Beyond Efficiency or Justice: The Structure and Measurement of Public Servants’ Public Values Preferences

The public values preferences of public servants play an increasingly important role in understanding their administrative behaviors in the era of public value management. Researchers, however, tend to choose proxy or simplified variables to measure public values preferences, resulting in incomplete understanding of the underlying structure. Based on survey data in China, this study develops a five-dimensional scale of public servants’ public values preferences and verifies the scale’s predictive validity by adopting public service motivation and work performance as the criteria. From this study, we call for the establishment of a public values-based public personnel management system.