Crowding-Out or Crowding-In? The Impact of Performance Rating on Public Service Motivation: Evidence From a Chinese Local Government

Despite extensive research on Public Service Motivation (PSM), reconciling the debate over whether PSM is a state or a trait remains a challenge among public administration scholars. Studies exploring the antecedents of PSM that engage in this debate often overlook the importance of organizational factors in influencing PSM. Framed within the literature on the behavioral aspects of performance information processing and adopting a propensity-score-matching model with data from a Chinese local government, we examine whether and how performance ratings influence public service motivation of public servants. The results show that performance ratings have a crowding-out effect, underscoring how the ways in which signals of performance feedback are conveyed to public servants can shape PSM. Our findings contribute to understanding the antecedents that preserve and promote public service motivation. We call for future research that focuses on public-value-based performance appraisal systems in centralized regimes.