Citizens as Co-producers of Public Service Culture: How Citizen Incivility Affects Public Employee Motivations to Stay and Serve

While public administration ethics literature has accumulated a significant amount of knowledge on how to promote public service culture steeped in ethics, the primary focus of the scholarly discussion has long been on the importance of developing ethics among public employees and in their organizations. Based on the premise that citizens are co-producers of the public service culture, this study turns attention to citizens and their commitment to ethical values when interacting with public employees. Specifically, this study examines how citizen incivility influences public employee work attitudes, particularly public employee turnover intention and their desire to serve the public. The analyses were conducted using survey data collected from Korean public employees. The findings suggest that citizen incivility is negatively associated with public employees' motivation to serve the public (i.e., public service motivation), that citizen incivility is positively associated with public employee intention to leave their jobs, and that the relationship between uncivil citizen behaviors and public employee turnover intention is partially mediated through public service motivation. When discussing how to ensure that public employees make decisions and behave in ways that best serve the needs of citizens, scholars have long emphasized the importance of an individual public employee being a person of integrity and the importance of public organizations encouraging employee ethical behaviors through a supportive organizational structure and culture. However, if and how can citizen behaviors influence public employee work attitudes to best serve the needs of citizens? The present study explores this rarely discussed question by testing how uncivil citizen behaviors influence public employees' motivation to serve the public and their intention to stay in their jobs. The study found that increasing uncivil behaviors by citizens when interacting with public employees are associated with a reduced desire of public employees to serve the public and stronger intentions of public employees to leave their jobs.