One of the main practical recommendations from the copious public service motivation literature is that human resources (HR) professionals should use public service motivation (PSM) to assist in selecting candidates for public service jobs. To test if PSM is indeed attractive to HR professionals in selecting applicants to work in the public sector, 238 HR managers recruited from the International Public Management Association for Human Resources rated three cover letters and then rated themselves about PSM and the Big 5 personality traits. The cover letters were randomized on most likely combinations of PSM and Big 5, revealed in earlier research. Our results are that real HR professionals did not rate cover letters more highly when they displayed aspects of PSM.
Transactions between Big‐5 personality traits and job characteristics across 20 years