Public service motivation and continuous organizational change: Taking charge behaviour at police services
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| Author | Julia Weiherl,Fabian Homberg,Rick Vogel |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12354 |
SYMPOSIUM ARTICLE
Public service motivation and continuous
organizational change: Taking charge behaviour
at police services
Fabian Homberg
1
| Rick Vogel
2
| Julia Weiherl
3
1
Department of Human Resource
Management and Organisational Behaviour,
University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
2
Department of Socioeconomics, Universität
Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
3
Beiersdorf AG, HR Development, Hamburg,
Germany
Correspondence
Fabian Homberg, Department of Human
Resource Management and Organisational
Behaviour, University of Southampton,
Highfield Campus, Southampton SO17 1BJ,
UK.
Email: f.homberg@soton.ac.uk
Building change capabilities into public organizations is a challenge
for strategic management. This study focuses on the micro-level of
extra-role behaviours that contribute to continuous improvements
in working procedures at the front-end of organizations (i.e., taking
charge behaviour; TCB). More particularly, we examine public serv-
ice motivation (PSM) as a key variable mediating between per-
ceived practices and TCB of street-level bureaucrats. The analyses
are based on survey data from a state police force in Germany
(N= 1,165). Results confirm the role of PSM as full mediator, but
this mediation is limited to the relationship between leadership
behaviours and TCB, while perceived organizational
characteristics—except for red tape—have direct positive impact
on TCB.
1|INTRODUCTION
In the course of recent decades, the public sector across many countries has undergone several reform waves, often
politically charged, such as privatization, competition, public–private partnerships, benchmarking, total quality man-
agement, e-government, good governance and many more approaches (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011). Many public
organizations are thus faced with pressures for change. In contrast, however, the literature on organizational change
has remained sparse in public administration, particularly when compared to change management in the field of gen-
eral management. Fernandez and Rainey (2006), in their extensive review of the literature, conclude that ‘this recur-
rent theme of change in government agencies has not induced a high volume of articles that explicitly address the
topic in public administration journals’(p. 168) and that more research efforts are long overdue.
Ever since this review, the body of literature on organizational change has grown at a modest rate (e.g., Wright
et al. 2013; Giauque 2015), but a focus on what is commonly called organizational transformation has remained:
large-scale, planned and strategic change initiated from the top of the hierarchy (Fernandez and Rainey 2006). The
triggers of first-order (Bartunek 1984), evolutionary (Pettigrew 1985) or continuous change (Weick and Quinn
1999), which is less disruptive to organizations than second-order, revolutionary or episodic change and develops
bottom-up rather than being imposed top-down, have received far less attention from public management scholars
Received: 16 October 2016 Revised: 13 March 2017 Accepted: 15 May 2017
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12354
28 © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm Public Administration. 2019;97:28–47.
and practitioners. This is despite the fact that promotors of change have growing difficulties mobilizing support for
further large-scale reforms because a kind of ‘reform fatigue’has spread among many public servants and employ-
ees who are increasingly fed up with yet another change initiative (de Vries 2013). Continuously changing organiza-
tions adapt in a more timely way to new conditions, evoke less resistance on the part of organizational members
and spend fewer resources on change management than organizations that are subject to rare but profound
changes (Weick and Quinn 1999).
Accordingly, the antecedents and consequences of change-related capabilities distributed within public organi-
zations deserve more attention (Piening 2013). More specifically, the theoretical underpinnings of individual beha-
viour in continuous (as opposed to episodic) change processes which provide microfoundations (e.g., Teece 2007)
to the literature on organizational change in the public sector are as yet underdeveloped. We take a step in this
direction by exploring the question of why and how organizational members take charge of adaptive changes at the
front-end of the organization. Taking charge behaviour (TCB) is defined as ‘voluntary and constructive efforts by
individual employees to effect organizationally functional change’(Morrison and Phelps 1999, p. 403). Members
who show high levels of TCB pay attention to, and engage in, the improvement of organizational structures, pro-
cesses and routines.
This article thus examines the drivers of TCB of civil servants and employees at the front-end of a public organ-
ization. More particularly, we examine public service motivation (PSM) as a key mediator between organizational
characteristics and leadership behaviour, on the one hand, and TCB, on the other. PSM is defined as ‘an individual's
orientation to delivering service to people with the purpose of doing good for others and society’(Hondeghem and
Perry 2008, p. vii). The association of PSM with TCB is of particular interest because PSM predominantly has an
external orientation towards citizens and the general public, while TCB is more directed towards internal processes.
Recent work has emphasized the importance of understanding the relation between the different dimensions of
PSM and organizational change (Wright et al. 2013). We build on this line of research to investigate whether PSM
also drives behaviours that do not, or do not directly, address the public but are concerned with the improvement
of work processes within the organization. Arguably, TCB supports organizations in securing their functioning, which
will in turn positively affect the provision of public services.
The subject of our study is the police force of a German federal state. New challenges such as religious extrem-
ism, right-wing terrorism and cybercrime have created strong pressures for improving existing and implementing
new practices and procedures in the police. Given this increasingly demanding work environment, police organiza-
tions offer an interesting setting for the study of TCB. On the one hand, their structures and processes have to
comply with extensive legal requirements, suggesting that many rules and procedures of police organizations are
largely predetermined by the law and are not subject to change efforts by organizational members. This view reso-
nates with the literature on command-and-control organizations which implies that in public security organizations
such as the military, fire departments or the police, authority is exercised top-down in formal chains of decision with
little discretion at the bottom end of the hierarchy (e.g., McCann and Pigeau 2000).
On the other hand, the literature on street-level bureaucrats provides vast evidence that considerable degrees
of freedom for front-line members of police organizations (Brockmann 2015) and other public organizations
(Canales 2011) remain. Moreover, the police are frequently mentioned as a prime example of a high-reliability
organization (e.g., Roberts et al. 2008). This literature suggests that such organizations tend to foster a ‘collective
mindfulness’(Weick et al. 1999) among their members and direct their attention to details of work processes in
order to prevent errors and crises. Mindful organizing implies that members proactively pay attention to structures,
processes and practices and thereby contribute to the organization's overall culture of safety (Weick et al. 1999).
Our study makes three distinct contributions to the literature: First, the findings have implications for the imple-
mentation of public sector reforms in times of increasing resistance to profound organizational changes on the part
of public servants and employees (de Vries 2013). The triggers of continuous change deserve more attention from
public management scholars and practitioners because they help build distributed capabilities of change into the
organization. Second, by investigating the interrelationships between organization, leadership, motivation, and
HOMBERG ET AL.29
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