User Orientation and Public Service Motivation in the shadow of public sector reform

This article highlights the particular case of the reform of public education inItaly in order to investigate its impact on the Public Service Motivation (PSM)of state school teachers. The empirical basis of this article is a first step towards amore detailed analysis of the interrelation between trajectories of administrativereform and changes in the motivation of public servants. Literary articles haveshown that PSM improves satisfaction, commitment and individual performance,but the results reveal that the motivation to serve the public interest and to serve the society at large is strictly linked to teacher User Orientation(UO), which is a prosocial motivation directed towards helping and benefitingindividual recipients of public services, represented by students in our case. On aregulatory level and more so on an organisational level, not taking teacher PSMand UO into account could undermine the intrinsic fundamentals of any reform,and the powers of the reform could in turn jeopardise PSM and UO.