Tummers and Knies (2016) introduced four roles of public leadership to the literature, accountability leadership, rule-following leadership, political loyalty leadership, and network governance leadership. This paper extends their work by analyzing the effects of the four public leadership roles on two staples of the public-sector literature, public service motivation (PSM), and performance (Perry, Hondeghem and Wise 2010).
Based on social learning theory (Bandura 1977), we argue that the public leadership roles will have a positive influence on employees’ PSM and job performance, as each of the roles specifically models different types of positive public service behaviors. We stipulate the following hypotheses:
Hypotheses 1a-d: The four public leadership styles will be positively related to follower PSM
Hypotheses 2a-d: PSM will mediate the relationship between the four public leadership styles and follower job performance.
Hypothesis 3: Network governance leadership will predict PSM and subsequently follower job performance above and beyond that of the other three public leadership roles.
The data for this project were collected from Chinese civil servants working in two government bureaus located in a prefecture-level city in Shandong province in China. To reduce common method bias, data were collected in three phases. At time one, employees were asked to rate the public leadership behaviors of their direct supervisor, as well as provide their own demographic details. At time two, which occurred one month later, employees who responded to the first wave of the survey were asked to rate their level of PSM. Finally, a further month later, supervisors were asked to rate the individual job performance of each employee and provide their own demographic details. In total, 300 employees across 64 teams participated in the survey.
Before the hypotheses were tested, we conducted a series of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to establish the discriminant validity of the public service leadership, PSM, and performance measures. Using a maximum likelihood estimation with robust standard errors, the CFA demonstrated that our six-factor measurement model was a good fit to the data. As the data was nested within teams, multi-level modelling using maximum likelihood method with robust standard errors was used to analyze the data. To test the mediation effects, the Monte Carlo method with the recommended 20,000 replications was utilised (Preacher and Selig 2012). Our results show support for all of our three hypotheses.
Our study demonstrates that the four public leadership roles impact the job performance of civil servants through enhancing their PSM. In line with social learning theory, public service managers act as role-models for their employees to follow, which helps to foster higher levels of PSM amongst their employees. In turn, through having higher level of PSM, employees are more likely to perform at a higher level in their public service jobs (Perry and Wise 1990). Our article contributes to the emerging public leadership literature by using both employee and manager data to establish the predictive validity of the public leadership measures and by extending their nomological network.
