Politics matter: Public leadership and taking charge behavior in the public sector

Abstract

Learning how to motivate employees to engage in proactive taking-charge behavior (TCB) has become an essential topic for building change capabilities into public organizations. However, despite limited research investigating triggers of TCB in the public sector, even less attention has been paid to leadership-related drivers. With a three-wave survey on a Chinese public employee sample, we test how public leaders can motivate TCB using accountability, rule-following, political loyalty, and network governance leadership approaches, and whether these employees’ organizational identification mediates this relationship. Results show that only employees under supervisors who practice rule-following and political loyalty leaderships will own greater identification with their organizations and will subsequently exhibit TCB——these two public leadership approaches work because they paint a realistic picture of China’s political context to public employees, boosting their organization identification, which then enhances their TCB. Such results enrich our understanding of public sector change management in authoritarian political conditions.