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AbstractTransformational leadership, it is argued, aligns employees' values with those of their organization. Empirical research has found a positive relationship between transformational leadership and value congruence. Yet studies rely predominantly on cross‐sectional research designs that limit causal conclusions and have not uncovered the potential contextual conditions of this argument. This article argues that transformational leadership positively affects value congruence in public service organizations, but only when employees see that their jobs impact the well‐being of other people and society. To test the relationship between transformational leadership and value congruence and the moderating effect of perceived societal impact, the article combines a field experiment on 79 managers of public service organizations and a balanced survey panel of their 583 employees. Consistent with the expectation, results indicate heterogeneous treatment effects, implying that employees' perceived societal impact is important to consider when transformational leaders strive to align the values of individual employees and the organization.

Despite the clear benefits volunteers can bring to public service organizations, their involvement may also create or exacerbate challenges for managers in ensuring clear roles for professionals staffing such organizations. We argue that simple, strategic communication messages can clarify the relative roles of volunteers and professionals. We test this assertion with a low-cost experimental communication experiment embedded in a survey of 240 professionals employed at nursing homes in Denmark. Our results show that strategic communication to clarify volunteer roles reduces professionals' perceived ambiguity about volunteer roles and the relative roles of volunteers and professional staff. These results are encouraging as many public service organizations seek to involve more volunteers, and managers can implement the kind of strategic communication studied in this article straightforwardly without high costs.

AbstractWhile public service professionals may rely on stereotypes and social categories in exercising who gets what, when and how in clientelist citizen‐state interactions, it remains unclear whether negative judgments similarly pervade in settings where citizens help produce–rather than consume–public services. We propose that service professionals judge volunteers as incompetent based on (1) a lack of the skills necessary to solve specific tasks, and/or (2) negative stereotypes toward volunteers as a means of shielding the privileged position of the profession or safeguarding the quality of services. Using an experiment among 817 nursing home professionals, negative judgments of volunteer competence were invoked simply by priming professionals to think of citizens volunteering in service production. The effect, however, is not conditional on the type of task (complementary vs. core) solved by volunteers, suggesting that judgments of competence mainly stem from stereotypes of volunteer (in)competence in assisting with service production.

AbstractInvolving volunteers in the production and delivery of public services is a core policy objective of governments around the world. While existing research on volunteer involvement in service production, for example, has focused on advantages and disadvantages of such involvement and different dimensions of volunteer involvement, little is known about service professionals' response to volunteer involvement in public service production. Integrating perspectives from multiple theories, we build a theoretical framework for understanding how and when service professionals come to see volunteers as a threat to the quality of service, the profession's privileged position and monopoly, and professionals' own work tasks and job security. Based on a central distinction between production of core and complementary tasks, we propose that volunteers come to be seen as a threat in the eyes of service professionals when volunteers solve core rather than complementary tasks. Using a survey experiment among health assistants at nursing homes, we find partial support for our argument. Health assistants are more likely to perceive volunteers as a threat to the quality of care when volunteers solve core rather than complementary tasks. The study guides research toward a more nuanced understanding of volunteer involvement in service production in public organizations.

AbstractWhile doing good for specific citizens and users is often considered a powerful motivator among public service employees, little research has rigorously evaluated how public managers can promote individualized prosocial motivation. We follow recent studies on the behavioural implications of 'user orientation' to explore how public managers can use a specific leadership strategy—transformational leadership—to reinforce employees' individualized prosocial motivation. Combining a field experiment with 80 childcare centre managers and survey reports from their 590 preschool teachers, we assess the effect of a transformational leadership training programme on user orientation. The results show a positive effect on user orientation three months after the training programme but no persistent effect 15 months after the intervention. This implies that, at least in the short term, public managers can use transformational leadership behaviours to stimulate user orientation.

Motivating public service employees to greater effort is a key issue for managers and scholars. Transformational leadership concerns behaviors to develop, share, and sustain a vision for the organization and has been suggested as an important lever in this respect. However, we know little about the processes by which transformational leadership may stimulate work motivation. Integrating transformational leadership, public service motivation (PSM), and self-determination theory, this article sheds light on the psychological mechanisms underlying the motivational effects of transformational leadership. According to structural equation modeling, the relationships between transformational leadership and two types of autonomous work motivation—intrinsic motivation and PSM—are mediated by the satisfaction of the basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Our findings support the claim that the motivational effects of transformational leadership are mediated by need satisfaction, but also that satisfaction of individual needs is not equally important for intrinsic motivation and PSM, respectively.

Ledelse er blevet et væsentligt felt i forvaltningsforskningen, og studier af offentlig serviceproduktion og ledelse måles ofte gennem spørgeskemaundersøgelser af ledere og medarbejdere. Den internationale forskning peger imidlertid på, at opfattelser af ledelse påvirkes af faktorer på i hvert fald tre forskellige niveauer: det individuelle niveau mellem aktører inden for den samme organisation (leder-medarbejdere såvel som mellem medarbejdere), det organisatoriske niveau og sektorområdet. Der findes dog meget lidt empirisk viden om disse niveauers betydning, og vi vil derfor undersøge, i hvilken grad variationer i opfattelser af to centrale ledelsestilgange – transformations- og transaktionsledelse – forekommer på disse tre niveauer. Ved brug af spørgeskemadata fra 541 ledere og deres 8.515 medarbejdere fordelt på otte serviceområder demonstrerer artiklen, at hovedparten af variationen forekommer inden for organisationerne, men at der ligeledes findes væsentlig variation i ledelsesopfattelser mellem organisationer og mellem serviceområder, samt at lederne selv vurderer både transformationsledelse og transaktionsledelse højere, end medarbejderne gør.

Leadership has become an important topic in public management research, and most empirical studies of leadership apply measures based on survey responses by managers and employees. A consistent finding is, nonetheless, that there is great variation in assessments of leadership, and it has been suggested that these variations can be explained by factors on three levels: the individual level within an organization, the organizational level, and the sector level. However, there is very little empirical knowledge about variation at these levels, and the article therefore investigates how two important types of leadership – transformational leadership and transactional leadership – vary at these three levels. We apply survey data from 541 managers and their 8,515 employees, from eight different service areas. The analyses show that the main variation in leadership ratings is within organizations, but significant variation also exists between organizations and service areas. Finally, leaders rate their own leadership more favorably than their employees do.

Motivation to benefit individual recipients of public services (user orientation) can conflict with classic public service motivation linked to the interest of a collective entity. When actions intended to increase the well‐being of an individual user can harm societal interests, the two types of motivation have different behavioural implications, but we know far too little about these potential trade‐offs. This study analyses the relationships between public service motivation, user orientation, and antibiotic prescriptions for 407 general medical practitioners in Denmark. Use of antibiotics has a positive effect on the individual patient and (especially broad‐spectrum antibiotics) a negative effect on society due to resistant bacteria. Combining survey and administrative data, we find that public service motivation and user orientation indeed are differently associated with prescription behaviour. This implies that it can be important for behaviour whether a public service provider is primarily inclined to help the individual user or society.