Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 14th Aug 2025, 08:44:49am BST
Session Chair: Prof. Sharon GILAD, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Presentations
Crowding Out Commitment? Rethinking Motivation in Public Administration for Democratic Resilience
Charity L BOYETTE
Virginia Tech, United States of America
As democratic societies confront mounting challenges—including eroding trust in public institutions and shifting workforce expectations—public administrations must reexamine how they sustain engagement, integrity, and effectiveness among public servants. This paper contributes to this rethinking by challenging one of the foundational assumptions in public administration: that public service motivation (PSM) is the dominant or most desirable basis for commitment to public work.
Based on qualitative analysis of interviews with public sector professionals, this study found that instrumental motivations—such as fair compensation, professional development, and work-life balance—featured more prominently than traditional PSM drivers like altruism, compassion, or mission alignment. These findings raise concerns that over-reliance on moral or mission-based appeals in bureaucracies may inadvertently crowd out legitimate and necessary extrinsic needs, undermining long-term workforce resilience.
This paper argues for a more pluralistic and inclusive understanding of motivation in public administration, drawing on theories of motivational crowding and psychological contract to propose a rebalancing of how bureaucracies recognize and support their employees. By revisiting assumptions about what motivates public servants and integrating diverse motivational needs into institutional design, public administrations can better support democratic resilience, employee wellbeing, and intergenerational sustainability.
This work is especially relevant to discussions on how administrative systems must adapt to retain talent, embody democratic values, and remain responsive in increasingly complex social and political environments. It suggests that renewing the moral legitimacy of public institutions requires not only mission clarity, but also a commitment to meeting the practical needs of those who serve.
Overconfidence and Public Service Motivation
Illoong KWON
Seoul National Univeristy, Korea, Republic of (South Korea)
Civil servants play a crucial role in designing and implementing public policies. Therefore, it is essential to examine whether their decision-making processes are subject to cognitive biases, what factors influence these biases, and how such biases affect policy decisions.
This paper focuses on overconfidence among civil servants. Using survey data from civil servants and citizens in Korea, overconfidence is measured in two ways: (1) the gap between civil servants’ perception of their own productivity and their perception of their organization’s productivity (referred to as overplacement or the better-than-others effect) and (2) the gap between civil servants’ perception of their local citizens’ customer satisfaction level and the citizens’ actual customer satisfaction level (referred to as overestimation).
The findings indicate that, on average, civil servants exhibit overconfidence in both overplacement and overestimation. Moreover, public service motivation (PSM)—the desire to serve the public interest, often at the expense of personal gain—is positively associated with overconfidence. To the extent that overconfidence is an undesirable cognitive bias, this finding suggests a potential dark side of PSM. Lastly, overconfident civil servants are more likely to prefer indirect policy instruments, such as vouchers, over direct instruments, such as regulations. Thus, civil servants’ overconfidence can have significant consequences for policy design and outcomes, particularly in the context of the New Public Management (NPM) movement.
