Promoting Street-Level Bureaucrat: How Ethical Leadership Impacts Community Workers' Enforcement

Background and Purpose: Over the years, many scholars have conducted in-depth research on enforcement. However, few studies have focused on the formation of the enforcement of street-level bureaucrats. As street-level bureaucrats are popular in providing public services, they are the front-line workers in implementing the policy. Their enforcement may affect the resignation intention of the organization members, the reputation of the organization, and the implementation of public policies. Therefore, it is a meaningful research topic to discuss the enforcement of street-level bureaucrats. In addition, the influence of ethical leadership has also received more attention. This article examines the influence of ethical leadership on the enforcement of street-level bureaucrats.

Methods: Data were collected using a cross-sectional survey design. The empirical results are based on street-level bureaucrats surveyed in "Survey on the Professional Advantages of Community Workers in Grassroots Governance in Mainland China"(n=1669). Consistent with the research perspective on community worker enforcement, this study specifically uses data from the street-level bureaucratic group working in the community. The average age of the total respondents is 36.65 years. 78.1% of street-level bureaucrats are women, and 36.5% of street-level bureaucrats hold a social work license. Survey items were drawn from the existing literature to ensure construct validity of the four core latent variables: Ethical Leadership, Public Service Motivation, Psychological Empowerment, and Enforcement Style. Harman’s one-factor test and factor analyses suggest that CMV was not strong enough to bias this study.

Results: This study examined the mechanisms of the roles that public service motivation and psychological empowerment played in the relationship of ethical leadership and enforcement among street-level bureaucrats. Then, we compared the effect sizes of the three models to further determine the best model to explain the street-level bureaucratic enforcement. We found public service motivation and psychological empowerment in total acted as mediators, buffering the effects of ethical leadership on enforcement. Besides, psychological empowerment mediates the relationship of public service motivation with enforcement. We further tested the three moderating effects of the boundary conditions to answer when those boundary conditions work. To be specific, when political institutionalization, professional institutionalization, and institutional rigidity are high, the relationship between ethical leadership and enforcement is relatively weak.

Conclusions and Implications: Our study contributes to revealing the “black box” of ethical leadership in enhancing street-level bureaucratic enforcement and its mechanism under different situations. First, we provide the first empirical test of how ethical leadership affects the enforcement of street-level bureaucrat. Secondly, we tried to resolve the uncertain relationship between ethical leadership and the enforcement of street-level bureaucrat by investigating two mediating variables and three moderating variables. Finally, our research fully considers China's characteristics of the times, which helps to provide more meaningful results. Ethical leadership in the public service work may therefore be salient in effecting street-level enforcement, and as such should be consciously targeted by public sector managers.