Public service motivation and the intention to enter in the public sector: a comparison between Italian and British students

Many scholars of public administration converge on the belief that some individuals are predisposed to perform public service. In this frame, the nature and the relevance of public service motivation (PSM) remains – after two decades of research – one of the “big questions” of public management. In particular, many researchers have hypothesized that a person’s PSM has a positive connection with a preference for public sector employment. Following this stream of research, the present study explores the link between PSM and the perceived attractiveness of public sector employment. Using a sample of 782 students, this paper makes two contributions: first, we investigate the employment sector preferences of students in a variety of programmes such as management, economics and others. Second, we compare differences in sector preference between Italian and British students increasing the available empirical evidence on this question. Our results provide support for a positive relationship between PSM and public sector job preferences, even if only for the Italian students. On the contrary, our analyses provide only limited support for the idea that previous public sector work experience strengthens the association between PSM and sector preferences.