Should I Stay or Should I Go: The Impact of Public Duty Motivation on Turnover Intentions*

Despite the expansion of public service motivation (PSM) research in recent years, only a few studies have linked PSM with public employees’ turnover, and they have typically understood turnover as a dichotomous decision of staying versus leaving. Unlike previous research, we explore the relationship by taking into account various exit options. Utilizing data from the 2005 Merit Principles Survey, we classify public employees’ exit strategies into four types—not leaving, retiring, moving to another federal agency, and resigning from federal service—and examine how an indirect measure of PSM influences which of these exit strategies they intend to follow. We employ the indirect measure due to data availability; following previous research, we name this measure public duty motivation. Our findings suggest that the impact of public duty motivation varies across intended exit strategies: it decreases the likelihood of public employees intending to retire, while it leads them to be more likely to intend to move to another job within the federal government. In contrast, it is not a significant predictor of public employees’ intention to resign from federal service.