How Transformational Leadership Supports Intrinsic Motivation and Public Service Motivation: The Mediating Role of Basic Need Satisfaction

Abstract

Motivating public service employees to greater effort is a key issue for managers and scholars. Transformational leadership concerns behaviors to develop, share, and sustain a vision for the organization and has been suggested as an important lever in this respect. However, we know little about the processes by which transformational leadership may stimulate work motivation. Integrating transformational leadership, public service motivation (PSM), and self-determination theory, this article sheds light on the psychological mechanisms underlying the motivational effects of transformational leadership. According to structural equation modeling, the relationships between transformational leadership and two types of autonomous work motivation-intrinsic motivation and PSM-are mediated by the satisfaction of the basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Our findings support the claim that the motivational effects of transformational leadership are mediated by need satisfaction, but also that satisfaction of individual needs is not equally important for intrinsic motivation and PSM, respectively.

Only When We Agree!How Value Congruence Moderates the Impact of Goal‐Oriented Leadership on Public Service Motivation

“…Third, most studies probing the transformational leadership‐PSM relationship rely on cross‐sectional research designs (e.g., Caillier , ; Jensen and Bro ; Krogsgaard, Thomsen, and Andersen ; Vandenabeele ; Wright, Moynihan, and Pandey ), which are ill suited to isolate the impact of goal‐oriented leadership on motivation. Challenges include reversed causality (e.g., if managers with particular leadership behaviors are recruited based on past levels of employee motivation), simultaneity, and omitted variable bias.…”

Does transformational leadership stimulate user orientation? Evidence from a field experiment

“…Transformational leadership promises to meaningfully change employee motivation without imposing additional costs on the organization. While recent efforts have started to disentangle this potential (e.g., Bellé ; Jensen and Bro ; Jensen et al ), rigorous evaluations of the motivational effects of transformational leadership remain in short supply.…”

“…The focus in public administration literature has centred on the prosocial motivation to ‘do good’ for others and society, as well as on the question of what public leaders can do to stimulate this kind of motivation. The concept of ‘transformational leadership’ has received particular attention, with scholars arguing that transformational leaders can develop, share and sustain a vision for the collective, and use these behaviours strategically to help illustrate the prosocial aspects of the organization's mission—and connect day‐to‐day work activities to core goals (Wright et al ; Jensen and Bro ). Distinguishing between the motivation to do good for society or larger collective entities (public service motivation—PSM) and the motivation to do good for specific others (user orientation) (Jensen and Andersen ), prior research has mainly focused on the link between transformational leadership and PSM (see Bro et al for an exception).…”

Are transformational and transactional types of leadership compatible? A two‐wave study of employee motivation

“…The need for relatedness reflects a propensity to interact with, be connected to, and experience caring for other people (Hetland et al , p. 508). Jensen and Bro () find positive correlations between transformational leadership and satisfaction of these needs, and their results suggest that basic need satisfaction mediates the relationship between transformational leadership and intrinsic motivation. They argue that the need for autonomy mediates the relationship because transformational leadership establishes the broader purpose of the organization and thereby allows employees to link their actions conceptually to organizational outcomes, as well as allowing employees to initiate everyday tasks that contribute to organizational outcomes.…”