Financial performance and ethics: employing commitment to public values as a proxy

New public management (NPM) reforms reemphasised the importance of financial performance in the public sector. Debates following the introduction of these reforms have raised the question of compatibility of these business-like reforms and practices with more traditional public service values, including public service ethics. This article presents the results of an ordinary least square analysis that assessed the impact of these reform efforts in five municipalities in Poland on one outcome of interest – commitment to public values (CPV) as a proxy measure for public service ethics. The study used data from the 2013 statistical and fiscal yearbook and an online survey administered in 2014 to measure employees’ level of public service motivation. The findings reveal no association between the proposed measures of financial performance and CPV, questioning the harmfulness of NPM reforms for public ethics previously suggested by the literature.