How Leadership and Public Service Motivation Enhance Innovative Behavior

By Qing Miao, Alexander Newman, G. Schwarz, B. Cooper. 2018

274 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Prior research has linked the innovative behavior of public sector employees to desirable outcomes, such as improved efficiency and higher public service quality. However, questions regarding the drivers of innovative behavior among employees have received limited attention. This study employs psychological empowerment theory to examine the underlying processes by which entrepreneurial leadership and public service motivation (PSM) shape innovative behavior among civil servants. Using three-wave data from 281 Chinese civil servants and their 59 department heads, entrepreneurial leadership is found to positively influence subordinates’ innovative behavior by enhancing two dimensions of psychological empowerment: meaning and impact. Additionally, PSM was found to influence subordinates’ innovative behavior by enhancing the dimensions of meaning and competence. Our findings suggest that to facilitate innovative behavior amongst employees, public organizations should consider introducing training that encourages leaders to serve as entrepreneurial role models and recruit employees with high levels of PSM.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Public Administration

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4cc0b32528a439795295702b7a3b6a2c27690836

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. N. Eva
2. Alexander Newman
3. Afsaneh Bagheri
4. G. Schwarz
5. I. Nielsen
6. Herman H. M. Tse

In Public Administration

1. N. Eva
2. Alexander Newman
3. G. Schwarz

Citations in the corpus

• The effects of employees' creative self-efficacy on innovative behavior: The role of entrepreneurial leadership (2018, background): “Accordingly, recent work has found a strong relationship between team members' aggregated perceptions of entrepreneurial leadership and the innovative behavior of employees over time (Miao et al., 2018).”
• Entrepreneurial leadership of CEOs and employees’ innovative behavior in high-technology new ventures (2020, background): “In line with the findings on entrepreneurial leadership and employees’ innovative behaviors in more established organizations (Miao et al., 2018) and the main tenets of social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1997), we expect entrepreneurial leaders to foster employees’ innovative behavior in hightechnolo”
• Can Public Leadership Increase Public Service Motivation and Job Performance? (2020, methodology): “This scale has been used extensively in prior research (Naff and Crum 1999; Wright, Christensen, and Pandey 2013) and specifically with samples from China (e.g., Miao et al. 2018; Schwarz et al. 2016).”