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Korean Journal of Policy Studies
Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University

Korean J. Policy Stud. 2012; 27(1):87-108

pISSN: 1225-5017, eISSN: 2765-2807

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52372/kjps27105

Article

Pay-for-Performance and Work Motivation: Comparing Motivation between Two Compensation Systems in US Federal Agencies*

Geon Lee1
1Geon Lee is a BK21 postdoctoral fellow in the Graduate School of Public Administration at Seoul National University. His research interests are public management, human resource management, and public sector organizational behavior. His work has been published in the American Review of Public Administration, International Review of Public Administration, Public Administration Review, and Public Management Review. E-mail: glee153@snu.ac.kr.

© Copyright 2012 Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Received: Feb 10, 2012; Revised: Feb 21, 2012; Revised: Mar 23, 2012; Accepted: Apr 04, 2012

Published Online: Apr 30, 2012

Abstract

While private-sector managerial practices are being widely adopted in the public sector, few studies have investigated how market mechanisms influence the motivation or behavior of members of public organizations, or whether there is a systematic difference in employee motivation or behavior between marketcentered settings and traditional civil service environments within the public sector. Analyzing large-scale survey data, this study investigates the difference in employee motivation between two compensation systems in the US federal government: pay-for-performance and general schedule. The empirical findings show that employees working in pay-for-performance systems tend to place a higher value on extrinsic values such as pay, performance ratings, and promotion than those in general-schedule systems. This indicates that market-centered managerial practices may undermine the public service motivation of public servants while attracting extrinsically motivated employees to the public sector.

Keywords: pay-for-performance; pay systems; motivation