do and these distant goals, these extraordinary goals that individuals in your organization may be working toward, and they may be closer to the end result than you. But by the way, if you get a couple specks of dust in that computer and the computer doesn't work when the Apollo 13 or whatever gets to the moon surface, then they're going to be in trouble. So you got a role in this too. So stories are important. My, I wish I could tell you more. The other one is that we taught, that we're going to talk about in the article that I talk about in the book, is "mission mystique". Getting people committed to the mission and mission salience is absolutely essential. And the question is, how do you sort of make that happen? That's a leadership function, but it's also a function of the culture. You mentioned this idea of sort of onboarding people and mentoring, which we talk about, which I talk about in chapter seven of the book. How do you socialize people?
But Paul O'Neill, who was fortunate enough to generate great wealth that, he just shared $30 million with our school. That's why we have his name on our school now, talks about mentoring that, that a low-level employee did when he was in the Bureau of the Budget.
[25:28-25:52 John Medcof and Dr. Perry are seated, facing the audience.]
This guy was, this guy was, I think a labourer. And he went to work on learning about this labourer, because his labourer had something to share with him that help him, to help him understand the work of the organization. And so mentoring is highly, can be highly consequential.
[25:53-26:07 The camera switches to John Medcof and Dr. Perry.]
And all of you, I don't know whether you have mentees, but there ought to be multiple mentors for every lower-level public servant, for every public servant in every public agency. And that can make a difference.
[26:08-26:23 The camera switches to just Dr. Perry.]
And that's a way of sort of building a culture around the values of the organization, what's important and what is very difficult to measure. Because, you know, one of the things we've talked about is the difficulty of measuring public performance. And we know, for instance, that people need to work not only on what's measured but what's not measured, because it's all, that is all about public service.
[26:24-26:34 The CSPS logo appears on screen. Text appears on screen: canada.ca/school. The government of Canada logo appears on screen.]
