The role of leadership behaviors for enhancing organizational effectiveness in the Chinese public sector

Abstract

The threefold purpose of this study is as follows: (1) to verify whether three leadership styles (servant, ethical, and participative) contribute to enhancing organizational trust and commitment, (2) to test the full and partial mediating roles of organizational trust and commitment in the relationships between the three leadership styles and organizational outcomes (in-role performance and managerial accountability), and (3) to probe indirect leadership impacts on performance and accountability outcomes. First, we employed exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to operationalize the variables and to confirm the latent constructs from the relevant survey questions. Second, to confirm the total direct and indirect effects, we employed a full structural equation model (SEM) to test the interrelationships among variables, and to assess the relative strength of each variable. The results of this study demonstrate that ethical and participative leadership behaviors in the Chinese public sector are positively and significantly associated with organizational trust and commitment. Based on a discussion of the main findings, various research and practical implications for public management theory and practice are provided.

Keywords:

• servant
• ethical
• participative leadership
• organizational commitment and trust
• organizational effectiveness
• public sector employees

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In this study, we wanted to verify and confirm that the Chinese public sector employees’ attitudes and behaviors were developed by survey items under the Western culture. In other words, we supposed that the leadership values rooted in Confucianism and collectivism would be associated with individual behavior (i.e., trust, commitment, accountability, and in-role performance), at least indirectly or partially influenced by the structure of certain types of leadership behaviors which are often displayed in the Chinese public sector. Based on the results of this study, we suggest that individual behaviors in the Chinese public sector could be measured by the Western types of survey items. In addition, confirming the factor structure of research variables provides strong evidence that these theory-based constructs can be generalized to the Chinese context. In a nutshell, while we confess that aspects of the Chinese context are not measured or tested directly in this research, we are confident that this research indirectly measured those idiosyncratic, cultural contingencies through examining a set of unobservable/latent factors that are nested in leadership, trust, commitment, accountability, and in-role performance. However, in future research, we recognize that we need to incorporate those factors in more direct ways (e.g., by operationalizing these cultural factors as exogenous or endogenous variables), and that we need to test whether these factors would be significant in terms of influencing organizational outcomes.

2. The invited sample (239 employees) was randomly selected with equal probability of selection for all members of the target group, those who received training at the Zhejiang University, to minimize bias. The effective sample size of 239 is well above common estimates of what is needed to produce stable and robust measures for CFA, SEM, and regression. Our model includes 10 observed variables, whose sample size, according to two different rules of thumb, is sufficient to support the number of observed variables (a commonly used rule is that a sample needs to contain at least 50 more than 8 times the number of variables in the model or 15 cases per observed variable [Stevens, 1996]). Although the overall distribution pattern of the current sample appears to be consistent with those of the Zhejiang University alumni database (the whole population is around 1800), as a methodological limitation, it should be noted that lower-level employees of Zhejiang province are slightly underrepresented, whereas fundamental leaders are over-represented in the present sample. This difference might be partially due to the relatively small size of the sample. Hence, as a cautionary note, we suggest that findings of this research should be checked with other organizational studies that draw on larger samples. Comparative studies between central and local government employees and with other East Asian countries would be useful as well.

3. Each indirect path coefficient was calculated to determine whether the indirect effects (mediating effects) were statistically significant. The three antecedent variables of leadership had positive and indirect impacts on both managerial accountability and work performance, through organizational trust and commitment. As shown in Table 6, some of the coefficients for the indirect paths of the SEM were significant (i.e., the Sobel’s Z statistics path numbers 5, 6, 11, and 12 were statistically significant).

4. The overall fit indices for this path analysis indicate that the hypothesized SEM achieved a good fit (see Figure 4). The model fit indices of CFI (=.927), RFI (=.826), NFI (=.840), IFI (=.928), and RMSEA (=.054) exceeded the cut-off for acceptable values. Moreover, the result of the chi-square test was also acceptable (X²/df =1.699, p < .001).

5. This mediation was expected to be partial in the sense that the three types of leadership behavior were also expected to have a direct relationship with managerial accountability and in-role performance. However, the modification index used to fix the data suggested that the path between leadership behaviors and the two previously specified outcome variables was unspecified. Therefore, the three types of leadership behavior were assumed to have only indirect effects on the outcomes.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government [NRF-2014S1A2A2028436].