For example, for NASA GISS administrator, James Hansen, aka patient zero, seen below being arrested at a climate protest.
UGA research reveals public servants individually motivated to help environment
Athens, Ga. – New University of Georgia research shows that while on the job, public servants contribute not just to mandated sustainability but also to discretionary eco-friendly initiatives of their own.
“Some people are born with a higher intrinsic need to serve the public,” said study co-author Robert K. Christensen, an associate professor in the School of Public and International Affairs. “They have a desire to help others and serve society. Government and nonprofit managers, for example, typically have higher levels of public service motivation than business managers.”
The study in the American Review of Public Administration used a survey of hundreds of public servants in a large southeastern city to examine their environmental and organizational behaviors.
Authored by Justin M. Stritch, a former doctoral student in public administration and policy, and Christensen, who also is the school’s Ph.D. director in the department of public administration and policy, the research found that public servants were likely to engage in eco initiatives.
“Eco initiatives are discretionary, pro-environmental behaviors that an employee can participate in during the day,” said Stritch, who is now an assistant professor at Arizona State University. “Eco initiatives involve things like recycling or energy conservation. Reusing water bottles and turning off your computer screen are examples.”
Eco initiatives include sustainable micro-level behaviors, small tasks that are done voluntarily by the employee. When an employee chooses to do things like save paper or turn off lights at work, they are participating in eco initiatives. Eco initiatives are done because employees choose to do them, not because they’re enforced.
In the survey, public servants in the southeastern city from departments like neighborhood and business services, fire, police, human resources and the city manager’s office reported their environmental and workplace behaviors. The results showed that eco initiatives had to do with how motivated these public servants were to help society.
Public service motivation, a type of altruism, determines how people feel about the public and how they want to service public values. People with public service motivation can fulfill their desire to help society by choosing a job in government or a job in the private sector that helps citizens.
“Eco initiatives are correlated with the public service motivation of an individual,” Christensen said. “Public servants with high public service motivation engage in micro citizenship behaviors to benefit society on a broader basis.”
Along with public service motivation, two other predictors indicate a person’s likeliness to perform eco initiatives.
“The three key drivers are public service motivation, organizational commitment and environmental connectedness,” Stritch said. “The three work together to determine whether a person engages in eco initiatives.”
Environmental connectedness describes an individual’s attachment to nature. Having a strong connection to nature will increase an employee’s likelihood of performing environmental initiatives. An employee’s concern for the environment will help predict whether, and to what extent, they engage in eco initiatives.
“Even after accounting for an individual’s connectedness to nature, an employee’s public service motivation is a key factor in understanding voluntary, eco initiatives in the public workplace,” Christensen said.
Stritch and Christensen hope that future studies will examine how institutional arrangements and mandated sustainability initiatives in cities change environmental commitment and behavior.
“Our hope is that people begin to think about stewardship and public resources in a broader way,” Stritch said. “We want to see how public servants consider the environment over time and in different places.”
“We have some compelling, if not preliminary, evidence that government workers often have the motivation to go above and beyond to benefit the environment while working in jobs that benefit society,” Christensen said.
The full article, published online ahead of print, is available at http://arp.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/09/29/0275074014552470.full.pdf+html. For more information on the School of Public and International Affairs, see http://spia.uga.edu/.
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http://www.epa.gov/ems/
The creeps are in. Time to kick them out.
Love the Freddie Hat.
Government and nonprofit managers, for example, typically have higher levels of public service motivation than business managers.”
Too bad they do less good.
I also participate in environmental initiatives. (Ultimately speaking, at the point of a gun.)
That attitude is because they think they are actually taxpayers.
But if all taxes were eliminated tomorrow, they would be out of a job. Ergo, they are NOT taxpayers, but tax consumers.
Which is not making a judgment call. We need some public servants. Mostly it is the Military whose public service we can’t survive without. I’m happy to pay taxes to support them. In fact the US Constitution says they are the first thing we can be taxed for. Well there’s the National Debt to pay as well. But there wouldn’t be a National Debt, if the government did what it is hired to do, and butted out of that which isn’t their business. Which leaves the Military to pay for.
Two likely reasons:
– they are more collectivist minded, whether or not they started out that way
– they want to do good, and feel they are doing something for their pay
Seriously, please do not term these wackos public servants. They may be public employees, but they are not public servants. They serve themselves and no one else, though they may be paid by taxpayers.
Perhaps 8 years ago I was driving a friend of my wife to the airport. This person was at the time the Chair of a Geology Dept at a major Midwestern University. We briefly discussed “Global Warming”. I mentioned to her that all the calculations I had seen indicated that it would not measurably matter if the US cut back on carbon dioxide emissions, so there was little point in doing so. She replied “I know, you’re right, but it would make me feel better”.
That’s really all one needs to know about these eco-wackos: it’s all about their feelings. And, they are perfectly happy to steal from others to make themselves feel better.
Feminism snuck in through the back door of science.
Lotsa feelings and little logic.
Brought to you by the Frankfurt School.
Universities today are full of this kind of junk.
““New study translated: public servants are more likely to become eco-activists”
Not quite. How about “New study: Eco-activists are more likely to become government agents”
Where is the control in this experiment? A statement is made about public service employees in a large city without subjecting comparable non-public employees in the same city to the same investigative procedure.
A more accurate assessment of public servants is that government employment attracts people who feel the need to control other people, and their government job is the vehicle they use to to do that.
I recall reading that the murderers Stalin used to enforce collectivization in Ukraine during “The Great Famine” would gather in the evening and read poetry to each other. No doubt these poets felt a compelling need to serve humanity.
Like the Vogons and they were not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous.
Working definitions for any of that are evidently proprietary.
Shocking. Government funded research finds that government employees are just plain wonderful people, and people who work in the private sector are mean, selfish jerks. Don’t sprain your arm while patting yourself on the back, buddy.
As many have said before, the common thread is that government employees are more likely left leaning, and hence love all things that lead to a bigger government role in everything, like eco-fascism. We really didn’t need a study to tell us this. But then of course this leach wouldn’t have a job.
The irony is that these well-meaning public servants, who are interested in enviro-wacko causes (not pragmatic and beneficial environmentalism) have ruined people’s lives, not made them better.
Yes, all Americans want clean air, and the US has cut REAL air pollutants by 50~99% just since 1980:
http://www.epa.gov/airtrends/aqtrends.html
Many of these REAL pollutants are already so low, it makes absolutely no economic sense to cut them further, because the added costs to do so would yield virtually no quantitative nor qualitative health benefits.
To get around this conundrum, enviro-wackos and political hacks targeted CO2, to force evil capitalists to waste $trillions in cutting plant food emissions.
The CAGW scam has been a Bonanza for the public sector by creating millions of new public-sector jobs around the world, and wasting $trillions in added CO2: taxes, subsidies, rules and regulations and mandates and wind/solar mega-projects.
CAGW doesn’t work and is quickly becoming a political liability. As soon as support for CAGW costs politicians more votes than gains, the CAGW scam is finished. The way CAGW poll numbers and global temps are falling, this point of singularity will probably occur in about 5~7 years.
There is no way CAGW can survive almost a quarter of century of no global warming trends, no increase in global severe weather for 50~100+ years, increasing/recovering polar ice extents, 6 inches/century sea rise, etc.
Great to see that Homer Simpson has been taken into custody before he was able to wreck the power station.
Great to see that Homer Simpson has been taken into custody before he was able to wreck the power station.
So a solidly eco-wacky assistant professor manages to convince some local governmental agencies; e.g. fire services, police, human resource workers, and the city managers office, to participate in a ‘eco’ survey.
Key recognition factors include recycling and turning one’s monitor…
Phrased differently, local government employees get an official survey regarding their ‘politically correct’ opinions. (It is technically illegal to request governmental employee actions or beliefs).
DUH! What employee wouldn’t ‘like’ all of the politically correct concepts? Who would seriously believe that these employees would imply anything that might mar their image in their employment?
Obviously Stritch might be that daft.
As a long term Federal employee, including a number of years delivering mail, I have a few suggestions to all those who deride things they do not know.
Get a job yourself in those supposedly cushy positions with wonderful salaries! After working in the positions for several years with all the dismal promotion opportunities, then criticize the jobs! At least then you will know what you are talking about.
I’ve worked in both private industry and public service. I decided to apply for civil service because I was sick and tired of constantly running into nepotism. At least in the Federal service I wasn’t constantly training someone’s relative so they could be promoted.
If you are going to deride governmental employees, criticize the managers or elected official who allow bad work habits.
Governmental managers are susceptible to the temptation of ’empire building’. Governmental employees are ranked by numbers of employees, physical assets and/or cash flow. The easiest status increase to achieve are numbers of employees closely followed by physical assets (vehicles, equipment, buildings,…).
Empire builders tend to have huge egos, but their image is not usually service, efficiency or process based so public satisfaction is not high on their list.
There were always turkeys who thought that because I was in uniform, that I was at their beck and call. Like the wahoo who drove to the bottom of a hill and started honking his car’s horn long and loud. A few seconds after the first honks when I didn’t run down the hill to see what he wanted, he started cursing at me. When I finished delivering the houses along the hill’s crest, my path to my next delivery passed by the crackpot in the car. As I neared the car I got a bunch of profanity that included my parentage and employment.
His question, when he decided to ask before I walked off; he wanted directions to a person’s house that he knew the name of, but not the address nor phone number.
I suggested he go to the Post Office and inquire there or better yet, the Police Station just up the hill. He started cursing again as I walked off.
Just because a Postal carrier learns a lot of personal information regarding residents does not allow us to share that information without official orders. Let alone some lazy as___le who believes civil service employees should jump and run down a steep hill to answer improper questions.
That particular route required enough steps that the route averaged ten to twelve miles (depending on how many houses actually got delivery that day). Yes, the Postal Service counts how many steps a carrier takes as part of their ‘route reviews’.
I transferred to the carriers as it got me outside where working under the open sky is a miracle everyday.
The most unnerving times? Children play and people may complain about noisy kids right outside their house, but very few people realize that children add a few decibels to everyday noise outside. Every fall when schools started up the silence outside was eerie till one got used to the quiet again.
Quoted
““Some people are born with a higher intrinsic need to serve the public,” said study co-author Robert K. Christensen, an associate professor in the School of Public and International Affairs. “They have a desire to help others and serve society. Government and nonprofit managers, for example, typically have higher levels of public service motivation than business managers.”
____________________________________
Now lets try a little experiment;
Take a couple of government departments that are full of those, by their definition, caring, helpful , responsible bureaucrats and tell those employees that from this point on there will be no further tax payer funding for their department.
If they want their organisation / department and their employment to continue then they will have to come up with products that the public will buy and pay for voluntarily because the public likes and wants the products they are selling.
And there will be no coercive instruments permitted in the form of legislative requirements to force the public to purchase their products.
They will be on their own and will survive or disappear depending on their success in selling their products and making a profit..
And then a couple of years later conduct another very similar survey of the surviving employees of those departments. Thats if they still exist as business structures.
I would lay high odds that the [ quote ] “Some people are born with a higher intrinsic need to serve the public,” would by then be a very difficult characteristic to find under those real life circumstances identical to those that business people both large and small and micro in size have to deal with every single day.
It is damn easy to tell some pollster just how you want to serve society and help others when you are getting access to almost unlimited supplies of OPM, “Other Peoples Money” that you are never really required to account for in the way it is dispersed.
And unlike business owners and operators, you will rarely if ever be personally penalised financially for not performing.
If those same psuedo altruistic public servants were ever required to do business in the real world where you have to actually provide service and goods and products the public actually want and will pay over their hard earned money for, and then have to use their own hard eared cash to create such a business,
then I would lay odds that the somewhat fake bureaucratic altruistic vapourware claimed here would be very difficult to find in any sort of future survey of the remnants of those departments
I suspect this survey like most others today, seems to have been set up to find exactly what they wanted to find with a good helping of distorted analysis just to make sure of the required results.
Short version;
Few believe the claimed survey findings,
Particularly after dealing with real life public servants at least here in Australia.
Just another survey that as with most of these surveys stinks of manipulation to boost somebody’s profile and ego.
I finally got around to writing a song about little Jimmy H
It’s not a service ethic – it’s a desire to rule over the great unwashed.
The whole concept of “public servant” has been corrupted; an Orwellian example of how language is abused.
Is a waitress not serving the public? Is a clerk processing an insurance claim not serving the public? Someone who changes oil in peoples cars not serving the public? Truck drivers not serving the public? Anyone with a service or manufacturing job is serving the public. Any company or person that provides a service or product to the public is serving the public. And just like government “public servants” they receive compensation.
The idea that a government worker serves the public out of the goodness of their heart is grossly self-serving and ridiculous considering the perks and benefits they receive. We’d have a lot less government “public servants” if they were not well compensated.
Now there are real public servants, who for no pay or benefit serve on a regular basis. These include people who act as cross-walk monitors for children or mentor people from other countries in learning the English language to any number of other public volunteer work.
Meanwhile this study is further proof that there are no bounds to stupidity. This study is a conclusion with no controls, flawed premise, flawed methodology, literally no evidence to support the conclusion. The authors lack of insight into their limited research skills and biases is the only interesting aspect about this study.
The study is hog wash. “Public” servants have no altruistic desires. What they have is greed. Pure unadulterated greed. They earn more than the private sector. And they merely seek to perpetuate their gravy train, by any means possible. In another 20 years, that will be a new cause, possibly global cooling. But what ever brings in more money to the government, they will support. They do not care a wit about serving anyone, only being served. Of that there is no doubt. The worst customer service ratings, consistently, always has government agencies at the top.
The worst customer service ratings, consistently, always has government agencies at the top.
============
because the civil service has a monopoly and the customers cannot go elsewhere. Not happy with the government passport office? Don’t want to stand in line all day only to be told 3 months later you were rejected because you didn’t tick box 33 on page 7 of form xyz, and need to try it all once more. Well, try and go down the street and get your passport somewhere else. See how that works for you.
It worked for Snowden. 😉
But you are correct.
“need to serve the public”
. . . when they couldn’t find a job anywhere else.
Since Hansen’s picture tops the article i thought
I would recycle this poem I wrote a few years ago.
“OLD DEATH TRAIN” HANSEN —
Always good for a laugh
More holy than thou
He warns you of Venus
The only thing now
That hardens his penis
He rants at the crowds
A coot with the hypers
His mind in the clouds
A load in his diapers
He quotes from the Greens —
We work for the many!
(Diversity means
The colors of money)
He quotes from the Reds —
Consensus is dictum!
(Good socialist heads
Are all up one rectum)
A fascist he cries
This Goebbels of weather
The truth is in lies
The bigger the better!
So just like a skunk
His sight is alarming
His science is junk
There’s no global warming
Eugene WR Gallun
I stand in awe…
The authors of this trash misunderstood and twisted way out of proportion the phrase “public service”, or indeed “public servant” in order to fit their agenda, and many here fell into the same trap. In industry, there are two sectors; goods or services, and the service industry is divided into public and private. The public part simply means governmental, though there are some exceptions – here in New Hampshire our biggest supplier of electricity is Public Service of NH (PSNH). Then, to add still more confusion, we have the word “servant”, which used to mean someone who worked in a household, performing household duties.
There is nothing intrinsically good or bad about working in the public sector.
the government teat flows freely when people play social and eco justice warriors.
This study is rubbish. Looking at jobs statistics in the west, it becomes quite obvious what motivates public service. High wages and benefits and generous pensions, job security, and the ability to be lazy and unproductive with the backing of huge Unions. Compare any private sector job with its public counterpart and you quickly find that the public sector wage/benefit package pays more. Anybody who tells you different in the employ of public service is lying to you.
Is it any wonder living inside this taxpayer funded bubble world, protected from the chaos of actually generating wealth and surviving in the real world, that you advocate and agitate for more policies that drive the cost of living up and taxes for your fellow workers in the private sector, knowing full well that your Union will compensate you for those increases in the next blackmailing/extortion union contract negotiations. It all sounds good knowing full well someone else is paying for it. Whats not to like. The managers in public service who preside over this massive moneypit are also complicit. They fully understand that any wage/benefits/pension increase they agree to from the Unions, is used as justification for their own wage/salary benefits increases. And this cycle repeats every 4 to 6 years.
That is the reality.
There is a golden rule in the civil service. Never criticize a fellow worker, no matter how bad a job they are doing. If you do, you can expect to get fired, not the person doing the bad job. The civil service is all about going along to get along, regardless of the quality of work. In this fashion no one need worry about getting fired. The real work in the civil service is done by outside consultants for extremely high fees. It is the consultants that are expected and required to fall on their swords when projects go wrong. The civil servants never make mistakes, because you have to actually do something to make a mistake. If you do nothing you cannot ever be found to have done something wrong. How do you avoid doing anything? Sit on every document received for 3-6 months, then ask for clarification. Sit on the clarification, then call for a meeting if questioned, as you still don’t understand. By then whatever was wrong will have been replaced by some more pressing matter. Rinse and repeat. In this fashion you will always have tons of work you are “working on”, but none that ever gets completed. The fine art of doing nothing while appearing super busy.
That subject has been covered extensively by Prof. C. Northcote Parkinson in his book Parkinson’s Law. Definitely worth reading.