In charge of safeguarding the public interest: the role of goal clarity in shaping public service motivation and the acceptance of unethical behaviours
| Published date | 01 March 2022 |
| Date | 01 March 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852319878255 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
In charge of safeguarding
the public interest: the
role of goal clarity in
shaping public service
motivation and the
acceptance of unethical
behaviours
Guillem Ripoll
University of Navarra, Spain
Abstract
Ethics are important for personal, organizational and societal development. Although
the literature has isolated some remedies and causes of unethical attitudes and behav-
iours, there is a still a need for further research. When focusing on the public context,
it has been suggested that the motivation to serve the public interest has a negative
relationship with different unethical outcomes. Thus, one interesting avenue of
research is to explain how public service motivation can be enhanced by the outcome
of certain managerial practices, which may also lead to ethical benefits indirectly. Using
data collected from social workers in Catalonia (Spain), this article confirms that goal
clarity directly increases the levels of public service motivation and indirectly reduces
the acceptance of unethical behaviours by eliciting public service motivation. Research
and practical implications of the findings are discussed.
Points for practitioners
This study highlights the importance of public service-oriented institutional contexts in
indirectly shaping unethical outcomes. The findings recommend to public managers and
practitioners to provide goal clarity (through certain human-resource management
Corresponding author:
Guillem Ripoll, University of Navarra – School of Economics and Business, Amigos Building 4090 Pamplona,
Navarra 31009, Spain.
Email: gripollp@unav.es
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
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DOI: 10.1177/0020852319878255
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2022, Vol. 88(1) 43–58
practices such as appraisal or job design) because it increases public service motivation
and indirectly reduces the acceptance of unethical behaviour.
Keywords
goal clarity, public service motivation, unethical judgement
Introduction
Given the importance of ethics in flourishing good governments and societies
(Koven, 2015; Lawton et al., 2013), citizens are especially worried about the
spread of unethical attitudes and behaviours across governments and public agen-
cies. Although public administration scholars have provided valuable insights
regarding what causes unethical behaviour, more work is still needed to isolate
the ways in which it can be reduced (Belle
´and Cantarelli, 2017). Motivation is of
special interest to satisfy this need because it prompts individuals to bring their
values to decision situations involving ethical issues (Cramwinckel et al., 2013;
Stazyk and Davis, 2015). Moreover, since motivation can be influenced by many
human resource practices (e.g. training or job design), there is a broad spectrum of
management interventions that can be used to indirectly reduce unethical behav-
iours by cultivating motivation. This study investigates how public service moti-
vation (PSM) is related to the acceptance of unethical behaviours, and what
indirect role goal clarity plays by nurturing PSM.
Despite the scholarly interest in ethical behaviour (Kolthoff et al., 2013), there is a
surprising difficulty in defining it. The morality of an a ttitude or behaviour is usually
assessed by comparing it to a set of values and norms working as moral standards
(Lasthuizen et al., 2011). However, there is a difference between the content of an
outcome and the governance process that leads to that outcome (Huberts, 2018). For
example, a government can decide to create a social policy or not (content), with or
without making integrity violations such as cheating, bribing or favouritism (process).
Although using the first approach to explain the nuances of the theory, this study
defines unethical behaviour as acting against relevant norms and values: committing
integrity or ethics violations (Lasthuizen et al., 2011; Six and Lawton, 2013).
The first aim of this study is to confirm that PSM has a negative effect on
accepting unethical behaviours. When delving into the motivations of individuals
providing public services, the public administration literature has developed the
concept of PSM (cf. Perry and Wise, 1990, Ritz et al., 2016). PSM is defined as a
motivation to promote the public interest even if personal interests need to be
sacrificed (Schott et al., 2019; Vandenabeele et al., 2018). It captures an old
ideal: to provide meaningful public service, personal interests need to be replaced
by the interests of the community at large (Horton, 2008). Due to the emphasis on
looking after the public interest (and the public values that it embraces), PSM has
44 International Review of Administrative Sciences 88(1)
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