Empowering Leadership and Municipal Service Delivery: A Case Study of a Metropolitan Municipality in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Since municipal service delivery is a challenge facing many municipalities in South Africa, this paper reports on a study conducted among a convenience sample of managers and employees from the Revenue and Customer Relations Management department of a major metropolitan municipality in South Africa, to address the aforementioned problem. The findings reveal that empowering leadership is strongly correlated with employee work effort, performance and improved service delivery. On the practitioners’ side, the important mediating role of employee work effort and employee performance in the “empowering leadership–improved service delivery” relationship in South Africa’s public sector is also highlighted.

KEYWORDS:

• employee performance
• leadership
• municipal service delivery

Notes

¹ For the purposes of this paper, empowering leadership is used synonymously with transformational leadership since in a service delivery environment empowering staff to delivery on their mandate is critical to service delivery. Moreover, empowerment is an attribute/trait of a transformational leader that was measured; cf. section “Research methodology.”

² The primary researcher is a senior employee in the R&CRM department of CJMM. Permission for the study was obtained from the Human Resources Department, which had also provided e-mails of all employees.