Prospective Employee Attitudes Toward Public and Private Sector Employment: A Comparison Study of a Belgian and Two Greek University Student Groups

The increasing scarcity of talent and the graying of the labor market in western societies pose a number of challenges for the human resource departments of public sector organizations. Traditionally, the public sector fails to attract high-caliber professionals, since it lacks the resources of private organizations, unable to match their salaries and benefits. The situation is getting even more difficult for managers in the public sector, with the drives of downsizing and leanness, forced on them by the governments. Public organizations thus need to focus on finding high-quality talent, driven more by public service motivation (PSM) and less by extrinsic rewards. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between PSM and student choice of employer. Three samples were used in our analysis, one from a Graduate School of Economics in Belgium, another one from a Graduate School of Public Administration in Greece, and a third one also from a Graduate School of Business in Greece. We used SPSS and conducted a factor analysis, to ensure that the questions correspond to the expected dimensions of PSM. We then examined the relationship between the dimensions of PSM and the employer choices using correlation analysis. The hypotheses concerning the employer choices and the PSM dimensions were tested with ANOVA. The results partially supported the hypotheses proposed in this paper, demonstrating that PSM is a good indicator of an individual’s propensity to give preference to working for a public organization, in spite of the less attractive rewards expected by doing so. The implications of the findings in this study are particularly significant for public organizations, since they highlight the value of PSM, as a predictor of how devoted to public service a future employee will be before recruitment. Public organizations can avoid turnover and achieve high levels of job satisfaction and employee motivation, if they use PSM when they recruit their staff.