Know thyself. Public leadership, leader self-awareness, and public service motivation

Motivating followers is key to effective leadership, yet still little is known about how leadership affects the special motivation to do good for others and society (i.e. public service motivation; PSM). While previous studies... [ view full abstract ]

Motivating followers is key to effective leadership, yet still little is known about how leadership affects the special motivation to do good for others and society (i.e. public service motivation; PSM). While previous studies on this relationship draw on general leadership theories, most prominently transformational leadership theory, we join recent efforts of elaborating special forms of leadership in the public sector and examine how public leadership translates into PSM of followers. We hypothesize that self-awareness of public leaders – an ingredient of authentic leadership – moderates this relationship and is thus an important condition of how public leadership is effectuated in practice. We test our hypotheses in a sample of 1,049 leader-follower dyads in a city-state in Germany. Results of multi-level modelling confirm that public leadership is a significant predictor of PSM, with political loyalty leadership standing out among the four dimensions. Leaders who are self-aware of their leadership behaviour exert a stronger influence on followers’ PSM than leaders who lack this self-awareness, supporting our moderation hypothesis. We discuss the implications of these findings for research and practice of leadership in the public sector.