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RefeRenceS

Bozeman, Barry. 1993. A theory of government “red tape”. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 3: 273–304.

———. 2000. Bureaucracy and red tape. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

concepts to Advance Public Service contribution? equity, motivation, and Altruism

Adam Grant. 2013. Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success. New York City, NY: Viking Adult. 320 pp.

The less that you give, you’re a taker– Ronnie James Dio

This is my first book review. Without this confession, the reader will no doubt be able to discern that I am neither a particularly skilled nor practiced book reviewer. In part the reader may be able to detect some of my initial hesitancy to even accept an invitation to review a book for the entire world, but especially for my peers in public administration. What if they think I’ve selected a book that is less relevant to them? Or made a poor effort of underscoring its importance? There are, of course, less socially conscious but more self-centered concerns. How will I find the time between grading and readying my new courses? Wouldn’t my time be better spent working on a research article that will more directly advance my academic career? Perhaps, I will want someone to take the time to write a review of one of my future books.

The essence of my conflict is laid bare in Adam Grant’s Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success. In his monograph, Grant argues the benefits and importance of being givers in our organizational lives—prioritizing the needs of others before self. In a well-organized mixture of anecdotes and rapid-fire digests of academic research, Grant contrasts givers, takers, and matchers. Takers put their own needs in front of others and matchers try to balance giving and taking in equal proportions.

Grant’s work puts a fresh face on concepts introduced in J. S. Adams’s (1965) work in equity theory and Meeker’s (1971) and Fiske’s (1991) models of social exchange and human relations. Grant strikes a popular chord with the scores of corporate workers and their managers seeking guidance in how they might find the right balance between what they give to others at work versus what they receive. One of Grant’s goals is to illuminate that balance by debunking the popularly held notion that the most suc-cessful individuals in the workplace are takers. Indeed, Grant makes a strong case for moving toward the giving end of the give-and-take spectrum. He recognizes that some givers can become doormats, but Grant also argues that the giver’s distribution is bimodal in halls of failure and success. Givers are “the worst performers and the best performers . . . takers and matchers are more likely to fall in the middle” (p. 7,

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emphasis added). The argument, then, is that giving opens the possibility of higher levels of success than does taking or matching.

In the avaricious echoes of Enron and subprime mortgage crises, Grant’s reminder of the utility of giving/altruism for the (private) business management read-ership that has responded so favorably to the book is certainly welcome. However, Grant largely misses an important mark by neglecting those involved in the business of public service, where the utility of altruism and public service motivation (PSM) has long played a prominent role in how we have examined public administration. This is somewhat surprising considering Grant’s frequent anecdotal use of public and political figures in the book and his own scholarly contributions to the prosocial and PSM literatures (e.g., Grant 2008; Wright and Grant 2010). Grant uses one footnote to recognize that givers are more likely to occupy nonprofit and government positions (p. 204), which I’ll collectively refer to as public service positions. Further, Grant notes that givers are more likely to accept less money for the same work if that work is in an organization that promotes giving values—a finding similar to one in our own field of study (Christensen and Wright 2011).

Grant’s neglect of how his argument might inform the business of public service raises the opportunity to renew how, as a field, we might connect the concepts of equity (i.e., giving, matching, taking), motivation, and altruism, with the manage-ment of public service personnel. One step might be to systematically examine how the recent outpouring of PSM work connects to broader notions of individual equity raised in Grant’s book—a move that would be welcome among PSM’s earliest propo-nents (Perry, Hondeghem, and Wise 2010, p. 688), and one that could potentially lead to mutually beneficial conversations across private and public managers and scholars. The conversations may reveal, for example, that equity calculations—does one give, match, or take—may be a function of job type, commitment, organizational culture, and perception of impact on beneficiary. Finally, service sector may prove to be more than just a boundary condition of passing interest.

If we assume the latter, is Grant’s case for being a giver less urgent because givers are already overrepresented in public service organizations and public service-oriented jobs? If so, what does Grant’s prescription for success suggest? First, I think Grant’s reminder of the currency of altruistic organizational behavior should motivate those in public service to consider the utility and impact of a collective “giving” identity. Grant notes that “repeated acts of voluntary helping contribute to the development of a giver identity in general . . . the more the organization provides a sense of optimal distinctiveness, the faster that identification tends to occur” (p. 248). One implication, partly untested, of this observation is that building a public service organizational culture around individual public commitment may not only increase individual per-sonnel giving—in stark contrast to arguments about rational choice bureaucrats—but also increase the public’s perception of the organization and service motivation. In an era of eroded public confidence in government, better leveraging the giving culture of public service raises the welcome possibility of the improving public perception of public service organizations.

Second, articulating the giving culture in public service organizations promises benefits for the employees themselves. Increased motivation and commitment and reduced burnout are possibilities that flow from Grant’s prescription for maintaining

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motivation: selfless giving is more sustainable and energizing than “otherish” giving. Or, in the words of Herbert Simon “intelligent altruists . . . will be fitter than . . . unin-telligent altruists and selfish individuals” (Simon 1993, 157; quoted in Grant 155).

Related to this point is a third implication: Grant’s work raises the possibility that organizational givers in public service may exhibit higher performance than matchers or takers. Grant observes that because of their “dedication to others, givers are willing to work harder and longer than takers and matchers” (p. 119). This finding may lend additional insight into recent evidence regarding the positive performance (e.g., Bellé 2013) and endurance (Brewer and Brewer 2011) of public service workers.

Fourth, Grant’s work raises an important research implication regarding the rela-tionship between equity and PSM. In this review, I have made an implicit assumption that PSM may be positively correlated with an equity balance that favors organiza-tional giving. Although preliminary evidence from my own research suggests that this is the case, the relationship between individual equity and public service motives deserves greater attention.

Finally, Grant’s championing of organizational giving has implications for the pedagogy of public administration. While PSM comes up as an important, if not con-troversial, topic in some Public Administration classes, as a field we lack systematic ways of teaching, exploring, and nurturing these forms of other-directed commit-ment. Grant’s suggestions may be of some utility in this regard. Testing one’s giving quotient, practicing the 5-min favor, running a reciprocity ring, and practicing power-less communication are among the “actions for impact” recommended by Grant and tested in his own classes (p. 261). To the extent that these can be incorporated in the professional education of public servants, we may discover new and interesting ways to foster altruism and public commitment both for our students and ourselves.

doi:10.1093/jopart/muu035 Robert K. ChristensenUniversity of Georgia

RefeRenceS

Adams, J. Stacy. 1965. Inequity in social exchange. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 2:267–299.

Bellé, Nicola. 2013. Experimental evidence on the relationship between public service motivation and job performance. Public Administration Review 73:143–153.

Brewer, Gene A., and Gene A.  Brewer. 2011. Parsing public/private differences in work motiva-tion and performance: An Experimental Study. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 21(Suppl 1):i347–i362.

Christensen, Robert K., and Bradley E. Wright. 2011. The effects of public service motivation on job choice decisions: Disentangling the contributions of person-organization fit and person-job fit. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 21:723–743.

Fiske, Alan P. 1991. Structures of social life: The four elementary forms of human relations: Communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, market pricing. New York: Free Press.

Grant, Adam M. 2008. Employees without a cause: The motivational effects of prosocial impact in public service. International Public Management Journal 11:48–66.

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Perry, James L., Annie Hondeghem, and Loise R. Wise. 2010. Revisiting the motivational bases of public service: Twenty years of research and an agenda for the future. Public Administration Review 70:681–690.

Meeker, Barbara F. 1971. Decisions and exchange. American Sociological Review 36:485–495.Simon, Herbert A. 1993. Altruism and economics. The American Economic Review:156–161.Wright, Bradley E., and Adam M. Grant. 2010. Unanswered questions about public service motiva-

tion: Designing research to address key issues of emergence and effects. Public Administration Review 70:691–700.

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