Merit recruitment, professional advancement opportunities and prosocial rule-breaking among public servants in Greece

Abstract Public servants have a significant impact on peoples’ lives, but we don’t have many reliable estimates of how many employees engage in prosocial rule-breaking (PSRB), a form of constructive deviance. We collected original survey data (N = 497) among a representative sample of Greek public servants and implemented a list experiment to gauge how pervasive PSRB is in Greece’s public sector. Greece is a particularly useful setting in which to study PSRB as the euro crisis created strong reform pressure. We find that public servants who were hired via merit competitions are not less likely to break rules, but this is conditional on their beliefs about career prospects and the fairness of the promotion system. They perceive the professional reward system as biased towards those with political connections and compensate for lack of efficiency by doing favours. This finding raises concerns about the quality of EU reform assessments.