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A Demands-Resources Model of Corruptibility: Empirical Evidence on How Moral Disengagement and Harm Awareness Regulate Civil Servants’ Moral Judgment

Kristina S. Weißmüller & Adrian Ritz

Review of Public Personnel Administration2026https://doi.org/10.1177/0734371x261417649article
AJG 2ABDC B
Weight
0.50

What the paper says

Understanding the motivational mechanisms of administrative corruption is of paramount importance for public integrity. We propose and test a novel demands-resources model of civil servants’ corruptibility from a micro-level perspective, focusing on important personality and job-related demands and resources, that is, personality traits, motives, and states. Drawing on experimental evidence ( Obs . = 263) from Swiss public administration, this study reveals how public service motivation and social value orientation function as integrity-enhancing resources but through different psychological mechanisms. Furthermore, Machiavellianism and psychopathy—but not narcissism—significantly stimulate civil servants’ capacity to morally disengage and hence increase corruptibility, serving as integrity-draining demands, while job-related burnout has no effect. These novel insights contribute to the “bright side” discourse of PSM, advance the conceptual understanding of administrative corruption, and expand the state-versus-trait debate of public integrity, providing important insights for the effective design of anti-corruption strategies and public personnel selection for public integrity.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/0734371x261417649

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@article{kristina2026,
  title        = {{A Demands-Resources Model of Corruptibility: Empirical Evidence on How Moral Disengagement and Harm Awareness Regulate Civil Servants’ Moral Judgment}},
  author       = {Kristina S. Weißmüller & Adrian Ritz},
  journal      = {Review of Public Personnel Administration},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/0734371x261417649},
}

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A Demands-Resources Model of Corruptibility: Empirical Evidence on How Moral Disengagement and Harm Awareness Regulate Civil Servants’ Moral Judgment

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Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.