Workgroup innovative behaviours in the public sector workplace: the influence of servant leadership and workgroup climates

ABSTRACT

Despite much research on how to foster innovation in public organizations, little research has been conducted at a workgroup level. Against this backdrop, this study examines how servant leadership, ethical climate, and performance-oriented climate jointly influence workgroup innovative behaviours in public organizations. The results of this study suggest that servant leadership and ethical climate have positive relationships with workgroup innovative behaviour in general. In addition, a performance-oriented climate was found to moderate the relationship between servant leadership and workgroup innovative behaviour.

KEYWORDS:

• Servant leadership
• innovative behaviours
• ethical climate
• performance-oriented climate
• workgroup climate

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2021.1999668.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Although the AVE of social desirability was less than 0.5, the convergent validity of variables was judged to be still adequate because composite reliability (CR) is more than 0.6 in social desirably (Fornell and Larcker 1981)

2. The current study surmises that workgroup innovative work behaviour could be operationalized based on workgroup members’ evaluation of their workgroup members’ innovative behaviours. That is, while workgroup members might vary in being engaged in innovative work behaviour at their workplaces, their evaluations of workgroup innovativeness could contain a commonality with other group members. This approach differs from a summative approach that operationalizes group innovativeness by adding all the individual workers’ contributions to workgroup innovativeness. While Pirola‐Merlo and Mann (2004) reported that workgroup innovativeness and averaging individual workgroup creativity had strong correlations across different times (r²= 0.71), we posit that asking workgroup members to evaluate their workgroup members’ innovative work behaviours would be more appropriate than asking them to evaluate their innovative work behaviours because an individual’s contribution to workgroup innovation could vary depending on task structure of the workgroup. For example, while an additive approach might be appropriate when individual has equal opportunities of contributing to group innovativeness, the approach might be inappropriate when workgroup task structure is disjunctive where group innovativeness is determined by the highest contribution of one individual (Kurtzberg and Amabile 2001).

3. Each of the social desirability items was reverse coded into 0 (candid answer) or 1 (socially desirable answer) and was aggregated into group level. Each aggregated item indicates the proportion of socially desirable answers responded by workgroup members, or the workgroup’s socially desirability tendency. Thus, if the coefficient of social desirability variable is positive and significant, it would denote that the tendency of seeking socially desirable answers of a workgroup has a positive association with their report of group innovative behaviour, which one can suspect the issue of common method variance. We should note that the analysis of the data does not reveal any significant evidence of common method variance at the workgroup level. On the other hand, at the individual level, the significant positive association between social desirability and innovative behaviour reported in Table A2 confirms that individuals’ tendency of seeking socially desirable answers has a positive association with their self-report of innovative behaviours.

4. We conducted multi-group CFAs both at the individual and group level because data were collected from two different districts. First, a CFA model constrained to be equal across two districts was conducted. A significant change was not reported in the model comparison of constraint and unconstraint model both at the individual-level data (χ²= 23.20; d.f.=18; p =0.18) and workgroup level data (χ²= 27.63; d.f.=18; p =0.07) at the significance level of 0.05, which suggests that factor loadings were invariant across different districts. Besides, we also investigated whether the district could moderate the influence of independent variables (i.e. servant leadership, performance-oriented climate, and climate for rule and law) on innovative behaviours at the group level by comparing structural weights of constraint and unconstraint models, and a significant change was not reported in the model comparison (χ²= 17.44; d.f.=15; p =0.29). Based on the results, we did not include the district as a control variable.

5. The organizational climate has been defined as ‘the shared perceptions of and the meaning attached to the policies, practices, and procedures employees experience and the behaviors they observe getting rewarded and that are supported and expected’ (Schneider, Ehrhart, and Macey 2013, 361), while psychological climate is can be understood as individual’s perception regarding organizational policies, practices, and procedure (Koys and DeCotiis 1991). Based on this notion, workgroup climate (i.e. ethical climate and performance-oriented climate) can also be understood as workgroup members’ shared perception of organizational policies, practices, and procedures. In other words, determining whether it is workgroup-level or organization-level climate depends on which level individuals share their perception of organizational policies and atmosphere, and not based on whether they are targeting workgroup or organizational phenomenon. Based on this notion, we assume that the perception of employees’ ethical and performance-oriented climate can be shared at the workgroup level even when it is referring to ‘organizational’ policies or atmosphere.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF-2018S1A3A2075609].

Notes on contributors

Dong Chul Shim

Dong Chul Shim is currently an Associate Professor at Department of Public Administration at the Korea University, South Korea. His research interests include public service motivation, public service value, leadership and organizational citizenship behaviour. Dr. Shim has work published and forthcoming in American Review of Public Administration, International Public Management Journal, International Review of Public Administration, and Review of Public Personnel Administration.

Hyun Hee Park

Hyun Hee Park is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Administration at the Kookmin University, South Korea. She earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Public Administration and Policy, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany - State University of New York. Her research focuses on social networks, with a particular interest in the impact of social interaction on human behaviour within the public sphere. Dr. Park has work published and forthcoming in Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, American Review of Public Administration, International Public Management Journal, International Review of Public Administration, and Review of Public Personnel Administration.

Kee Hoon Chung

Kee Hoon Chung is a post-doctoral fellow at the KDI School of Public Policy & Management, South Korea. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Public Administration at Korea University. His research focuses on comparative governance and institutional change, with particular interest in informal institutions. Dr. Chung has work published and forthcoming in Public Choice, International Review of Administrative Science, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, and the Economics of Transition.