Supportive management practice and intrinsic motivation go together in the public service

Drawing on over 4,000,000 individual and 2,000 agency observations across five countries, this paper examines the relationship between features of an employee’s work environment and intrinsic motivation in public agencies. It finds that practices which foster employees’ sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are associated with substantially higher levels of intrinsic motivation across a broad range of settings. This is true both at the individual and agency level and when examining changes within agency over time. These patterns appear to be at least partially a result of differential selection in and out of the agency, with lower levels of supportive practices associated with greater desire to exit for employees with higher levels of intrinsic motivation. Nonfinancial elements of job design are strongly associated with intrinsic motivation, as are potentially more difficult to alter features of an agency, such as satisfaction with compensation and managerial quality. There is also suggestive evidence that the relationship between agency practices and employee intrinsic motivation is stronger when tasks are more difficult to monitor.