For public causes or personal interests? Examining public service motives in the Chinese context

The western concept and scale of public service motivation (PSM) have recently been generalized to China. We analyze the western-centric PSM scale in the Chinese cultural, historical, and sociopolitical contexts. We find that PSM scale developed in the United States has limited applicability and generalizability in China. Instead, we adopt the career orientation inventory as an alternative to measure Chinese PSM with a sample of 403 government employees in relation to their job and career satisfactions and job involvement. We found that lifestyle, security and stability, technical/functional competence and service dedication to a cause were dominating motives for Chinese civil servants studied. The results not only partially explained the recent puzzling civil servant fever' phenomenon taking place in China, but also demonstrated that not all western developed scales could be directly adopted to the Chinese contexts. We offer important implications and future directions for research on PSM in the Chinese context.