Advancing the Relationality Turn: Social Media Use and Public Service Motivation

Digitally supported relational public service (RPS) symbolizes a forward-looking effort to realize relational governance, yet its implementation faces two persistent challenges: the difficulty of measuring relationality and structural resistance. This study provides a Chinese pathway to address these challenges by examining how social media use can enhance public service motivation (PSM). We develop and empirically test a multi-level relational origin model of PSM. Findings show that social media use significantly strengthens PSM by satisfying three key antecedents: structurally, China’s social media control policy institutionalizes PSM as a normative public value; societally, social media fosters socialization; and individually, it fulfills public service employees’ basic psychological needs. These results offer context-specific modifications to two Western theories and advance the relationality turn in public administration scholarship.