Motivation and Professionalisation in Hungarian Civil Service – an Empirical Analysis on Hungarian Regional Civil Service

The art­icle dis­plays and ana­lyses the res­ults of em­pir­ical re­search, in the con­text of main­stream pub­lic sec­tor mo­tiv­a­tion PSM lit­er­at­ure, and in the con­text of the re­cent Hun­garian le­gis­la­tion on pub­lic ser­vice per­son­nel man­age­ment. The aim of the art­icle is to cla­rify the im­pact of the new le­gis­la­tion on the mo­tiv­a­tion of Hun­garian civil ser­vants. The find­ings ought to be in­ter­preted with ref­er­ences to the com­plex­it­ies of prac­tice in Cent­ral and East­ern European civil ser­vice, widely con­sidered as Weberian, al­though with sig­ni­fic­ant ele­ments of leg­al­ism, politi­cisa­tion and post-So­viet man­age­ment style. As this pub­lic ad­min­is­tra­tion cul­ture is het­ero­gen­eous and its com­pon­ents are con­tra­dict­ing, changes in pub­lic per­son­nel man­age­ment policies might lead to un­ex­pec­ted or largely vary­ing ef­fects. This art­icle presents the find­ings of pub­lic per­son­nel man­age­ment policy change through the eval­u­ation of the re­sponses of civil ser­vants in re­gional civil ser­vice. The art­icle con­cludes that the sub­ject­ive value of job se­cur­ity is less than ex­pec­ted, but sat­is­fac­tion with the pay is sig­ni­fic­antly above ex­pec­ted. Streams for pro­mo­tion are frozen, good work­force is dif­fi­cult to re­tain in civil ser­vice but those who re­main in the ser­vice con­sider them­selves highly mo­tiv­ated, re­ceiv­ing help­ful sup­port from their su­per­visors and feel­ing that they have a re­ward­ing job in serving the pub­lic.