Innovative self-efficacy of municipal employees: empirical evidence from Russia’s Leningrad region

ABSTRACT

Quality in service delivery requires government agencies to exhibit innovative activities. Surprisingly little research exists on the self-efficacy of municipal employees engaging in innovative activities. Using survey data from 1,700 Russian municipal employees this study finds that innovative self-efficacy of front- and mid-level employees results from high levels of proactivity, strong prosocial motivation, a strong perception of empowerment, and more than 7 years of working experience. Our findings imply a potential for change-oriented behavior among municipal employees. We argue that rigid centralism in decision-making and a culture of self-enrichment (as opposed to prosocial motivation) prevent innovative self-efficacy becoming public service improvement on a large scale more frequently.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovation
• self-efficacy
• municipal employees
• Russia
• local government
• public administration

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Acknowledgments

The author thanks Anna Sanina, Daria Popova, Ilya Akishin, George Alexander Borshchevskiy, Jesse W. Campbell, and three anonymous reviewers who provided substantial remarks, comments and suggestions on how to improve the previous version of the paper. This article benefited from the proofreading services offered by the Academic Writing Centre (AWC) at National Research University Higher School of Economics, in particular Anna Dudetskaya, and Konstantin Seiko.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Tim Jäkel

Tim Jäkel is an Assistant Professor at the the School of Public Administration of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russian Federation. He holds a PhD in Political Science (Dr. rer. pol.) from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Prior to joining the National Research University Higher School of Economics, he worked as a research fellow at the German Research Institute for Public Administration Speyer, Germany.