Effect Of Organizational Support And Public Service Motivation On Job Performance Of Grass-roots Civil Servants

A comprehensively elevated capacity and level of grassroots governance,as the bedrock of national governance,is the key foundation for modernizing the national governance system and capacity.Grassroots public officials,who implement the policy system through tasks,serve as a converter,transforming all policy texts into specific actions and practices.How they behave and what they deliver at work straightly constitute governance results of towns(streets)and urban and rural communities.Grassroots public officials handle the affairs of the masses directly,and therefore have close,frequent,and direct contact with them.In the“Governmental-Civil interaction”,citizens not only receive policies but also evaluate them.Besides,in the interpersonal interaction,they would form an impression and assessment of grassroots public officials who implement the policies and carry out activities,such as their work attitude and behaviors.Their impression and evaluation of grassroots officials will influence the way they view the grassroots government,hence affecting the governmental credibility.Therefore,grass-roots civil servants are the “last link” of policy implementation,so their work behavior and performance are undoubtedly the focus of public attention.However,the contradiction between arduous grass-roots governance and inefficient grass-roots workers has become the key and difficulty in the practice of grass-roots governance.Based on the realistic environment and policy background,this study presented the theoretical issue of whether organizational support and transforming leadership can effectively improve the job performance of grass-roots civil servants and explored how they can promote or inhibit the job performance of grass-roots civil servants and how to improve their job performance by improving their working environment and management methods,which are all realistic issues to be solved urgently.Aiming at “bolstering the modernization of grassroots governance system and governance capacity and boosting the job performance of grassroots public officials”,this paper reviews and sorts out the existing literature on the job performance of grassroots public officials based on their actual situation,in which a detailed comment on the structural dimensions,evaluation methods,influencing factors and influencing mechanism of their job performance is made.Combined with the theory of job performance,Organizational Support and public service motivation,this paper constructs a theoretical model of the job performance influence mechanism of grass-roots public officials incorporating organizational management and leadership style according to the direction of “environmental inducement factors—cognition and action—behaviors and output”.This model integrates the external environmental inducement with the individual’s internal cognition.Taking the survey questionnaires of 622 grassroots public officials in Henan Province as a sample,this paper conducts an empirical analysis,and draws research conclusions and optimization paths correspondingly.This study resulted in following findings and conclusions:First,definition and dimension of the job performance of grass-roots civil servants.Job performance of grass-roots civil servants includes two dimensions: task performance and contextual performance.Task performance reflects the task completion effect of grass-roots civil servants as well as direct work behavior to complete tasks and achieve goals,including improvement in job skills and rational application of laws and regulations;contextual performance reflects indirect work behavior such as interpersonal interaction and atmosphere promotion to complete tasks and achieve high performance.Job performance includes both work results and individual behavior to complete tasks or achieve goals.Second,Status quo of the job performance of grass-roots civil servants and influencing factors.The data analysis showed medium job performance of grass-roots civil servants,low overall task performance,and slightly higher contextual performance than task performance and validated that age,working years and working area have differentiated effects on job performance of grass-roots civil servants,so grass-roots civil servants should improve their job performance and work behavior.In terms of the scores of factors affecting job performance of grass-roots civil servants,transforming leadership and red tape scored high,while job engagement,organizational support and public service motivation scored low.At present,grass-roots workers in villages and towns still face high red tape,less perceived organizational support as well as inadequate public service motivation and job engagement.Third,effect mechanism of the job performance of grass-roots civil servants.Based on structural equation modeling and hierarchical multiple regression,this study validated the positive effect of transforming leadership and perceived organizational support on the job performance of grass-roots civil servants,analyzed the way and significance of the effect,and verified the negative moderating effect of red tape.On this basis,this study gave recommendations for improving the job performance of grass-roots civil servants as follows: stimulate public service motivation and build a transforming leadership team;improve assessment and incentive mechanisms to promote job engagement;comprehensively improve the working environment and create “supportive” organization.This study made following contributions and innovations:First,this study built a theoretical framework for analyzing the job performance of grass-roots civil servants from a comprehensive perspective,and starting from the organizational level and individual level,this study found out the way the mesoscopic organizational environment factors and management factors stimulate and affect microscopic individual cognition and action.It focused on the effect of organizational environment and management environment on the cognition of grass-roots civil servants and the comprehensive effect on their actions.Based on the working situation and organizational environment of grass-roots civil servants in China and combined with the perspectives of mediating effect and self-regulation in behavioral motivation research,this study built a framework including organizational management,leadership style and individual cognition for analyzing the effect mechanism of the job performance of grass-roots civil servants.Second,this study determined the internal structure of job performance of grass-roots civil servants.Job performance of grass-roots civil servants was comprehensively defined from the perspectives of results and behavior based on previous findings;applicability of the task-context performance model for grass-roots civil servants was empirically tested,and it was determined that job performance of grass-roots civil servants included two independent dimensions,namely task performance and contextual performance,which enriched research on connotations of the job performance of grass-roots civil servants.Third,this study revealed the effect mechanism of organizational support and transforming leadership on the job performance of grass-roots civil servants.SPSS21.0 and AMOS 23.0 were comprehensively used for exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis.Based on theory and combined with survey results,the factors affecting the job performance of grass-roots civil servants were classified into two categories,including a total of 5 independent factors.Through structural equation modeling and hierarchical multiple regression,it was validated that organizational support and transforming leadership had a significant direct positive effect on the job performance of grass-roots civil servants,public service motivation and job engagement had an indirect effect on job performance of grass-roots civil servants,and red tape negatively moderated the effect of organizational support and transforming leadership on job performance of grass-roots civil servants.To a certain extent,this study enriched and improved research on job performance of grass-roots civil servants as well as the mechanism and model of influencing factors and provided theoretical guidance for performance improvement of grass-roots civil servants in the local environment.