Leadership Promotion Of Public Service Values : Transformational Leadership As An Institutional Explanation For Individual Public Service Motivation

Both leadership and public service motivation are important issues in contemporary public administration. By connecting these issues, the aim of this paper is to assess the impact of transformational leadership behavior (promoting public values) on public service motivation development. Two hypotheses were tested with a dataset of 3506 state civil servants in Belgium. The analysis shows that a positive relation exists, and that it is moderated by a set of basic psychological needs (security, autonomy, competence and relatedness). The results demonstrate the validity of an institutional theory of public service motivation.