Tapping the Americorps Pipeline Using Secondary Data to Test the Public Service Motivation Construct

As public and nonprofit managers are continually expected to provide more and better public services, the current political and economic conditions have made funding these efforts difficult, leaving public administrators with few tools to improve organizational performance and programmatic outcomes. In an effort to improve performance, public and nonprofit organizations have begun to incorporate traditionally private sector practices, such as performance management, program evaluations, and process improvement techniques into management practices. However, the results of these efforts appear to have had only a weak to moderate effect (Moynihan, 2008). A parallel approach to improving performance has focused on generating a better understanding of the motives and values of public and nonprofit sector employees. The motivation literature has important implication for the attraction, selection, and attrition of employees, as well as for improving the performance of these employees. Recently, there has been considerable scholarly attention paid to the development of the public service motivation (PSM) construct as a way of predicting and measuring the values that differentiate public employees from their private sector counterparts. Among the leading and most analyzed research veins in contemporary public administration and management literature, PSM theory posits that intrinsic motivations are important drivers in attracting individuals to public service. Although this research has flourished, there has not been convergence around a single definition of PSM. Rather, attempts to generate a more definitive definition of PSM have arguably created greater divergence. Despite the variance in definitions, at its most basic definition, PSM refers to "an individual's predisposition to respond to motives grounded primarily or uniquely in public institutions and organizations" (Perry & Wise, 1990, p. 368). Perry and Wise (1990) suggest that latent constructs such as attraction to public policymaking, sense of civic duty, compassion, and self-sacrifice are all positively associated with PSM. In addition, the PSM research agenda has recently shifted toward model validation and psychometric verification of the construct. Although the advancements identified in contemporary research (Kim, 2011; Kim et al., 2013) are important for better defining the underlying drivers of PSM, they primarily introduce new scales and items than the original scale. In an effort to generate greater convergence around the definition and measurement methods of PSM, they also signify a need for improved measures of PSM to better explain the motives that attract individuals to public service and ultimately retain these individuals. This research examines the utility of using secondary data to measure values associated with PSM. Utilizing a dataset compiled by the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) that examines the impact of participation in AmeriCorps programs on individuals, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) are used to determine whether PSM-related values are identified among a population likely to hold PSM-related values. From a practical perspective, this research tests for the presence of PSM-related values among an important and understudied population: those interested in national service programs. AmeriCorps, a quasi-governmental federal service program, largely provides human capital to nonprofit organizations and local governments. Although a primary purpose of the program is to improve nonprofit organizational capacity, affecting individual program participants is also an important programmatic priority (Perry, Thomson, Tschirhart, Mesch, & Lee, 1999). More recently, national service has been identified as an important pipeline for addressing the impending wave of retiring baby-boomers in the public and nonprofit sectors (Frumkin et al., 2009; Ward, 2013). …