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

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, i.e., 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-vs-trait debate of public integrity, providing important insights for the effective design of anti-corruption strategies and public personnel selection for public integrity.