Leadership is always a popular topic of discussion. As our guest, Taha Hameduddin, Assistant Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy says, "if you want to sell a talk or a speaker or a class, you have to put the word leadership in it". But the fact is leadership matters. And that's exactly what Professor Hameduddin and his co-author Professor Trent Engbers found in their recent study, "Leadership and public service motivation: a systematic synthesis."
David Austin: I'll start by saying that I did read the study. And it is very dense to a layman. I mean, I did make it all the way through it but then it's a little bit hard to absorb.
Taha Hameduddin: Yeah, it's a challenge to kind of be faithful to the research, but also try to simplify and make it accessible. So yeah, it's an ongoing challenge.
David Austin: Let's start with just the title - "Leadership and public service motivation: a systematic synthesis". Can you explain the title to me?
Taha Hameduddin: So basically the idea is, there are these two things out there in the world. Leadership, we see it everywhere, right? So if you want to sell a talk or a speaker or a class, you have to put the word "leadership" in it. And everyone signs up because they feel like leaders make a difference, and all the failures of the world and the successes of the world can be attributed to leaders. Even though that may or may not be true, who knows?
So that's one kind of construct out there. We know kind of what it looks like. We may have some models of what's an ideal leader. And then there's this idea of public service motivation. It's this idea that has been around for, I would say maybe in some form the past 50 years, or maybe even longer, but was formalised a bit more than 30 years ago. And the idea is that individuals that join public service, or socially-minded organisations have a unique motivation.
So if I go work for a marketing organisation, or go trade stocks on Wall Street, my motivation might be different from someone who joins a non-profit or who joins government or does something similarly kind of altruistic.
So that was the idea to kind of explore why people choose to work in government specifically.
But it's expanded to cover other sort of socially-minded sectors. And the idea is that people choose these organisations to work for because they have this altruistic, other-minded motivation. Some call it pro-social motivation, some call it public service motivation. I mean, for the purposes of, you know, being very simple, they're basically the same thing.
David Austin: And then the systematics synthesis is the study. It kind of refers to your mode of attacking this problem. Is that right?
Taha Hameduddin: Yeah, so these two constructs are floating around. Many people have examined them. Does being a good leader, does that make people more motivated towards a social mission or does being a publicly-minded make you a better leader? There's like all this research. So having all these individual pieces of research is good, but in order to be useful, we have to kind of combine it all. And give the big picture of what this disparate research tells us.
So that's the synthesis part of it. So we find 39 studies and we analyse them, because they fit our search criteria. And we go through them and try to figure out what's the big picture that they're trying to give us, in terms of a large-scale finding. And a mode of research, like you said, was a research synthesis, which has become much more common in the past 10, 20 years of synthesising a large pool of research to make it more useful.
David Austin: Before we get into your findings and everything, what inspired you do the study in the first place?
Taha Hameduddin: Professor James Perry (who is known for formally proposing the PSM construct) connected me with my co-author, Trent Engbers. He was interested in submitting this to proposal for a conference on public service motivation. And he's been doing work on leadership and he was really interested in what connects public service motivation to leadership.
But really, it's about motivation and leadership. Two extremely important constructs, especially when you know there's belt tightening, you can't just pay people bonuses, right, to keep them motivated. You have to find other ways to do it. There's austerity measures, COVID-19, so many other things that make motivation very, very difficult to achieve and sustain. So that's kind of the genesis of the study. So it took us about two years, I think, from start to finish to get this out.
And I'm very happy. It's finally published.
David Austin: When you talk about public service and motivation, it seems a bit self-evident right? That people who go into that line of work would have some sort of altruistic motivation or some motivation separate from the pure profit motives, since there's more profitable sectors to go into, but as an area of study, this whole concept of public service motivation, can you break it down for us a little bit more? How was it established as an idea in the first place and how does it help people, you know apply learnings to this sector?
Taha Hameduddin: Yeah. So two very simple ways in terms of application.
So, recruitment - you're trying to recruit people, you know that you can't be competitive in terms of wages, so you have to inspire people through mission match and that starts from the recruitment of individuals into the organisation. Because if you have people already in there and you're trying to change their motivation, that's hard to achieve. But if you get the right people from the get-go, there, you have it, right?
The second part is actual motivation within the organisation. So when the job gets tough, when the going gets tough, and you don't have the resources to extrinsically motivate people through bonuses or promotions, or all this kind of other "business-y" type of things that we say are great, you have to find other ways to motivate people, to keep them going.
You have to tell them that we're serving a very important function and inculcate a public service ethic. And that doesn't come automatically, that's where the leaders come in. That's when the supervisors come in, and they have to model those behaviours and those actions and those values. And that's when you actually see changes.
So that's two very brief kind of examples.
Larger and the sort of the policy world, if you think about the governmental reform, so not really in Singapore, but outside of Singapore context, you think about austerity measures, ways to reform the public service, you know, government is bloated, blah, blah, blah, all these things. A lot of them centre around the fact that, "Oh, we need government to perform better so we should pay people more. And if they don't perform, we should cut their pay."
And, you know, it sounds very simple, but it is very simplistic actually. And it might backfire because even experimental evidence shows that when you dangle a big reward in front of people, they usually get distracted from the actual tasks that they're completing, especially if it's a complex task that requires a lot of cognitive skill.
If it's a routine task, then sure, those things may make them work much faster, increase the rate at which they work. But for complex kind of social things, this stuff kind of backfires, and so much of governmental reform is centred around this idea of paying people for performance, when performance is not a dollar figure. It's not stock market price, it's not profits. You can't measure that very easily in the public sector. So that's what makes public service motivation such an intriguing construct and really links it to leadership.
David Austin: And then one of the key questions you were trying to answer is, does leadership influence public service motivation, or is public service motivation a factor in predicting leadership behaviours? So did you find an answer to that question?
Taha Hameduddin: Well, not conclusively because we, we only have 39 studies that we found that examined the relationship between these two, but in general, it's much easier to predict that leadership will affect the service motivation, which is a very practical finding. When you know that leadership is linked to better job performance, retention, just general satisfaction with the job itself, then leaders can actually do things to increase their own public service motivation and especially those of the people that they manage, they lead.
The other way around, we found one or two studies, but to be honest, it's quite low to be able to say conclusively. Even the leadership effecting public service motivation, we don't really have much causal evidence.
We have association, correlation evidence. It's very difficult to do get causal research in social science, as you might imagine, because we don't have rats in a lab, right?
David Austin: Right.
Taha Hameduddin: All that being said, leadership does predict public service innovation. Yeah.
David Austin: Then tell me about the styles of leadership and how did that influence public service motivation?
Taha Hameduddin: We found actually that there was a few very overarching kinds of styles of leadership or behaviours, which have been around for a very long time. So one of them is known as transformational leadership.
You can just Google it you'll find like four different behaviours. Idealised influence where people idealise, you, you have some sort of big mission. Individual consideration, this is where, you give special sort of social support to subordinates and you consider their needs, you know, emotional socio-emotional needs.
You have inspirational motivation, which refers to providing a vision, articulating a vision that motivates people to some future state. So we have a crisis right now, and 10 years from now, or five years or next year, we'll have this other nice place for going to, so that can motivate people to think, "Oh, okay, we're going there. Fine. I'm gonna motivate myself to change my behaviour so that we can get to that station".
And then being intellectually stimulating. Not just caring about people's emotional needs, but also helping them deal with intellectual needs and providing them work that's interesting.
So that's the idea of transformational leadership. It's one of the most well-known kind of approaches and we did find that transformational leadership is linked to public service motivation because it is about these larger ideals.
So it's unsurprising to me when considering public service or somebody's ideals of like, "Oh, serving the community or being socially minded." So it's very much congruent with the ideas of transformational leadership.
The others that we found were some more new kinds of approaches. So ethical leadership, this idea that you model ethical behaviours in the workplace. Not just through words, by saying to people, "Oh, you know, we should really care about ethics," but am I actually modelling those behaviours so people can learn from them? That's another one that we found to have an influence on public service motivation.
There are others, but they're quite nascent, there isn't too much work on them that kind of informs public service motivation.
David Austin: I would think if it's a government bureaucracy that has a mission to do something in the public sphere versus, an NGO or a non-profit, which might be even more idealistic, it might be set up by like a leader who has a real passion. Does that create kind of two different styles of organisation that play into this public service motivation?
Taha Hameduddin: Yeah. I mean, certainly there's like big structural kind of features. So with those smaller organisations, you have this one person that's driving everything, and the sustainability of that organisation is kind of questionable, because once that person goes, who's going to take over or will there be succession?
Whereas [with] government, you know it's going to be there. Unless there's some revolution and government is overthrown. You know it's going to be there. Their structures are formalised. Everything's kind of done there.
So that does give rise to a lot of differences in that relationship between public service motivation and leadership. And one of the big things is just size, when you have thousands of people working and you have these large scale policies formulated at the top level and trickling down, [you] really have to assess to what extent the intent behind some change, some managerial change, some leadership change is communicated.
So one of the big issues in leadership is actually communicating intent.
Because if you don't communicate intent people will make up their own minds. They may assume that you're acting out of your own interests rather than the interests of the people that you lead. So size makes a huge difference. And it's likely that you know, survival makes a big difference also in that relationship.
And lastly, it's probably much more likely that people self-select into these professions in the first place. And that's the whole theory of public service motivation, that people self-select... we're not randomly assigned to jobs, right? So I am motivated to work in the social sector, so I will work for this organisation.
So likely people already have public service motivation. Then the question becomes, how can you hone that and actually use that? Because in a lot of those sectors, people might actually burnout if they don't have enough resources. So that's another part which we don't examine. So there's a lot more work on that. Especially in professionals like teaching, there's quite a lot of burnout nursing, right? You could arguably say it's socially-minded, public service minded. They don't do it for wages. So, that becomes another issue. But we don't really speak to that in the paper.
David Austin: But you do talk about whether or not the relationship between leadership and public service motivation is constant, or if it's contingent on the context, such as you know, what sector it's in or national context, you touched on that a bit right now, but can you tell us a little bit more about what you found?
Taha Hameduddin: So actually we found very little difference. In fact, no discernible difference. And I would say probably that's due to the limited number of studies. So if there were many, many studies in the non-profit sector or across the world, then I would imagine that there are actually differences.
But we can't speak to any, because just because of the little number of studies, 39 is quite small. If you have hundreds, then it's easier. But I would predict that it is different. So if you think about, just based on structural features. So [for] Singapore's public service famously, you know, it's unlike other governmental services across the world, the pay is quite good. It's very competitive with the private sector. That's to ensure that you keep the best within the organisation, they're not lured away and also to reduce corruption, right? There's rent-seeking. this kind of behaviour, which can be a problem in many different countries. So here, you know, public service motivation may play a very different role.
So people may not really need to be publicly motivated. They might be.
The other possibility is that people actually have these mixes of motivations. You're not purely motivated by public service, you still need to provide food and shelter for your family. You still want to buy a nice car, house and all these kinds of things.
But there are differences. When you compare just average levels of public service, motivation across different sectors, the private sector comes down much, much lower. And this was like the research that was conducted about 20 years ago. But yeah, we didn't find a whole lot of differences, but I would imagine that would be. Actually Asia is one of the regions where there is a lot of research on public service motivation, especially in China and Korea, not so much in Singapore.
But people do seem to, you know, have this public service ethic across the world. But we really need to know more.
David Austin: How would you expect organisations in the public sector to use this knowledge, whether it's for their recruitment or their motivation, what can they take away from this to help their organisations run better?
Taha Hameduddin: Simply kind of, you know, pay attention to people's sort of public service needs, especially when things get tough.
And people learn from their social environments too. When you link performance to extrinsic pay and all these kinds of things, that's good because it does motivate people.
Pay does motivate individuals. But the problem is to what extent can you sustain that? At some level, the marginal impact of increased pay will be very, very small, you know, so then people actually want to make a difference. So there's a few strategies.
So connecting people to their beneficiaries, seeing the impact of your work. Having a sense of identity about what you stand for in your organisation. Having a public service mission, an organisation that you're proud of, that's also very important. And making people aware, you know, that they're valued in the organisation. All of these kinds of strategies do make a difference in keeping people around, not just when things are great, but when the situation gets worse, and you aren't able to sustain using extrinsic rewards. Those are general sort of implications.
With regards to public service motivation, it would be really about honing the public service mission and vision.
And that really comes down to leaders articulating that. So can we say, why is it that we do what we do today? And how does what I'm doing today affect the large picture of whatever the policy is or the outcome? So you may not be able to connect all those threads and that's where kind of leadership helps articulate those different things. And yeah, that that's basically it.
David Austin: Do you have any examples of good leadership? You know, when times are hard or any organisations that have a leader that's been inspiring and, you know, able to kind of implement these sorts of ideas.
Taha Hameduddin: There's many, many examples. I mean, probably the ones you can think of. People that have risen to the challenge, really articulated a vision, bringing people together. Usually they come from geopolitics, because that's stuff people know about. So you could think about FDR, Lee Kuan Yew, Mandela, you know, even if you don't agree with the policies or all these kinds of things, you could say that this person was in the right place at the right time, which is probably very true. And it's really about rising to the challenge.
So the other stuff that we don't go into in the leadership literature is really about, "Are leaders born or made?" And the idea is that, yeah, you can actually make leaders, you know, it's not some random personality trait that makes someone a better leader or the other, which is good news, for those of us that are introverts and may not have social skills. All these things don't matter that much for actual effective leadership.
David Austin: Well, one thing that came to mind was just, how much there is an overlap with the private sector, you know, because a lot of the big MNCs, you know, they have a whole CSR model. They have mission statements and vision statements. And especially over the past 10 or 15 years, I've seen how so many more companies try to have a kind of public service angle to what their profit making enterprise is.
Taha Hameduddin: Yeah. I mean certainly, and this is for the same reason. So when you do CSR activities people tend [to], you know, as employees, feel better. Like "Oh we are doing something good." You know, it gives you a chance to bond also outside of the workplace, see people in a more human light and connect yourself to beneficiaries.
And so I think, yeah, and this is becoming a lot more common, especially if you think about the larger context within which corporations are responding to social pressures and trends. To their detriment or to their benefit you know, depending on who the audience is and all this stuff, will kind of continue.
Some of it is window dressing, unfortunately and some of it, you know, if you take a very cynical view, it's really trying to squeeze out as much from an employee as possible. Hopefully it's not that. It is an intentional effort to actually connect to the wider community and do something good for the community that you know, you're in. But a lot of times, you know, it can just be like, if it's not a priority by leadership, it's just an office of CSR, that's in the basement office somewhere. It doesn't really get much resources or attention. Then, you know, people might not take that seriously as well. So it's the job of leaders to actually make that a priority.
David Austin: Absolutely.
Taha Hameduddin: And if they don't then, you know, people see through that. But there are some that are very interesting.
David Austin: Absolutely. Well one last thing I'd like to ask you before we wrap this up, because you've mentioned several times that 39 studies is not much, and there's a lot of things you would still like to know. What are some things that if you could, you know, if you had all the time and money in the world, what would your next study be? What are some of the things you would want to find out?
Taha Hameduddin: Oh, I mean, it's very simple. The next step would be to do actually a meta-analysis. So our study was qualitative, so there was very few numbers I think that you probably have seen. So meta-analysis actually gives you numbers, tells you how much of an increase in quantitative terms would leadership cause on public service motivation.
But also be able to, you know, conduct some primary studies where you actually examine the relationship between these two in a context that has been maybe under-studied, so Africa, you know, South Asia. You get a lot of studies from East Asia, from Europe and, from North America. But there's a lot of regions that are very much underrepresented and we don't know how leadership actually, you know, functions there.
And because of all the reasons that we talked about today, leadership matters, it's an important kind of thing. So yeah, lots of things to figure out. And also if I actually was, you know, in this God scenario, I would try to figure out a causality, you know, how does it go? But you know, much more challenging.
David Austin: Right. Exactly. Well, thank you. Is there anything else that you wanted to mention?
Taha Hameduddin: No, I would just encourage people to go read the paper, contact me if they have questions, you know, happy to talk and [to] any people working in public sector organisations or social minded organisations, you know, I'd love to hear from them too, see how they're doing.
David Austin: Very good, a call to action. They can reach out to you, if they have anything to add to the conversation.
(Photo credit: mentatdgt)