Between Structure and Action: Public Motivational Capacity as the Missing Link in the State
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29393/GP11-12EECM10012Keywords:
State Capacity, Public Motivation, Bureaucracy, Value Públic, Public OrganizationAbstract
Public sector performance debates face a persistent paradox: public organizations endowed with equivalent resources, regulatory frameworks, and technical personnel produce radically different outcomes. This essay argues that the paradox cannot be resolved through the concepts available in the field’s established traditions, as what remains undertheorized is the specific process by which the meso-organizational level activates and sustains collective energy oriented toward public ends. To address this gap, the essay proposes the concept of Public Motivational Capacity (PMC): the transformative capacity of a state organization to generate, sustain, and orient collective motivational energy toward the creation of public value. Located at the meso-organizational level, PMC is expressed through four constitutive dimensions —intensity, direction, persistence, and alignment— and is produced through specific generative mechanisms: corporate coherence, transformational leadership, enablement and discretion, and a climate for innovation. The essay argues that PMC constitutes an emergent property of the organizational system, analytically separable from both its generative conditions and its observable effects, which allows for the formulation of falsifiable hypotheses and avoids the risk of conceptual circularity. The essay concludes with three research hypotheses and a progressive development agenda that includes the construction of a PMC measurement scale and a public sector organizational capacity index that integrates PMC as a constitutive component.
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