Public Service Motivation and Work-Related Attitudes of Public Employees: A Comparison between Nigeria and Denmark

This paper presents a study on public service motivation in relation to work-related attitudes of public servants in Nigeria’s public organization. The role of public servants with high level of organizational citizenship behaviour cannot be over emphasized in the development of any nation. Based on the level of perceived corruption in the Public sector of Nigeria as reported by Transparency International (2019), this study saw the need to compare the public servants’ work related attitudes and motivation of Nigeria which is rated as a corrupt nation and that of Denmark which is rated as least corrupt with a view to learning from the later by the former. Consequently, this thesis seeks to understand why Denmark has maintained 1st position on the list of least corrupt nations in the world and Nigeria lagging behind based on the corruption perception index report (Transparency international, 2019) as well as to understudy Denmark in relation to its public service motivation and work-related attitude with a view to making recommendations for the Nigerian context. Research hypotheses were tested from the findings of the study and compared with evidence from the International Social Survey Programme. Qualitative methodology was adopted for the study. Primary data was obtained with the aid of in-depth interviews while secondary data was gathered from publications and academic literatures. Results from the study revealed that Nigerian Public Servants have low level of prosocial motivation amongst other findings.