Revisiting an "urban legend": an experimental assessment of common method variance's impact on relationships in self-reported data.

Despite the ubiquity of self-reported data in social science and public administration research, widespread concerns persist regarding common method variance (CMV) and its potential to distort observed correlations. In this article, we estimate CMV's biasing effects through five preregistered studie...

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Publicado en:Journal of Public Administration Research & Theory Vol. 36; no. 3; pp. 343 - 361
Autores principales: Cui, Manqian, Zhang, Xuelian, Li, Jiayuan
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Oxford University Press / USA Jul2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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      dt: Jul2026
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        atl: Revisiting an "urban legend": an experimental assessment of common method variance's impact on relationships in self-reported data.
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          Cui, Manqian
          Zhang, Xuelian
          Li, Jiayuan
        affil: School of Government, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China
      su:
        Job performance
        Motivation (Psychology)
        Social science research
        Response styles (Examinations)
        Questionnaires
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          Job performance
          Motivation (Psychology)
          Social science research
          Research and Development in the Social Sciences and Humanities
          Response styles (Examinations)
          Questionnaires
      keyword:
        common method variance
        copyrightHolder:Public Management Research Association
        copyrightYear:2026
        inLanguage:en
        public service motivation
        publisher:Oxford University Press
        sameAs:https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muag008
        survey experiment
        common method variance
        copyrightHolder:Public Management Research Association
        copyrightYear:2026
        inLanguage:en
        public service motivation
        publisher:Oxford University Press
        sameAs:https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muag008
        survey experiment
      ab: Despite the ubiquity of self-reported data in social science and public administration research, widespread concerns persist regarding common method variance (CMV) and its potential to distort observed correlations. In this article, we estimate CMV's biasing effects through five preregistered studies (including eight survey experiments) with UK and Chinese civil servants (N  = 3,159), focusing on the relationship between public service motivation (PSM) and job performance—a proposition of PSM theory often subject to CMV concerns. Our findings indicate that procedures widely advocated by methodological scholars to mitigate CMV did not substantially attenuate the PSM-performance relationship. A single-paper meta-analysis integrating these survey experiments reinforced this result, revealing a negligible overall moderating effect (mean effect size = −0.018, 95% CI [−0.08, 0.04]). Our results offer insights into the quality of self-reported measures, call into question the notion that CMV uniformly biases self-reported correlations, and strengthen the PSM theory by providing evidence for the validity of its core theoretical relationships against the CMV's biasing effect.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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