The journal Public Money & Management (PMM) has both an academic and a practitioner readership, and called for contributions to a special issue about developing civil servants. A brief note on motivating civil servants that I submitted was published online this week.

On the basis of self-determination theory, a short TED video and our recently published work on motivating civil servants in the Netherlands, I wrote a brief note for PMM, titled: “Motivating civil servants—insights from self-determination theory”. The main message of the note is that cuts in education budgets can backfire in the long term, and that civil servants’ needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness should be taken into account when designing public sector jobs.

The first 50 people who use this link can access the letter for free.