Cut the Red Tape and Get Things Done: Exploring the role of public servants’ pragmatism and public service motivation in justifying rule-bending

Rules are central to the functioning of public bureaucracies, yet public servants often experience formalization as both enabling and constraining. While functional rules support fairness, efficiency, and integrity, dysfunctional formalization—or red tape—obstructs effective service delivery. This study explores how public servants cope with this tension by investigating how public service motivation (PSM) and pragmatic creativity shape their likelihood to bend rules for prosocial reasons. Advancing the ability-motivation-opportunity model of behavior under discretion, this study presents novel evidence on the antecedents of the moral justifications for rule-bending behavior based on data from a vignette-based quasi-experiment among Dutch civil servants. Findings show that pro social rule-bending is driven by PSM’s self sacrifice dimension, whereas rule-bending for self-serving purposes is driven solely by pragmatic creativity. These insights advance understanding of rule-bending as a morally contingent form of bureaucratic discretion and inform integrity management, recruitment, and public personnel policies on how contextual justifications influence this behavior.