The Motivation Crowding Effect and the Federal Bureaucrat.

This article employs item response theory to create a measurement model for the estimation a latent scale of task involvement for employees of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) using data from the 2002 Federal Human Capital Survey (FHCS). The IRS implemented a paybanding system that imposed high-powered performance incentives on supervisors, but not on non-supervisory personnel. A discussion of the FHCS data and the methods employed in both the IRT measurement model that estimates the latent intrinsic motivation scale as well as the quantile regression technique employed to test the hypotheses are presented.