LEADERSHIP ROLES IN PUBLIC SERVICE

Leadership roles in public service



Abstract

This study adds to our understanding of public service motivation by examining ways in which organizational leaders can strengthen and even augment the possible effects of public service motivation on the employees' attraction to the organization's operation (mission valence). This research notifies two research questions. First, it inspects the sources of public service motivation. We know comparatively little on the influence of organizational factors, particularly the role of leadership, in fostering public service motivation. We discover that transformational leadership is linked with higher public service motivation. Second, the paper inspects the association between transformational leadership and mission valence. We discover that transformational leadership has both a direct effect on mission valence as well as significant indirect belongings through its influence on clarifying organizational objectives and fostering public service motivation.

Table of contents

Abstract2

Chapter I: Introduction4

Chapter II: Literature review6

Transformational Leadership6

How leaders make difference and promote change within their organization7

Influencing Employee Perceptions of Goal Content8

Leadership within health care11

Managing contemporary healthcare leadership17

What internal and external barriers in influence leadership18

Strategic logic: creating space for strategic work19

Influencing Employee Perceptions of Goal Comprehension20

How policy and funding interfere21

Chapter III: Methodology23

Methods23

Data Collection23

Measures24

Results26

Chapter IV: Discussion29

Theoretical analysis of contemporary leadership theories and models29

Conclusion31

References33

Appendix39

Leadership roles in public service

Chapter I: Introduction

The fundamental question of how to motivate purposeful action and performance in public organizations remains with us. There is no shortage of theories, but there is a lack of clear evidence to inform choices between the myriad of alternatives. To what extent should organizations emphasize intrinsic or extrinsic motivators? To what extent should managers focus attention on formal management systems versus informal systems? What role can leadership play? In short, organizations and individual managers need to better understand which levers they can call on, and to what effect (Moynihan and Pandey 2007). This paper offers empirical evidence on these questions by investigating the mechanisms by which transformational leaders can activate levers that enhance mission valence. We expect transformational leadership to influence mission valence through a direct effect and through mediating effects via clarifying organizational goals and fostering public service motivation. We employ a structural equation analysis to test these hypotheses. An advantage of this approach is that it incorporates more complex causal pathways than a regression analysis, allowing us to understand how leader's ?pull different levers rather than just identify what these levers are.

Given the long-standing recognition of the power of worthy and attractive goals by organization and management scholars (e.g., Barnard 1938), it is important to gain a better understanding of what makes organizational goals attractive and compelling to individual employees. We characterize this as mission valence, a concept advanced by Rainey and Steinbauer (1999) who draw upon expectancy theory to define it as employee ?affective orientations toward particular outcomes associated with an organization's mission (Vroom, 1964, p. 15). Thus, mission valence can be viewed as an employee's perceptions of the attractiveness or salience of 3 organization's purpose or social contribution. Recent scholarship advances the argument that mission valence enhances satisfaction ...