A Life Worth Living: Public Employment, Desire to Help Others, and Happiness Thomas Deleire, Kohei Enami, Donald P. Moynihan* University of Wisconsin-Madison Abstract This paper examines the interaction between public sector employment, desire to help others, and life satisfaction. Public service motivation research suggests that individuals who seek to help others pursue public sector work, suggesting an effort to match job choices with intrinsic beliefs. The primary empirical focus of the paper is a longitudinal analysis, using data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which has followed a cohort of 1957 high-school graduates throughout their lives, and includes indicators of cumulative life-satisfaction. We supplement this analysis with pooled cross-sectional analyses from the General Social Survey, which includes indicators of current happiness. The results between the two sets of analyses vary slightly, but key findings are consistent. There is some limited evidence that public sector work is associated with higher life-satisfaction and happiness, but this effect holds only for males. Our analysis shows that individuals who express a stronger desire to help others through their work enjoy higher life-satisfaction and happiness, but that this effect is not limited to, and may even be weaker among, public sector employees. Paper prepared for the 2011 meeting of the Public Management Research Conference, Syracuse, NY, June 2-4. *corresponding author: [email protected]
Transcript
A Life Worth Living:
Public Employment, Desire to Help Others, and Happiness
Thomas Deleire, Kohei Enami, Donald P. Moynihan*
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Abstract This paper examines the interaction between public sector employment, desire to help others, and life satisfaction. Public service motivation research suggests that individuals who seek to help others pursue public sector work, suggesting an effort to match job choices with intrinsic beliefs. The primary empirical focus of the paper is a longitudinal analysis, using data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which has followed a cohort of 1957 high-school graduates throughout their lives, and includes indicators of cumulative life-satisfaction. We supplement this analysis with pooled cross-sectional analyses from the General Social Survey, which includes indicators of current happiness. The results between the two sets of analyses vary slightly, but key findings are consistent. There is some limited evidence that public sector work is associated with higher life-satisfaction and happiness, but this effect holds only for males. Our analysis shows that individuals who express a stronger desire to help others through their work enjoy higher life-satisfaction and happiness, but that this effect is not limited to, and may even be weaker among, public sector employees.
Paper prepared for the 2011 meeting of the Public Management Research Conference, Syracuse, NY, June 2-4. *corresponding author: [email protected]
“Only a life lived in the service of others is worth living” – Albert Einstein Introduction
How does career choice, intrinsic motivation to help others, and the interaction between the two contribute to life satisfaction? Public service is sometimes characterized as a special calling, but we do not know if those who pursue that calling end up being happier with their lives. While research on public service motivation (PSM) has argued for the special importance of intrinsic motivation on a variety of workplace behaviors, we again know little about whether those with strong intrinsic motivations enjoy greater long-term life satisfaction. In addition, we lack knowledge about how these two interact in producing satisfying lives.
The first section of the paper makes the case for connecting research on PSM to the study
of subjective well-being. Life satisfaction has long been an outcome of interest among psychologists and recently been becoming of greater interest to economists, organizational theorists, and in policy studies. It also, in some countries, has become a policy goal in its own right. In the second section, we describe the data and measures upon which the analysis is based. We use the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS), which has followed a cohort of 1957 high-school graduates throughout their lives. The panel is extraordinary in terms of its length and continuously high participation rate, and allows us to assess how career choices and values expressed early in life contribute to a sense of satisfaction at the close of one’s career. We supplement this analysis with data from the General Social Survey (GSS) which includes a measure of current happiness. In the remaining sections, we present and discuss our results.
The results do not show compelling evidence that working in the public sector generally
increases life satisfaction for the cohort studied. Males who have worked in public administration are, at the end of the career, more satisfied with their lives, but the effect does not hold for women. Our analysis shows that individuals with a stronger desire to help others through their work enjoy higher life-satisfaction, but that this effect seems to be less pronounced for public employees relative to private counterparts. We discuss the implications of these findings.
Relating Public Service Motivation to Subjective Well-Being
Public service is sometimes characterized as a special calling, one that might not reward financially, but provides intrinsic satisfaction from helping others (Frederickson and Hart 1985). PSM research suggests that the idea of a calling for public service is a real empirical phenomenon, with consequences for the career choices individuals make, their commitment, satisfaction, and performance at work, and other individual outcomes (see Pandey and Stayzk 2008 for a review of this literature). A key assumption of this work is that the matching of individuals with high public service motivation to work contexts where they can help others results in a more engaged individual. While work on motivation and work context primarily focuses on work outcomes, it should also have relevance for the life experience of the individual. Almost by definition, what motivates us should, at some basic level, also contribute to our life satisfaction. But this connection is largely unexamined. We have, for example, a host of studies on the impact of an individual’s PSM on workplace attitudes behaviors, but no evidence on whether PSM actually allows the individual to enjoy a greater sense of happiness.
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We seek to test whether public work, public service motivation, and the interaction between the two is associated with long-term benefits to subjective well-being. Subjective well-being has been frequently equated with measures of happiness or life satisfaction (Diener et al. 1999; Ryan and Deci, 2011; Ryff 2008). Our key dependent variables are cumulative life satisfaction, as estimated by a cohort of individuals at or near retirement age, and current happiness collected in cross-sectional GSS data.
In recent years scholars and policymakers have come to increasingly accept the
importance of subjective well-being as a central societal value (Judge and Kammeyer-Mueller 2011). Among valued-life goals, subjective-well being ranks at the top across many countries and different demographic groups (Diener 2000). It has, increasingly, also attained a level of policy importance. Nobel prize winners Amartya Sen and Joeseph Stiglitz led a commission that recommended that countries track measures of subjective well-being (SWB) indicators in addition to GDP (Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi 2009, see also Diener 2000). The government of UK has established a national happiness index to track how members of the public are feeling on a quarterly basis.
A burgeoning field of research on subjective well-being has emerged from economics
and psychology, and increasingly in organization theory and public policy. Judge and Mueller (2011, 31) summarize prior research to suggest that “SWB is relevant as an outcome for organizational research, and that public policy researchers interested in SWB should take note of the considerable body of research from organizational scholars showing that work can be a general source of happiness.”
Studies of PSM, or of public sector work more generally, have not tested the implications
of career choices or intrinsic motivation on SWB. We propose the following research questions:
1. Do people who engage in public sector work enjoy higher subjective well-being than others?
2. Do people with a stronger desire to help others enjoy higher subjective well-being than others?
3. Do public employees with a strong desire to help others experience higher subjective well-being than others?
Even without prior research directly on these questions, there is some evidence to
suppose that there might be a connection between these variables. There is evidence from the US, Netherlands, and South Korea that PSM is correlated with job satisfaction among public employees (Brewer and Selden 1998; Kim 2005; Steijn 2008). Other studies have found that job satisfaction and life satisfaction are positively and reciprocally related (Judge and Watanabe 1993), which offers some empirical evidence to suggest that PSM would also be correlated with life satisfaction. However, the relationship between job and life satisfaction is strongest using cross-sectional data, and weakens when longitudinal measures are used (Judge and Watanabe 1993).1
1 Judge and Watanabe found that cross-sectional indicators of job and life satisfaction were correlated at .41, but the correlation between the original measure of job satisfaction and a measure of life-satisfaction from five years on was correlated at a .25 level. This basic pattern holds for the WLS cohort we study. The 2004 measure of life satisfaction
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Other research has illustrated how the value associated with work is correlated with life
satisfaction by studying the effects of job loss. For many workers, the loss of a job corresponds with a loss in SWB and that this effect is not simply due to changes in income, wealth, or perceived financial well-being (Winkleman and Winkleman 1998; Kalil and DeLeire 2011). It is likely that individuals who gain satisfaction directly from their work will suffer a loss in this satisfaction upon separation.
Other evidence shows that individuals who feel they have attained valued intrinsic goals
report higher life satisfaction (Judge et al. 2005). This reflects a “self-concordance” model derived from goal-setting (Locke and Latham 2002) and self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan 1985). As individuals pursue goals that match their values an interest, self-concordance theory proposes that life satisfaction will increase (Sheldon and Elliot 1999).
To understand how career choices and PSM might relate to long-term SWB, a
longitudinal approach is ideal. One limitation of PSM work is the reliance on cross-sectional models, which limit the internal validity and contextual realism of the resulting research (Wright and Grant 2010). We employ a strategy of using of existing longitudinal data that include reasonable correlates of PSM. The WLS, described in detail below, provides data on individual career choice as well as an early-career measure (asked when respondents were about 37 years old) of disposition to help others, as well as life satisfaction as individuals come to the close of their career (when respondents were about 65 years old). The survey allows respondents to make long-term assessments of life satisfaction based on their entire careers, while allowing us to test how work factors from decades earlier may have mattered to this assessment. By contrast, other work that has tried to model the effect of intrinsic factors on life satisfaction has sometimes relied on college students, or left limited time between response waves, such as a couple of months (Judge et al. 2005), or even a few years (Rode 2004). Data
We use data from the WLS – a longitudinal study of 10,317 individuals who graduated from high school in Wisconsin in 1957. The survey started in 1957 as a random one-third sample of the Wisconsin high school graduates, which makes the data representative of that cohort. Main survey waves include 1957, 1964, 1975, 1992, and 2004. The survey collects a wide range of information on individuals’ life courses, including information on family background, aspiration in earlier life, personality, education, work history, and physical and mental health.
Both the retention rate and the response rate for the survey have been exceptionally high.
The retention rate of the original 1957 respondents in 2004 was 75%; the retention rate among the non-deceased sample was 86%. The response rate among non-deceased respondents was
is correlated with 2004 job satisfaction measure at .202 level, at the 1992 job satisfaction indicator at the .187 level, and with the 1975 measure at the .141 level. All correlations are statistically significant at the .001 level. However, other work (Rode 2004) suggests that both life satisfaction and job satisfaction are ultimately both explained by underlying dispositional attributes.
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92%.2 The large sample size, long study period, and high retention rate all make WLS uniquely suitable for studying the relationship between early attitudes and life satisfaction at older age. We supplement our longitudinal analysis using pooled cross-sectional data from the GSS, a national survey of the American public that began in 1972. Across some waves the GSS features some combination of the basic variables we are focused on (government and public administration work, desire to help others, and a general indicator of SWB), as well as a host of relevant control variables.3 The GSS has been used previously in PSM work (e.g. Houston, 2008; Lewis and Frank, 2004) though the link to happiness has not been examined. The addition of a cross-sectional approach adds another component to the analysis. Measures
In this section we describe the measurement of the key variables we examine. Since our primary interest is in the WLS, our discussion focuses mainly on items from this dataset unless otherwise noted. The key outcome of interest in our study is life satisfaction in 2004, which comes from the following question: “To what extent do you agree that when you look at the story of your life you are pleased with how things have turned out?” The set of possible responses include six ordered categories, ranging from disagree strongly (0) to agree strongly (5). The item is notable in that it seeks to solicit a sense of cumulative life satisfaction, inviting the respondent to consider their life course rather than just present state. It is more common for indicators of subjective well-being (or happiness) to frame the item in terms of current state. The item in the WLS, both in terms of wording and timing (asked at retirement), is better suited to linking past career experiences with life satisfaction. By comparison, the SWB variable from the GSS asks respondents “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days?” where respondents have the option of answering "very happy," "pretty happy," or "not too happy." We code the responses 2, 1, 0, respectively. While this measure also relates to SWB, it is more directly a measure of happiness rather than life-satisfaction and the framing of the question (“these days”) emphasizes current feelings rather than the long-term framing of the WLS (“when you look back at the story of your life.”) It is important to note therefore, that while both our WLS and GSS-derived dependent variables measure SWB, they are not equivalent.
Our measure of PSM is a question about how important the opportunity to help others is
in judging a job.4 The set of possible responses include three categories: not particularly important, fairly important, and very important. We create a dummy variable based on these responses, which takes the value of 1 when the response is "very important" and 0 otherwise. This question is asked only in the 1975 of the WLS survey. This item also appears in certain rounds of the GSS, along with other variables that contemporary organizational theorists would likely classify as indicators of prosocial motivation or perceived social impact (e.g. Grant 2008;
2More detail on the survey can be found here: http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/wlsresearch/. The data is available to any interested researchers. Full details on response and retention rates for different waves of the survey can be found here: http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/wlsresearch/documentation/retention/cor1004_retention.pdf 3Details of the GSS can be found here http://www.norc.uchicago.edu/GSS+Website/ 4 The exact questionnaire text goes: “I'd like to find out how important a number of things are to you in judging jobs in general--not just your job but any job. For instance, how much difference does the pay make in how you rate a job--is pay very important, fairly important, or not particularly important?” Then importance of other aspects of job, including “the chance to help people,” is asked in turn. There are 15 items in total being asked about under this question set.
Wright and Grant 2010): the importance of social usefulness in a job, whether respondents perceive they are helping others in their job, and if their job is useful to society.
Contemporary studies of PSM rely on a range of specially-developed scales, most of
which are shortened or expanded versions of a scale developed by Perry (1996). Our measure is different, relying on a single item of desire to help others through work. This raises the question of whether it is an appropriate measure of PSM. It is worth noting that much of the origins of PSM scholarship come from studies that use the item we employ or a closely-worded item. Such early work generally suggests that public employees place a higher value on jobs that allow them to help others than private employees (Rainey, 1982; Crewson 1997; Lewis and Frank 2002). In a 2005 survey across 11 North American and West European countries Houston (2009) found that significantly higher numbers of public employees saw a job that allowed them to help others as very important relative to private employees. In our sample, desire to help others is also positively and significantly associated with governmental work, suggesting that our sample behaves in ways similar to others in this respect.
Recent work on PSM measurement suggest that a single-item measure of desire to help
others correlates highly enough with widely used measures of PSM that may be judged to capture the same conceptual space (Wright, Christensen and Pandey 2010). The related concept of pro-social behavior may be subject to influence (Grant 2008), but features relatively stable trait characteristics that correspond with helpfulness towards others. We primarily use the following variables as measures of public work participation:
1. Ever participated in governmental work in/before 1975, 2. Ever participated in governmental work after 1975, 3. Ever participated in public administration work in/before 1975, and 4. Ever participated in public administration work after 1975
Governmental work comes from a series of questions on class of worker code, which
groups jobs into five groups of private business, government employee, own business incorporated, own business not incorporated, and unpaid family work. The dummy variable “Ever participated in governmental work in/before 1975” is coded 1 if the response of “government employee” appears in at least one of the following timings: first job5, March 1970, longest job last year, and current or last job at the point of 1975 interview. Likewise, the variable “Ever participated in governmental work after 1975” is coded 1 if the response of “government work” appears in at least one of job spells after 1975. For the GSS data, a measure of governmental work is available in GSS, which is coded 1 if the respondent is employed by a government and 0 if employed by a private employer.
Public administration work comes from major industry codes. Job spells between 1975
and 1992 are classified using 1970 census version of major industry code, which groups jobs into 12. Job spells between 1992 and 2004 are classified by 1990 census version of major industry code, which groups jobs into 13 categories. Both versions include "public administration" item 5 The question goes: “We would like to know about the first, full-time civilian job you had after you completed your highest grade in school.” (page 3 in http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/wlsresearch/documentation/questionnaires/ques75.pdf )
in their response set. The variable of "Ever participated in public administration in/before 1975" takes the value of 1 if the individual responded “public administration” in at least one of the timings of first job, March 1970, longest job last year, and current or last job. The variable of "Ever participated in public administration after 1975" takes the value of 1 if at least one of the respondents job spells is classified as public administration and 0 otherwise. For the GSS data we also create a dummy variable for public administration work for those whose work falls into appropriate census industry codes from 1980.
The key difference between the public administration and government category is that the
latter is much more specialized. 40% of the sample engaged in government work at some point in their career, while only 12% worked in the public administration category. Even so, the category of public administration is still varied including professional and technical positions, managers, clerical workers, service positions, but also firefighters and police.
The descriptive statistics for the WLS are given in Table 1. Insert table 1 here Method
We include the observations with valid data on life satisfaction in 2004. This reduces the sample from about 10,300 total observations to 6,754 observations. The observations are omitted from regression when one or more of the variables in the regression are missing. The desire to help variable was not asked to individuals who did not work at all prior to 1975 survey, which occurs more often for women. Also, there are some nonresponses among men and women. These reduce the number of male sample with valid life satisfaction in 2004 and desire to help measures from 3,111 to 2,956, and female sample from 3,643 to 2,545.
We estimate the impact of career choice, PSM, and the interaction between the two on
life satisfaction using linear regression6 with robust standard errors. We control for gender, parental income and education, respondents family income at time of response and education, marriage status, health status, and number of children. In the GSS models, we control for gender, age and age squared, education, marriage status, race, health status, and income. Results We present the results for each research question in turn. 1. Do people who engage in public sector work enjoy higher subjective well-being than others?
Table 2 provides estimates of the impact of public sector work on life satisfaction, controlling for other factors. The results show that working in the public sector, whether categorized as governmental work or public administration work, has a positive impact for life satisfaction, but the impact only becomes significant under certain conditions. For males who have worked in public administration jobs prior to 1975, the effects are positive and significant
6 Because the dependent variable in a 6-category ordered variable, we also estimated all models using ordered probits and obtained equivalent results.
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on life satisfaction. The effect size is 0.16 on 6-point scale (i.e. 0 to 5), or about 15% of one standard deviation. Insert table 2 here
We also tested a pooled cross-sectional version of the model, using data from the GSS (see table 3). In these analyses, there was a positive correlation between governmental work and happiness, though not between public administration work and life satisfaction for the overall sample.7 If we separate the results by gender, we find that the effects of government work on happiness for males are significant, but not for females, while public administration work is significant for males at p<.10 level, but not for females.
Insert table 3 here
Overall, the results suggests some limited evidence that suggests that early exposure to
some forms of public employment leads to higher life satisfaction for men. However, this positive impact of public sector careers on life satisfaction is not evident for women or, for the WLS cohort, for exposure to public administration later in one’s career.8 2. Do people with a stronger desire to help others enjoy higher subjective well-being than others?
Our second question asks whether there is a connection between desire to help others, and life satisfaction. The results are presented in Table 3. Insert table 4 here
The results show that individuals who report a desire to help others in 1975 have higher levels of life satisfaction in 2004. The effect size of the desire to help coefficient is about .12 on a 0-5 scale, approximately 10% of a standard deviation of the life satisfaction score. However, the effects of desire to help appear to be more pronounced among private employees than public.9 For private sector employees with a desire to help others there is a clear gain in life satisfaction. For government employees, there is not a statistically significant difference in life satisfaction between employees who express a strong desire to help others and those who do not.
7 In 2002, 2006 and 2010 the GSS also featured items that asked about non-profit work. Though not featured here, we also included this in a model of happiness, and find it was not significant. 8 The model provided may slightly underestimate the effect of public employment, since we also control for other factors, such as health and income, that are potentially correlated with public employment and tend to contribute to life satisfaction. 9 Models (2) through (5) in Table 3 are modeled as separate regressions allowing all the coefficients to be different across groups. We ran versions of these models jointly with interaction terms for desire to help others by work status, the interaction terms were not statistically significant. Overall then, though the effect of desire to help appear to be different across work status but the difference is not statistically significant.
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For those in the public administration category, desire to help others does increase life satisfaction at p<.10 levels.
We also ran a version of this model that includes number of years of work in the government/public administration categories (not shown). The basic findings hold, with the exception that the positive effect of desire to help on life satisfaction for public administration workers is now significant at the p<.05 level.
We ran a cross-sectional version of the model with GSS data from 1989 and 1998, when
the equivalent measure of desire to help others were included available. Here, desire to help others was correlated with happiness, at p<.10 levels. A similar measure, the importance of perceived social usefulness of a job, performed similarly. Individual’s perceptions that they were actually helping others or society with their job (equivalent to perceived social impact, see Wright and Grant 2010) were significantly associated with concurrent happiness at the p<.05 level and p<.01 levels respectively. Insert table 5 here
Unlike the other models, table 4 lists the effects of the control variables for the WLS. The
results consistently show that female status, being married, having a graduate level of education, higher levels of income, and better health are all associated with increased life satisfaction. The GSS analyses presented in table 3 show similar results, but also show that whites report higher happiness than non-whites, while age has a u-shaped relationship with happiness. These findings are generally consistent with other work in the study of subjective well-being. 3. Do public employees with a strong desire to help others experience higher subjective well-being than others?
The results presented in table 4 do not suggest that desire to help others has a particular impact on life satisfaction for individuals who worked as public employees generally, though its does for individuals who worked as public administrators. To further explore whether desire to help matters in a particular way for public employees we identify a series of models that use interaction terms. Insert tables 6 and 7 here
Tables 6 and 7 show the results from analyses that interact desire to help and governmental status, and desire to help and public administration status. Given the table 2 suggests that the effect of public work on life satisfaction might depend on temporal and gender factors, we offer models to account for these differences by a) creating interaction terms for public work before and after 1975, and b) breaking the sample into male and female groups. In none of the models specified does the interaction term significantly influence life satisfaction. We also ran a version of the model where we substituted desire to help with satisfaction to the chance to help in the current job in 1975. The results (not shown) were also not significant.
Insert table 8 here
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Using GSS data, we also interacted desire to help and other similar indicators with public
administration work to test the effects on happiness.10 As with the WLS data, we do not see positive results, and indeed there is a negative effect (at the 10% level) of the interaction term for the model that that interacts the importance of the perceived social usefulness of a job with public administration work. Discussion
The results offer new insights into career choices and life satisfaction. There is some limited, though not overwhelming, evidence that working in public sector positions, all else equal, increases life satisfaction and happiness. The link between careers and life satisfaction, for the WLS cohort, is heavily qualified. For males early in their careers, working in public administration increases life satisfaction. The GSS results show a similar gender variation in the effects of public work on happiness? Why does public sector work in earlier periods of time increase life satisfaction, but not in later periods? What accounts for the gender differences in the results? These questions invite speculation, but we cannot offer definitive answers.
On the question of why public employment seems to matter to life satisfaction early in
the respondents’ careers, but not later, there are a couple of plausible explanations. One is the potential for burnout among public employees. Moynihan and Pandey (2007) find that the longer that individual’s work in public organizations (controlling for age), the lower their job involvement. A second explanation is that as public employees become older, the nature of their job changes in ways that contribute less to life satisfaction. Common to the both these explanations is the idea that younger employees may be less cynical and derive more meaningful experiences from public work, while older employees become more jaded, either because they perceive the limits of public work over time, or because their changing nature of their jobs pulls them away from the opportunities to do meaningful work.
A third explanation is that external events occurring as the cohort aged made public work
less attractive, and thereby matter less to life satisfaction. The post World-War II political culture represents something of an aberration in American history in that public sector work enjoyed a high level of prestige. Moynihan and Ingraham (2010, 230) characterize this period as “the administrative heyday—a time when government and administration were held in high popular esteem, trusted, and enjoyed bipartisan support.” Our cohort of respondents grew up in this period. But by the late 1960s public confidence in government started to erode, and by the end of the 1970s the modern era of bureaucrat-bashing had begun. It may be that our cut-off period of 1975 simply coincides with a broader societal changes that saw the value of public work more questioned, and thereby made it more difficult for public employees to derive life-satisfaction from this work.11 It is also the case that young individuals today increasingly associate meaningful public service with non-profit or volunteer work rather than with public sector work (Light 1999). If these trends are real, they seem to further undermine the potential for public sector work to cultivate life-satisfaction among younger employees.
10 The variables desire to help and governmental work are not included in the same GSS data waves, and so cannot be interacted. 11 Features of the WLS, namely the periodic timing of the waves of data collection, led to our choice of 1975 as a cutoff.
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The results in table 2 also show marked differences between the experience of men and
women. Women in our cohort were less likely to derive subjective well-being gains from public work. While men see positive effects from public work, women do not. The finding is striking partly because contemporary public administration scholarship has portrayed the public sector as a supportive setting for females. Women are generally more likely to select public sector jobs (Bernhardt and Dresser 2002); less likely to encounter a glass ceiling and more likely to enjoy closer pay parity with male colleagues than private sector counterparts (Gornick and Jacobs, 1998; Stivers 2002); less likely to quit (Moynihan and Landuyt 2008), and more likely express higher levels of PSM (DeHart-Davis, Marlowe, and Pandey 2006) than male public sector colleagues. But the experience of females who entered the workforce in the late 1950s is quite different than it is for new employees today. For example, females in this cohort experienced lower wages than men across their career.12 One consequence of the relative accessibility of public employment opportunities for females in the WLS cohort is that many may have selected public employment not because reflected intrinsic preferences, but because they lacked equivalent private sector opportunities. If the potential connection between public employment and life satisfaction depends upon the ability to select a sector that matches preferences, the more truncated opportunities for females removes a true sense of choice in making that match.
It is also the case that the nature of public work was dramatically different for females in
1975. The 1975 survey showed that while 40% of male government workers were classified as public administration and another 48% were in professional and related services, 82% of female government works were classified as professional and related services (which includes teaching, hospital work, and welfare services). Given the significant differences in how females engage in and benefit from public work today, this is one aspect of the findings where we believe it is unwise to generalize to current experiences.13
With regard to the second and third question posed, on the role of desire to help, there is
again not compelling evidence that working in the public sector makes much difference. We find that individuals who seek jobs that give them a chance to help others tend to be happier, and more satisfied at the end of their careers. Public administration employees with a stronger desire to serve tend to enjoy higher life satisfaction than those who lack such a desire, but so too do private employees. The findings also echo results from Frank and Lewis (2004) who used similar items from the GSS to examine the predictors of work effort. They found that while public sector workers tended to express a higher desire for helping others than private employees, an interaction between the two variables did not explain differences in self-reported work effort between the two groups, leading them to conclude that “in both sectors, an interesting job that
12 In the 1992 survey, the WLS asked respondents about individual income (other waves of the survey ask about houseful income). A simple regression on respondent income for those who had worked in government post 1975 find that women earned a significantly lower wage than men after educational differences were accounted for. 13 The GSS data provides some opportunity to test claims about a changing workforce, but only limited one, since the combination of variables we employ was only first featured in 1985. In the 1985 wave male government workers have slightly higher coefficients for happiness than females, but the difference is not significant. Just taking the post 2000-waves, men in governmental work report significantly higher happiness relative to males in other professions, while women do not. These limited data undermine the general claim that females public employees are more apt to enjoy higher levels of happiness in recent years.
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allows one to help others and a strong desire for job security appeared to increase the probability that one will put in extra effort, and the size of the effect appeared to be about the same in both sectors” (2004, 46).” Similarly, Steen (2008) has argued that government work does not have a monopoly on PSM, and that private organizations offer a variety of ways in which to help others. More recently, the concept of pro-social motivation has drawn a great deal of interest in organization studies (Grant 2008). The work parallels the assumptions of public service motivation in most respects, but does not condition pro-social motivation on sector.
Limitations
It is worth noting some limitations of the work presented here. For the longitudinal analysis, the reliance on a cohort from one particular state might also raise concern that the data are not representative of the general population. A longitudinal approach offers a number of very real advantages over cross-sectional data, but one shortcoming is that the conditions under which data was collected change over time, raising concerns about the temporal validity of the findings. We note above that this is likely an issue for interpreting the findings for women, where broad workforce opportunities and conditions in the public sector have improved in ways that are likely to have reduced differences in response between males and females. It may also be that the overall political climate and attitudes toward public service may have changed, but the direction of those trends seems likely to further undermine the potential that public sector will have a particular relationship with job satisfaction (Moynihan and Ingraham 2011; Light 1999).
We set up a demanding test for the connection between desire to help and life
satisfaction, tracking its impact across three decades. This guards against the danger of spurious findings because of a reliance on cross-sectional data, but may set too high of an expectation for how PSM might matter across time. But the findings do suggest a robust association between the two variables.
A stream of recent research argues that the benefits of PSM depend upon employee’s
belief that their values fit with the values of the organization (Bright 2007; Steijn 2008; Taylor 2008; Vandenabeele 2009). Our test on the potential interaction between desire to help and public employment examines if such a connection between employee and values might occur at a sector level, but our measures of public work are relatively crude, focusing on whether a respondent has worked in governmental or public administration categories at any point in time. We also have data on amount of time individuals worked in public sector, and the results remain essentially the same when these measures are used. It would also be desirable to examine sub-categories within the broader public sector categories employed to see if the results vary for these sub-groups. Even if such a test fails, it remains possible that potential for individuals to develop meaningful value from their work depends largely on organizational factors that we cannot directly test, rather than the overlap between individual values and sector or occupation. Conclusion
This paper has employed a unique longitudinal dataset to understand how career choices and motivations in one period impact subjective well-being. The inclusion of cross-sectional data offers an additional means to test our basic questions, but it must be noted again that the GSS and WLS offer two distinct measures of SWB. The former elicits a measure of current happiness, while the latter seeks to understand cumulative life satisfaction. Given these real differences, it
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would be reasonable to expect a good deal of variation in the general findings. However, the results over a startling level of consistency. For both sets of analysis we can conclude that there is limited evidence of public sector work contributing to SWB, but only for males; that an intrinsic desire to help others and similar measures contributed to SWB; and there is no evidence to believe that the positive effects of desire to help others on SWB is limited to public employees.
The results do not suggest that PSM is unimportant for public employees, and some of
our results suggest that it increases life satisfaction for this group. Rather, we show that the positive benefits that emerge from a desire to help others are not limited to public actors.
Our paper began with a quotation from Einstein on the value of work that helps others.
While his lasting contributions to science were written during his time as a public employee the Swiss Patent Office, they were completely disconnected from his official tasks. He moved between public and private universities, but spent most of his career at a private one (Princeton University). Einstein’s own career pattern shows us the possibility of pursuing meaningful public service in different employment sectors.
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Table 1: Descriptive Statistic Variable year obs mean s.d. min max Dependent variables Life satisfaction 2004 6754 3.817 1.123 0 5 Independent variables Desire to help others 1975 5501 0.649 0 1male 2956 0.587 0 1female 2545 0.722 0 1Government job in/before 1975 1975 6644 0.264 0 1Government job after 1975 2004 6556 0.332 0 1Public administration job in/before 1975 1975 6645 0.072 0 1Public administration job after 1975 2004 6443 0.091 0 1Governmental job at any time 6461 0.399 0 1Public administration job at any time 6352 0.116 0 1 Control variables Female 6754 0.539 0 1Number of children 1992 6456 2.967 1.661 0 14Father graduated from high school 6270 0.439 0 1Mother graduated from high school 6337 0.499 0 1Average parental income 1957-60 5927 63.53 60.49 1 998Years worked 1975-2004 2004 6046 24.41 6.13 1 31Total household income in 2004 (in $1000) 2004 6283 66.49 83.17 0 710Married 2004 6727 0.788 0 1Separate/Divorced/Widowed 2004 6727 0.177 0 1Never Married (reference category) 2004 6727 0.035 0 1Self-rated health 2004 6148 3.026 0.677 0 4
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Table 2: Longitudinal Model of Government/Public Administration Work and Cumulative Life Satisfaction (WLS)
(1) (1A) (1B) (2) (2A) (2B)
VARIABLES life
satisfaction Male Female life
satisfaction Male Female
Government job before 1975
0.0579 0.0975 0.0306 (0.0458) (0.0752) (0.0604)
Government job after 1975
0.0117 -0.0098 0.0174 (0.0438) (0.0750) (0.0546)
Public admin before 1975
0.0145 0.1588* -0.1519 (0.0678) (0.0901) (0.1188)
Public admin after 1975
0.0454 -0.0371 0.0793 (0.0628) (0.0944) (0.0852)
P-value for F-test of Gov/Pub Admin before and after 1975 0.199 0.215 0.734 0.579 0.0941 0.362 Observations 4531 2126 2405 4535 2127 2408 R-squared 0.097 0.089 0.107 0.097 0.090 0.108
Controls for: year of work, gender, parent education, parent income, education, marital status in 2004, number of children, self-rated health, and total household income in 2004, self-rated health Robust standard errors in parentheses *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1
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Table 3: Pooled Cross-Sectional Model of Government/Public Administration Work and Current Happiness (GSS)
Variables 1. Full sample 2. Males
3. Females
4. Full sample 5. Males
6. Females
Female 0.0275** 0.0277*** (0.0129) (0.0090)
Governmental work 0.0347** 0.0642*** 0.0076 (0.0169) (0.0248) (0.0232)
Observations 8,613 4,077 4,536 17,518 8,108 9,410 R-squared 0.153 .159 .153 0.141 .141 .144 For model 1-3 data from years 1985, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2010. For models 4-6,
14 waves from 1988-2000. Regressions also controls for a set of year indicators (not shown).
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Table 4: Longitudinal Effects of Desire to Help on Cumulative Life Satisfaction (WLS) (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
VARIABLES Full sample Without
govt work With govt
work W/o public admin work
With public admin work
Desire to help others 0.123*** 0.144*** 0.0765 0.111*** 0.182* (0.0356) (0.0449) (0.0587) (0.0385) (0.0936)
Results combine data from years 1989 and 1998. Regressions also control for gender, age, age squared, health, education, marital status, number of children, real income, and a year dummy.
Robust standard errors in parentheses *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1
22
Table 6: Does desire to help change the effect of government work? (WLS)
(1) (1A) (1B)
VARIABLES life
satisfaction Male Female
Want to Help Others 0.1266*** 0.1938*** 0.0386 (0.0442) (0.0555) (0.0746)
Worked in government before 1975
0.0497 0.1552 -0.0493 (0.0876) (0.1231) (0.1258)
Interaction with desire to help
0.0126 -0.1083 0.1234 (0.1054) (0.1529) (0.1450)
Worked in government after 1975
0.0500 -0.0455 0.1145 (0.0882) (0.1297) (0.1203)
Interaction with desire to help
-0.0447 0.0434 -0.0950 (0.1067) (0.1589) (0.1408)
P-value for F-test of Worked in Govt pre-1975 & Interaction 0.502 0.405 0.583 P-value for F-test of Worked in Govt post-1975 & Interaction 0.848 0.940 0.616 Observations 3829 2048 1781 R-squared 0.102 0.099 0.112 Controls for: year of work, gender, parent education, parent income, education, marital status in 2004, number of children, self-rated health, and total household income in 2004 Robust standard errors in parentheses *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1
23
Table 7: Does desire to help change the effect of public administration work? (WLS)
(1) (1A) (1B)
VARIABLES life
satisfaction Male Female
Want to Help Others 0.1138*** 0.1784*** 0.0389 (0.0384) (0.0503) (0.0602)
Worked in public administration before 1975
0.0112 0.0696 -0.0711 (0.1113) (0.1371) (0.1971)
Interaction with desire to help
0.0707 0.1945 -0.0462 (0.1418) (0.1819) (0.2578)
Worked in public administration after 1975
-0.0017 0.0220 -0.0614 (0.1211) (0.1522) (0.1988)
Interaction with desire to help
0.0246 -0.1760 0.1994 (0.1464) (0.1986) (0.2283)
P-value for F-test of Worked in Pub Ad pre-1975 & Interaction 0.651 0.088 0.731 P-value for F-test of Worked in Pub Ad post-1975 & Interaction 0.961 0.477 0.37 Observations 3831 2049 1782 R-squared 0.102 0.100 0.112 Controls for: year of work, gender, parent education, parent income, education, marital status in 2004, number of children, self-rated health, and total household income in 2004 Robust standard errors in parentheses *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1
24
25
Table 8: Interactions of public administration work and desire to help (GSS) (1) (2) (3) (4)
VARIABLES
Public administration work -0.0242 -0.0396 -0.0349 -0.0600 (0.0554) (0.0562) (0.0714) (0.0731)
Importance of helping others in a job 0.0313 (0.0191)
Importance of social usefulness in a job 0.0356** (0.0180)
In my job I can help other people 0.0391** (0.0195)
My job is useful to society 0.0490*** (0.0178)
Interaction of Public administration and desire to help/sense of helping
P-value for joint significance of desire to help/sense of helping and interaction term 0.2376 0.0469 0.1261 0.0124 Observations 1811 1807 1285 1276 R-squared 0.132 0.132 0.103 0.105
Results combine data from years 1989 and 1998. Regressions also control for gender, age, age squared, health, education, marital status, number of children, real income, and a year dummy. Desire to help/sense of helping variables are normalized to their sample means.
Robust standard errors in parentheses *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1
