EVIDENCE OF AN ‘END OF HISTORY ILLUSION’ IN THE WORK MOTIVATIONS OF PUBLIC SERVICE PROFESSIONALS
| Date | 01 March 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12213 |
| Published date | 01 March 2016 |
doi: 10.1111/padm.12213
EVIDENCE OF AN ‘END OF HISTORY ILLUSION’
IN THE WORK MOTIVATIONS OF PUBLIC SERVICE
PROFESSIONALS
GREGG G. VAN RYZIN
The ‘end of history illusion’ refers to the tendency of people to underestimate change in their future
values and preferences. Could this cognitive bias apply to the work motivations of those in public
service? Toexamine this question, a sample of public service professionals was asked about their cur-
rent work motivations and then randomized to be ‘reporters’, who recalled their work motivations
10 years ago, and ‘predictors’, who forecast their work motivations 10 years from now. Predictors
expected much less change in their work motivations over time than reporters actually experienced.
Specically, predictors underestimated the importance of helping others and of working indepen-
dently, and they overestimated the importance of income. Thus, public service professionals, who
are often assumed to have unique prosocial motivations, seem to be subject to an ‘end of history
illusion’ when making decisions about what job characteristics will matter to them over the course
of their careers.
INTRODUCTION
People make decisions relatively early in their lives that can have a profound inuence
on their career trajectories. Even as children, people playact work roles that they want to
assume when they grow up (teacher, doctor, reghter). Adults routinely ask children,
‘What do you want be when you grow up?’ – encouraging them to imagine their future
working selves. Then as people grow into adolescence (high school) and enter young
adulthood (college), they engage in a variety of academic and other activities that prepare
them in different ways for the world of work. The accumulation and consolidation of these
many work-related expectations and decisions, made relatively early in life, profoundly
shape our job opportunities, sectors of employment, and work-related satisfaction as we
mature into middle age and beyond. But do our younger selves really know what we will
value in our work as we grow older?
This question may have particular relevance to public service, which is an area of
employment that many have claimed attracts people with prosocial work motivations
(Perry and Hondeghem 2008). But do these motivations change over the course of a per-
son’s career? More generally, what job characteristics do people predict will be important
to them in their future work lives – and how accurate are their predictions? The answers
to these questions have potentially important consequences because of the long-term,
prospective, and often deterministic nature of most people’s education and career deci-
sions in life. If people’s predictions regarding work motivations are biased, this could
have profound implications for organizations and for the well-being of individuals.
WORK MOTIVATIONS
Work motivations have been the focus of a very large and long-established body of the-
ory and research in the general management literature (Pinder 2008; Kanfer et al. 2012).
Gregg G. VanRyzin is at the School of Public Affairs and Administration, Rutgers University, USA.
Public Administration Vol.94, No. 1, 2016 (263–275)
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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