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 service motivation (PSM) as a key variable mediating between perceived 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.
| INTRODUCTIONIn 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 management, 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 general management. Fernandez and Rainey (2006), in their extensive review of the literature, conclude that 'this recurrent 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
