Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2021, 1–19

doi:10.1093/jopart/muaa057
Article

Article

Commitment to Public Values, Charismatic

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Leadership Attributions, and Employee Turnover
in Street-Level Bureaucracies
Gustavo M. Tavares*, Filipe Sobral†, and Bradley E. Wright‡
*Insper Institute of Education and Research; †Getulio Vargas Foundation; and ‡University of Georgia

Address correspondence to the author at gustavomt1@insper.edu.br.

Abstract
Public values (PV) are receiving growing attention in public administration research and scholars
frequently stress the need for public leaders to commit to and promote PV to protect the public
interest and build citizens’ trust in government. However, the relationship between public leaders’
commitment to PV and intra-organizational, behavioral outcomes has received much less theoret-
ical and empirical attention. To help address this gap, we draw on the social identity theory of lead-
ership to propose that leaders in street-level bureaucracies who are perceived to be committed to
PV are also more likely to be perceived as charismatic leaders and that these leadership attribu-
tions will be associated with lower employee turnover, especially in more stressful work contexts.
We test our hypotheses with ordinary least squares and negative binomial regression. Additional
mediation tests were conducted with structural equation modeling. Based on a sample of 87 public
organizations and 874 participants, our results reveal that perceived leader commitment to PV is
positively associated with perceived charismatic leadership which, in turn, is associated with lower
employee turnover in more stressful and demanding work environments. This study brings more
publicness to public leadership studies and can inform public leaders on how to develop more
engaging and inspirational forms of leadership with their constituencies.
  

If you don’t believe in the messenger, you won’t
believe the message. (Kouzes–Posner’s first law of
leadership)
Introduction
Public values (PV)—broadly defined as “the normative
principles on which governments and policies should
be based” (Andersen et  al. 2013, 294)—are receiving
increased attention in public administration research
(Bryson, Crosby, and Bloomberg 2014; Fukumoto and
Bozeman 2019; Van der Wal, Nabatchi, and De Graaf
2015; Wang and Wang 2020; Witesman and Walters
2014). Accordingly, public leadership studies stress the
importance of public leaders being committed to PV
and promoting these values in their organizations with
a focus on societal-level outcomes like protection of
democracy (Denhardt and Campbell 2006), institu-
tional integrity (Terry 1990), the public interest (Getha-
Taylor et al. 2011), and citizens’ trust in government
(Newell 2007). Consistent with these previous claims,
we argue that the potential beneficial effects of public
leaders’ commitment to PV on intra-organizational be-
havioral outcomes still deserve more theoretical and
empirical attention.
In this study, we draw on charismatic (Conger and
Kanungo 1998; Howell and Shamir 2005) and so-
cial identity theories of leadership (Hogg 2001; Van

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2 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2021, Vol. XX, No. XX
Knippenberg 2011) to propose that public leaders
who are perceived as being more committed to PV
are also more likely to be perceived as charismatic
leaders, particularly in street-level bureaucracies (like
public schools, social work agencies, public hospitals,
etc.) where PV may be especially salient (Fernández-
Gutiérrez and Van de Walle 2019). Central to our
theorization is the notion that charismatic leader-
ship is not simply the expression of a leader’s per-
sonal charisma—a special “gift” or trait (Platow et al.
2006)—but a social construction that depends on
both leaders and followers (Hogg, van Knippenberg,
and Rast 2012; Howell and Shamir 2005; Sy, Horton,
and Riggio 2018). In this sense, attributions of charis-
matic leadership are not only influenced by leader be-
haviors but also by the existing values, identities, and
expectations shared by followers, as they set the basis
for their judgments about and attitudes toward leaders
(Klein and House 1995; Platow et al. 2006).
We further investigate the relationship between per-
ceived charismatic leadership and an objective organ-
izational outcome, considering the moderating role of
context. Specifically, we predict that charismatic lead-
ership can be more associated with lower levels of em-
ployee turnover in more stressful contexts that demand
strong personnel effort and self-sacrifice (Javidan and
Waldman 2003; Klein and House 1995).
We tested our hypotheses with data collected from
87 public organizations and 874 employee partici-
pants. We surveyed public employees using a split-
sample design to mitigate response biases (Podsakoff,
MacKenzie, and Podsakoff 2012) and used objective
data provided by the Board of Education as our
moderating and outcome variables. Although our
cross-sectional research design does not fully address
reverse causality and other forms of endogeneity, it
strengthens our claims by providing empirical evidence
that is consistent with our theoretical rationale.
This study advances the public leadership and PV
literatures in several ways. First, we answer the call for
more publicness in public leadership studies (Crosby
and Bryson 2018; Getha-Taylor et al. 2011; Vogel and
Masal 2015; Vogel and Werkmeister 2020) and shed
light on unexplored intra-organizational outcomes of
public leaders’ commitment to PV. Second, this study
improves our comprehension of the factors that can fa-
cilitate charismatic leadership attributions in the public
sector, especially in street-level bureaucracies. Third, it
answers the call for more attention to the context in
the study of charismatic leadership in the public sector
(Javidan and Waldman 2003) by illustrating how
stressful work environments may alter the strength of
the relationship between charismatic leadership and
important organizational outcomes.
PV in Public Administration Research
According to Schwartz and Bilsky (1987), five features
are common to most definitions of values: values are
“(a) concepts or beliefs, (b) about desirable end states
or behaviors, (c) that transcend specific situations, (d)
guide selection or evaluation of behavior or events,
and (e) are ordered by relative importance” (551). In
the context of public administration, some values are
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held in high regard, as they represent the idealized
principles upon which the public service should be
based (Andersen et al. 2013). They are usually referred
to as PV.
To date, there is no complete consensus about the
definition of PV or its content (Fukumoto and Bozeman
2019; Rutgers 2015; Ventriss et al. 2019). Nonetheless,
some PV are recurrent in the literature, like integrity,
accountability, impartiality, openness to participation,
altruism, and professionalism (Jørgensen and Bozeman
2007; Van der Wal et al. 2006; Van Wart 2013; Wang
and Wang 2020; Witesman and Walters 2014). These
values can be found in professional codes of ethics like
that of the American Society for Public Administration
(Svara 2014).
The values found in the general PV literature have
some overlap with the values discussed in public ser-
vice motivation (PSM) research (Witesman and Walters
2014). While many of the PSM dimensions mirror
values found in the more general PV literature, the
two concepts are conceptually distinct given that “a
number of values that concentrate on the integrity of
governance are less apparent in public service motiv-
ation, such as impartiality, incorruptibility, and trans-
parency” (Maesschalck, Van der Wal, and Huberts
2008, 171). As suggested by Jensen, Andersen, and
Jacobsen (2019), PSM-related values may function as
the “fuel” for public employees’ actions, whereas more
normative PV (e.g., integrity and impartiality) gives
their actions the proper direction.
The public leadership literature has highlighted the
role of leadership in promoting PV in public organiza-
tions by arguing that public leaders committed to PV
act as guardians of democratic values, helping protect
the public interest and building citizens’ trust in gov-
ernment (Denhardt and Campbell 2006; Getha-Taylor
et  al. 2011; Newell 2007). Studies also suggest that
leadership can facilitate the internalization of PV by
followers (especially PSM-related values; Pandey et al.
2016; Wright, Moynihan, and Pandey 2012). Recent ex-
perimental studies have provided some evidence of this
proposition. While some experiments have found that
transformational public leaders can capitalize on em-
ployees’ existing PV to boost their performance (Bellé
2013a, 2013b), another found that transformational
leadership may only increase employee-organization
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2021, Vol. XX, No. XX
value congruence when perceived societal impact is
high (Jensen 2018).
Drawing on charismatic and social identity theories
of leadership, our study proposes that perceived leader
commitment to PV will be associated with attributions
of charismatic leadership in street-level bureaucracies,
which can, in turn, predict employee turnover. Below
we elaborate on our theoretical model.
Charismatic Leadership in Public Organizations
According to Howell and Shamir (2005), charismatic
leadership is an inspirational form of leadership “res-
iding in the relationship between leaders who exhibit
certain charismatic qualities and behaviors and those
followers who have certain perceptions, emotions, and
attitudes toward the leader […]” (98). That is, charis-
matic leadership is not only a set of leader behaviors
and characteristics but also a social construction since
its “validation” depends on followers’ favorable attri-
butions toward leaders (Hogg, van Knippenberg, and
Rast 2012). Attributions of charismatic leadership in-
clude follower admiration and respect for the leader,
attraction to the vision he/she articulates, seeing the
leader as a role model and a source of inspiration, and
feeling proud to be associated with him/her (Conger
and Kanungo 1987; Sy, Horton, and Riggio 2018).
Thus, it is not always enough for leaders to behave in
a certain way; employees must also be aware of the
leader’s behavior and interpret it favorably (Jacobsen
and Andersen 2015).
Given the important role played by followers’ per-
ceptions in charismatic leadership processes (Banks
et al. 2017; Barnes et al. 2016), this study focuses on
followers’ attributions of charismatic leadership (i.e.,
the extent to which they perceive their leaders to be
inspirational, charismatic). We acknowledge that other
important approaches to the study of charismatic lead-
ership exist and complements the attribution approach.
For instance, some studies focus on the outcomes of
specific leadership behaviors (e.g., vision articulation;
Jensen 2018) without necessarily exploring follower
attributions of charismatic leadership. Our study, how-
ever, does not focus directly on what leaders in street-
level bureaucracies need to do to be charismatic but
rather whether leaders perceived to hold certain values
are more likely to be perceived as charismatic and how
these employee perceptions of leaders might influence
their likelihood to stay in or leave the organization.
The important role that charismatic leadership
can play in influencing individual and organizational
outcomes has considerable empirical support. Meta-
analyses show that charismatic leadership is related
to followers’ work performance, extra effort, and job
satisfaction (Banks et  al. 2017; DeGroot, Kiker, and
3
Cross 2000; Dumdum, Lowe, and Avolio 2013). In the
context of public administration, charismatic forms of
leadership have been found to be related to important
public organizational outcomes (Van Wart 2013; Vogel
and Masal 2015), including increased public employee
PSM (Jensen, Andersen, and Jacobsen 2019; Jensen
and Bro 2018; Krogsgaard, Thomsen, and Andersen
2014; Wright, Moynihan, and Pandey 2012) and work
performance (Bellé 2013a, 2013b).
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Charismatic leadership may be particularly im-
portant in public administration because public man-
agers cannot use many transactional options (e.g.,
financial rewards; Boyne, Poole, and Jenkins 1999;
Hooijberg and Choi 2001). Then, inspirational forms of
leadership can be “left as one of the few tools at leaders’
disposal” (Moynihan, Pandey, and Wright 2014, 88).
This may be especially true in street-level bureaucracies
where the leader’s vision and inspirational appeals may
be less abstract to followers because “[b]eneficiary con-
tact enables employees to see that their contributions
to the vision [articulated by the leader] have mean-
ingful consequences for other people” (Grant 2012,
458; see also Bellé 2013a, 2013b). The importance of
inspirational forms of leadership in street-level bureau-
cracies is also supported by recent research showing
that visionary leadership affects employee motivation
in “people-changing” organizations but not in “people-
processing” organizations (Bro and Jensen 2020).
Therefore, it is important to advance our under-
standing of the factors that can facilitate charismatic
leadership attributions in public organizations. In the
next sections, we present our model and the proposed
relationships between perceived leader commitment
to PV, perceptions of charismatic leadership, and em-
ployee turnover.
Perceived Leader Commitment to PV and
Attributions of Charismatic Leadership
Studies have long acknowledged that leaders’ enacted
values and values-based messages are critical ingredi-
ents for attributions of charismatic leadership (Conger
and Kanungo 1987), and this premise continues to guide
contemporary studies (Banks et  al. 2017). According
to Conger and Kanungo (1998, 63), “a leader whose
vision fails to incorporate important values and lacks
relevance for the organizational context is unlikely to
be perceived as charismatic.” Similarly, Shamir, House,
and Arthur (1993) argued that connecting with the ex-
isting values and identities of followers is a necessary
condition for the leader’s message to have charismatic
effects (see also Krogsgaard, Thomsen, and Andersen
2014), while others have noted that employee percep-
tions that a leader exemplifies important group values
and norms are critical in generating a charismatic
image for the leader (Gardner and Avolio 1998).
4 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2021, Vol. XX, No. XX
These claims are consistent with the social identity
theory of leadership, which posits that for a leader to
be perceived as charismatic by followers, they need to
be first seen as someone who exemplifies the values,
beliefs, and norms that are important for the group
(Hogg, van Knippenberg, and Rast 2012; Steffens et al.
2019; Van Knippenberg 2011).
PV are expected to permeate public sector organ-
izations as “the basic principles on which these insti-
tutions are founded” (Vandenabeele 2011, 90). Public
employees are more likely to place importance on PV
as a result of attraction, selection, and attrition pro-
cesses (Perry and Wise 1990). Indeed, research confirms
that individuals with a PV orientation are more likely
to enter the public service (Asseburg et al. 2020; Holt
2018; Wright and Christensen 2010) and less likely to
leave it (Awan, Bel, and Esteve 2020; Ritz, Brewer, and
Neumann 2016). Furthermore, PV have been shown
to be even more likely to be shared by public servants
in street-level bureaucracies (Fernández-Gutiérrez and
Van de Walle 2019), where there is more beneficiary
contact (direct interaction with citizens) and employees
can more clearly see the prosocial impact of their work.
Based on the precepts of the social identity theory of
leadership, we expect that to the extent that followers
interpret a public leaders’ actions and words as a com-
mitment to PV, that leader will be more likely to be per-
ceived as representing the group’s values and beliefs (i.e.,
as group-prototypical; Hogg 2001; Van Knippenberg
2011). Greater leader group prototypicality translates
into greater status in the group and follower identifica-
tion with and attraction to the leader, which are neces-
sary elements for attributions of charisma by followers
(Platow et al. 2006; Steffens et al. 2015). In contrast, we
believe that perceived leader commitment to PV would
not be associated with attributions of charisma in private
sector contexts with low publicness (Van der Wal and
Huberts 2008) or even in government settings character-
ized by higher levels of corruption and self-interest (Awan,
Bel, and Esteve 2020), where PV would not be considered
central to the group’s shared values and norms.
Since perceived leader commitment to PV is expected
to increase leader group prototypicality in many public
service settings, especially in street-level bureaucracies, it
is also expected to be positively related to followers’ per-
ceptions of charismatic leadership. As such, we propose:
Hypothesis 1: Perceived leader commitment to
public values is positively associated with percep-
tions of charismatic leadership.
Charismatic Leadership and Employee Voluntary
Turnover
Charismatic leadership helps connect followers’
self-concepts (i.e., their existing values and identities)
to the organization’s goals (Howell and Shamir 2005).
By appealing to followers’ existing values and iden-
tities, charismatic leaders help followers develop a
sense of value congruence (or fit) with their organiza-
tions (Hoffman et al. 2011; Jensen 2018). Charismatic
leadership instills “a sense of the collective and pride
associated with being members of their organiza-
tions. Consequently, followers are likely to perceive
an alignment with the values of their larger organ-
ization” (Hoffman et  al. 2011, 782). Evidence shows
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that employee-organization value congruence is a key
mechanism linking charismatic forms of leadership to
the employee and organizational outcomes (Hoffman
et al. 2011; Jensen 2018).
When followers experience higher levels of value
congruence with their organizations, they feel that they
are part of something bigger (Hoffman et  al. 2011),
so their work becomes more meaningful and person-
ally satisfying to them (Edwards and Cable 2009;
Hoffman and Woehr 2006). This is particularly rele-
vant in public organizations since research shows that
public employees satisfy their prosocial motivations to
the extent to which they perceive that their values are
congruent with their organizations’ values (Liu, Tang,
and Yang 2015; Wright and Pandey 2008).
Therefore, we argue that, because employees are
less likely to leave an organization that enables them
to be involved in personally meaningful and satisfying
tasks (Griffith 2004; Grissom, Viano, and Selin 2016;
Pitts, Marvel, and Fernandez 2011), perceived charis-
matic leadership should be related to lower turnover
levels. By exemplifying PV, public leaders in street-level
bureaucracies are more likely to be seen as charis-
matic and can more effectively appeal to followers’ ex-
isting values, thus signaling a fit that provides a sense
of meaning among them and make them less likely to
leave the organization. As such, we predict that:
Hypothesis 2: Perceived charismatic leadership is
associated with lower levels of employee volun-
tary turnover.
The Moderating Role of Contextual Stressors
The idea that charismatic forms of leadership can
be particularly effective in stressful and challenging
situations is present in many seminal works (Bass
1985; Conger and Kanungo 1988). Klein and House
(1995, 185–6) assert that “in crises, individuals are
uncertain and stressed and, thus, open to the in-
fluence of persuasive leaders who offer a hopeful,
inspiring vision of the crisis resolved.” Relatedly,
Shamir, House, and Arthur (1993) have argued that
charismatic leadership can be particularly important
when “exceptional effort, behavior and sacrifices
are required of both leaders and followers” (590).
Accordingly, in the context of public administration,
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2021, Vol. XX, No. XX
Figure 1.  General study model.
scholars have been calling for more attention to con-
textual stressors in the study of charismatic leader-
ship (Javidan and Waldman 2003).
Many contextual factors can create a more stressful
and challenging work environment that demands in-
creased effort from public employees. For instance, in
the case of street-level bureaucracies, common con-
textual stressors known to increase employee volun-
tary turnover include the level of poverty and violence
in the surroundings of the organization (Kraft et  al.
2012). In these precarious contexts, public servants
may leave because they see their work environment as
a threat to their safety (Smith and Smith 2006) and per-
ceive that their poor working conditions impede their
chances to perform well (Simon and Johnson 2015).
While research shows that working in these precar-
ious contexts can be more meaningful to some public
servants (Cochran-Smith et  al. 2012), the chances of
not satisfying employees’ PSM increase because they are
often not given the necessary support to successfully ac-
complish their tasks. In a research conducted in a public
educational context, Kraft et al. (2012) found that most
teachers working in poorer districts did not express the
wish to work with wealthier, whiter, or higher-performing
students. Instead, they reaffirmed that helping students
succeed in those challenging contexts was even more sat-
isfying to them. However, when these teachers perceived
that their poor working conditions would prevent them
from achieving success, they expressed great frustration
and willingness to leave the school.
Therefore, we expect that in more stressful work
contexts characterized by higher levels of poverty and
violence, where public servants are more likely to have
their prosocial expectations frustrated, charismatic
leaders should become even more critical to prevent
high levels of voluntary turnover, as they can create a
more meaningful and fulfilling work environment that
helps employees satisfy their prosocial motivations and
cope with contextual adversities. We, then, advance the
following hypothesis:
Hypothesis 3: The relationship between perceived
charismatic leadership and employee voluntary
turnover will be moderated by the work con-
text, such that this relationship will be stronger
in high-stress work contexts.
5
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Based on the hypotheses set forth above, we provide
our research’s theoretical model in figure 1.
Methods
Research Setting and Sampling
To conduct this research, we established a partner-
ship with the Board of Education of the city of Rio
de Janeiro, in Brazil. The public educational system
in Rio de Janeiro includes more than 1,000 public
elementary schools.1 We chose public schools not
only because they are street-level bureaucracies cru-
cially important to society, but also because they
are the most common type of public organization
(Meier and Bohte 2003). Public schools within the
same educational system share similarities in mis-
sion, hierarchical structure, and internal processes,
despite operating in heterogeneous environments
(e.g., wealthy and safe vs. poor and violent neigh-
borhoods). As such, they represent a good setting to
test our hypotheses. Further, school principals are not
appointed by the Board of Education; instead, they
are elected for a 3-year mandate by the school staff,
teachers, and the local community. There are two
requirements for a teacher to be a school principal:
Having a post-graduation degree in school manage-
ment and at least 5 years of work experience in the
Rio de Janeiro public education system.
Importantly, by law, the Brazilian public education
system is based on the principles of democratic man-
agement and community participation (Lück 2017),
and teachers have a high level of job security. It creates
an environment that allows for dissent and critique,
thus mitigating socially desirable responses that could
bias our results. Moreover, Rio de Janeiro’s public-
school system structure limits teachers’ ability to
initially self-select into higher or lower-stress environ-
ments based on their own values. When they pass the
public exam to start a career as public teachers, they
do not know which school they will be assigned to
by the Board of Education. Teachers can subsequently
ask to be assigned to a different school (usually, after
1 Information retrieved from the Rio de Janeiro Municipal Board
of Education’s website: http://www.rio.rj.gov.br/web/sme/
exibeconteudo?id=9095194.
6 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2021, Vol. XX, No. XX

Table 1.  Characteristics and Representativeness of the Sample

Average Characteristics Population (N = 1,009) Selected Sample (N = 154) Final Sample (N = 87)
Number of teachers per school 25.55 27.74 29.54
Number of students per class 30.50 30.20 30.55
School performancea 5.14 5.24 5.08
HDI of school neighborhood 0.80 0.79 0.79
Proportion of schools per district:
District 1 (%) 6 6 9

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District 2 (%) 10 10 7
District 3 (%) 9 9 6
District 4 (%) 11 10 12
District 5 (%) 8 9 9
District 6 (%) 7 7 7
District 7 (%) 12 11 11
District 8 (%) 12 13 16
District 9 (%) 10 10 10
District 10 (%) 12 12 11
District 11 (%) 3 3 2

Note: aStandardized test score in 2015 (range: 0–10).

working for at least 5  years in a school), although
there is no guarantee that they will be assigned to the
school of their choice as the main allocation criterion
used by the Board of Education is the schools’ de-
mand for teachers. Despite these constraints, some
teachers manage to be moved to another school of
their choice.
To select the schools included in our sample, a
stratified sampling procedure was carried out to
ensure that relevant subpopulations would not
be underrepresented. Using this procedure, we
selected a random sample of 154 public elemen-
tary schools from a population of 1,009 schools.
The number of schools sampled from each of the
11 existing school districts was proportional to the
districts’ actual number of schools (table 1). Of the
154 schools selected, 148 provided us with their
teachers’ contacts, representing 3,770 potential
participants. In total, 1,017 teachers completed
the questionnaires sent via text message (response
rate of 27%). As our level of analysis is the school,
we only kept in our sample schools with at least
four respondents to have more reliable aggregate
measures. Thus, our final sample included a total
of 87 schools, totalizing 874 respondents. They
were mostly female (82%), had an average age of
44.10 (SD  =  4.31), and 12.56 (SD  =  4.38) years
of experience as teachers in public schools. The
average number of participants per school was
10.05 (SD = 5.50).
Table  1 shows the characteristics of our final
sample of schools, comparing it to the population and
the initially selected sample. It reveals that the most
important difference is the number of teachers per
school. This happened because we initially excluded
schools with less than 10 teachers2 and, after the data
collection, we excluded schools with less than four re-
spondents (as explained above). Therefore, our final
sample naturally included schools with a slightly
higher number of teachers (compared to the popu-
lation and selected sample). Nevertheless, all other
school characteristics (number of students per class,
school performance, and the Human Development
Index of the neighborhood) did not differ in mean-
ingful ways. Also, the proportion of schools per dis-
trict remained mostly the same, as shown in table 1.
As such, we believe that the sampling procedure pro-
duced a representative sample of the population that
would not need to be corrected with sampling weights
in the regression analysis.
Procedures
Data Collection
Two weeks before data collection, we sent ban-
ners, letters, and emails to all the randomly selected
schools informing them about our research. We then
sent questionnaire links to all potential participants
via a texting app (Whatsapp)3 based on the telephone
numbers provided by the schools. Participants were
informed about the general purpose of the study,
that their participation was voluntary and confiden-
tial, and that the research had been approved by both
2 We did not include in the sample schools with less than 10 teachers
in order to avoid having schools with low number of participants (our
aim was to have at least four respondents per school). During the
randomized sampling, when a school with less than 10 teachers was
selected, we substituted it by another randomly selected school from
the same district.
3 Whatsapp is the primary way people text in Brazil (https://datareportal.
com/reports/digital-2019-brazil).
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2021, Vol. XX, No. XX 7

Table 2.  Perceived Leader Commitment to PV—Scale Items

Public Values
Administrative integrity a
Administrative integrity
Openness to participation
Openness to participation
Accountability
Accountabilitya
Scale Items
Frequently ignores legal and ethical standards and prefer to do things “his/her own way.”
Is highly concerned about the ethicality and legality of all school employees’ actions.
Is open to the participation of employees and local community.
Considers the opinion and interests of many people and groups before making decisions.
Is accountable to citizens and superiors and manages transparently.
Gets annoyed when he/she is asked to provide information about the school management practices.

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Self-sacrifice Is willing to sacrifice him/herself in order to help the school.
Self-sacrificea Is often absent when the work in the school requires some personal sacrifice.
Service mentality Exemplifies the “service spirit” that public servants are expected to live up to.
Service mentality Reminds employees about the important social impact of their work.
Compassion Demonstrates compassion for the people experiencing difficulties.
Compassiona Is not sensitive to the needs of the community.

Note: aReverse-scored items.

the Institutional Review Board of the institution of
the leading author and the Rio de Janeiro Board of
Education (approval number nº 07/006.624/2017).
Before responding to the questionnaire, participants
provided their informed consent (online). About
1 month after sending the initial link to the question-
naires, we sent new messages, thanking those who
participated and inviting those who did not. We also
called the school principals of the schools that had
lower participation rates, asking them to encourage
their teachers to participate.4
Split-Sample Design
To limit common source biases and mitigate prob-
lems of spurious correlations, teachers were randomly
assigned to one of two possible questionnaires (i.e.,
a split-sample design). One of the questionnaires in-
cluded questions about principals’ commitment to PV,
while the other measured perceptions of charismatic
leadership. Although split-sample designs cannot ad-
dress all sources of method biases and endogeneity
(Favero and Bullock 2014), it was shown to be ef-
fective in mitigating individual-level biases that in-
flate correlations between study variables (Ostroff,
Kinicki, and Clark 2002; Podsakoff, MacKenzie, and
Podsakoff 2012).
Measures
Perceived Leader Commitment to PV
According to Van der Wal and Huberts (2008,
266)  “broad agreement exists that values cannot
be seen or heard and can only be observed in how
they manifest themselves through attitudes, prefer-
ences, decision making, and action.” In other words,
4 Since calling principals could bias our sample and results, we tested
whether the demographic characteristics of early respondents (those
who responded before we called) and late respondents (those who
responded after we called) differed. We did not find any significant
difference.
followers cannot directly assess their leaders’ values.
However, they can observe some of their leaders’
day-to-day decisions and actions, which, over time,
signal to them the extent to which their leaders
commit to specific values. We chose to use followers’
perceptions of their leaders’ commitment to PV ra-
ther than collecting this information directly from
their leaders (i.e., self-report) for two main reasons.
First, self-report measures are more likely to be influ-
enced by social desirability (Fisher and Katz 2000).
Moreover, as each school has only one principal, they
knew that they could be identified, which would fur-
ther increase their chances of providing only socially
desirable answers. Second, for attributions of cha-
rismatic leadership, followers’ perceptions of their
leaders’ values are more relevant than the leaders’
actual values (Gardner and Avolio 1998) as leaders’
values matter only to the extent to which employees
perceive these values are exhibited in the leaders’
words and actions.
Regarding the selection of the specific PV used to
measure leaders’ commitment to PV, it is important to
highlight that “there are no self-evident core [public]
values, nor categorizations or hierarchies of values
that can simply be applied universally in theory or
practice” and “the validity and usefulness of any typ-
ology relies on the justification of the approach taken,
that is, the very context it is stated in” (Rutgers 2008,
109). Then, we selected six values that are very re-
current in the PV literature that we believe are rele-
vant to our study’s context (table 2). We included both
classical, normative PV (integrity, accountability, and
openness to participation) and PSM-related values
(self-sacrifice, compassion, and service mentality) as
they complement each other (Maesschalck, Van der
Wal, and Huberts 2008). Important to note, all the
five dimensions of Wang and Wang’s (2020) PV in-
strument are represented by our study’s PV measure.
Moreover, our PV measure includes four of the seven
8 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2021, Vol. XX, No. XX
Figure 2.  Perceived leader commitment to PV (measurement model). Note: *Reverse-scored items. Model goodness of fit: χ 2(48) = 254.60,
SRMR = 0.04, CFI = 0.94, TLI = 0.92, RMSEA = 0.09.
“central values of governance” proposed by Huberts
(2014, 213): “Democracy with responsiveness and
participation,” “accountability and transparency,”
“lawfulness,” and “incorruptibility and impartiality.”
Then, we believe that, in balancing comprehensiveness
and parsimony, our PV measure captures important
aspects of a public leader’s commitment to PV and has
adequate content validity.
Table 2 presents the items used to measure perceived
leader commitment to PV. We created two scale items for
each of the six values, totalizing 12 items. Participants
rated their school principals’ commitment to PV on a
five-point scale, ranging from “strongly disagree” (1) to
“strongly agree” (5), after being prompted to consider
their behavior during the last mandate that had just ex-
pired.5 After performing confirmatory factor analyses
(CFA) and goodness-of-fit tests, we estimated the factor
scores for the latent variable (figure 2). The factor scores
were then aggregated (averaged) at the school level.
Perceived Charismatic Leadership
Perceived charismatic leadership was measured with
an adapted version of the 5-item scale used by Wright
and Pandey (2009) and Krogsgaard, Thomsen, and
5 In Rio de Janeiro, school principals are internally elected for a 3-year
mandate. The mandate under study finished in December 2017.
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Andersen (2014) based on House’s (1998) socialized
charismatic leadership scale. We excluded one item
related to the intellectual stimulation dimension of
transformational leadership (Bass 1985) since this di-
mension does not necessarily reflect charismatic leader-
ship perceptions. The four items are: “Says things that
make employees proud to be part of the organization,”
“Leads by setting a good example,” “Clearly articulates
his/her vision of the future,” and “Has a clear sense of
where our organization should be in the future.” Since
the items were rated by followers, they only capture fol-
lowers’ perceptions of charismatic leadership and not
necessarily a leader’s actual behaviors. Teachers rated
their school principals on a five-point scale, ranging
from “strongly disagree” (1) to “strongly agree” (5). We
used the CFA’s predicted factor scores as our measure
of perceived charismatic leadership. These factor scores
were then aggregated at the school level.
Voluntary Turnover
The Rio de Janeiro Board of Education provided us
with the total number of teachers who voluntarily left
each school in 2017. It does not include teachers who
left due to dismissal, retirement, health problems, or
death. This measure was obtained after the data collec-
tion period. On average, 2.9 teachers left their schools
in 2017 (turnover rate of about 9.7%).
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2021, Vol. XX, No. XX
Table 3.  Goodness-of-Fit Tests: Perceived Commitment to PV Measure
Model χ 2
1. Single-factor model χ  (54) = 383.95 [0.000]
2
2. Six-factor model χ 2(39) = 211.30 [0.000]
3. Second-order model χ 2(48) = 254.60 [0.000]
Note: Model 3 has a significantly better fit than Model 1: ∆χ 2(6) = 129.35 [0.000].
p values are reported in brackets.
Contextual Stress
We used objective indicators of poverty and violence
of schools’ neighborhoods to create a contextual stress
index. Both high levels of poverty and violence were
shown to be important predictors of teachers’ decision
to leave the school (Simon and Johnson 2015; Smith
and Smith 2006). To measure poverty and violence
in the school area, we used students’ socio-economic
status (SES)6 of 2015 (the latest available) and the
average yearly number of homicides around the school
(within a radius of 500 meters) from 2014 to 2016,
all of which provided by the Rio de Janeiro Board of
Education. The two indicators (SES and number of
homicides) were combined with factor analysis. We
predicted the factor scores to create a standardized
index of “contextual stress.”
Control Variables
We controlled for (i) school past performance (school
standardized test score in 2015), (ii) number of
teachers in the school, (iii) average number of stu-
dents per class, (iv) school principal gender, (v)
number of teachers per student, and (vi) the total
number of classes in the school. By controlling for
past performance, we aimed at mitigating the effect of
followers’ attribution of “good/bad leadership” based
on organizational performance (Meindl, Ehrlich,
and Dukerich 1985). We controlled for school size
(number of teachers and number of classes) and
the number of students per class because these vari-
ables can be related to the complexity of managing
the school and organizational climate variables. The
number of teachers per student functions as a proxy
to resources. Finally, school principal gender was in-
cluded as a control because leader gender can also
bias followers’ leadership perceptions (Eagly and
Karau 2002; Schein et al. 1996).
Results
Measurement
We tested different configurations of the perceived
commitment to PV measure with CFA. As shown
6 The students’ SES is an index calculated by the Brazilian Government
that considers the students’ family income, possession of goods,
and the educational level of parents, among other socio-economic
indicators.
9
∆χ 2 (∆df) SRMR CFI TLI RMSEA
– 0.04 0.90 0.88 0.11
∆χ 2(15) = 172.64 [0.000] 0.03 0.95 0.91 0.09
∆χ 2(9) = 43.30 [0.000] 0.04 0.94 0.91 0.09
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in table  3, the CFA revealed that a six-factor model
showed a significantly better fit than a single-factor
model, indicating the discriminant validity of the six PV
dimensions. Furthermore, a model in which all the six
PV dimensions load in a higher-order factor (figure 2)
showed an acceptable goodness of fit, indicating that
all the six PV dimensions reflect a common latent vari-
able. The Cronbach’s α of perceived commitment to
PV was 0.93.
Regarding the perceived charismatic leader-
ship measure, all four items showed to be highly
convergent (Cronbach’s α  =  0.94), and CFA re-
sults at the individual level indicated a good fit to
the data: SRMR  =  0.01, CFI  =  1.00, TLI  =  0.99,
RMSEA = 0.01.
We then assessed the extent to which teachers of
the same school agreed among themselves regarding
their perceptions of their school principals’ commit-
ment to PV. The ICC(1) and ICC(2) (Bliese 1998) of
perceived commitment to PV were 0.44 and 0.78,
respectively, indicating strong agreement among re-
spondents (Woehr et al. 2015). Teachers also seemed
to agree regarding their perceptions of charis-
matic leadership: ICC(1) = 0.28 and ICC(2) = 0.68.
Consistent with that, the rwg scores of perceived
leader commitment to PV and perceived charis-
matic leadership were 0.89 and 0.76, respectively,
all above the cutoff value of 0.70. The ICCs and rwg
scores of both perceived commitment to PV and per-
ceived charismatic leadership provide support for
aggregation and analysis at the school level (Woehr
et al. 2015).
To assess the discriminant validity of leader per-
ceived commitment to PV and perceived charismatic
leadership, we ran a factor analysis with the aggre-
gated items at the school level (we could not run that
at the individual level since we used a split-sample
design). Results show that the average variance ex-
tracted (AVE) of each factor was above the commonly
accepted threshold of 0.50 (commitment to PV = 0.66;
charismatic leadership  =  0.83), and that the square
roots of the AVEs (commitment to PV = 0.82; charis-
matic leadership = 0.92) were higher than the correl-
ation between the two variables (r = 0.66). This result
supports the discriminant validity of the constructs
(Fornell and Larcker 1981). Besides, we conducted
10 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2021, Vol. XX, No. XX

CFA7 tests using the organizational-level data to verify

−0.42***
if the two-factor model (commitment to PV and cha-

9
rismatic leadership separated) has a better fit to the
data than the one-factor model (both commitment
to PV’s and charismatic leadership’s items loading in

−0.18
−0.13
8
the same factor). Results showed that the two-factor
model has a good fit to the data, which is significantly
better than the goodness of fit of the one-factor model

−0.27*
0.10

−0.10
7
(see the Supplementary Appendix). This finding fur-

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ther confirms the discriminant validity of perceived

0.44***

0.64***
leader commitment to PV and perceived charismatic

−0.24*
−0.11
leadership.

6
Hypotheses Testing

−0.54***
−0.51***
Means, standard deviations, ranges, and intercorrel-

0.22*
0.04
−0.14
5
ations of the study variables are reported in table  4.
Additional descriptive statistics are provided in the
Supplementary Appendix. The zero-order correlations

0.21*
−0.18

−0.04
0.01
0.08
0.15
4
reveal a strong positive association between perceived
commitment to PV and perceived charismatic lead-
ership (r  =  0.66, p < .001). Both perceived commit-

−0.37***
0.24*
ment to PV and perceived charismatic leadership were

0.14
0.25
0.07
−0.08
0.07
3
negatively related to turnover (r = −0.28, p < .01 and
r = −0.31, p < .01, respectively). Also, contextual stress
Independent variables
is positively related to teacher turnover (r = 0.24, p <

−0.31**

−0.31**
Control variables

−0.24*
−0.19

0.14

0.04
0.02
−0.17
.05). When we compare the turnover rates of low- and
2

high-stress schools (contextual stress below/above the

median), we find that high-stress schools tend to have
0.66***

−0.38***
greater turnover rates (12%) compared to low-stress −0.28**

−0.32**
−0.24*

0.24*

−0.16
0.08
0.12
1

schools (9%). However, the effect of contextual stress

on turnover is not statistically significant when we con-
trol for other school characteristics (table 5). These re-

Raw mean (average of the scale items). bStandardized variable. cMale = 1, female = 2.
5.00
5.00
2.10
13.00

7.00
56.00

2.00
0.08
44.00
Max

sults provide preliminary support for the hypothesized 65.7

relationships.
Hypotheses were then tested with linear (H1) and
2.28
1.33
−2.29
1.00

3.20
10.00
18.50
1.00
0.03
6.00
Min

negative binomial regression (H2 and H3) using Stata

14 Software. Negative binomial regression was used to
Table 4.  Descriptive Statistics and Intercorrelations

model turnover because this is a right-skewed count

0.60
0.79
1.00
2.29

0.83

9.09
0.29
0.01
7.90
10.8
SD

variable (Gardner, Mulvey, and Shaw 1995; Stanley

et al. 2013). Additional analyses were conducted with
4.37a
4.15a

generalized structural equation modeling (GSEM)

Mean

2.88

5.08
29.54
30.55
1.91
0.04
21.51
0b

both as a robustness check of our results and to con-

duct the conditional path analysis (Hayes 2013); that
Note: N = 87. Level of analysis: schools.

is, to test the indirect relationship between perceived

Perceived charismatic leadership
Perceived commitment to PV

leader commitment to PV and turnover through per-

ceived charismatic leadership (mediation).
School past performance

*p < .05, ** p < .01, ***p < .001.

Table  5 shows the results of the regression ana-

Teachers per student
Variable

Number of teachers

lyses. Supporting H1, we found a significant

Number of classes
Students per class
Principal genderc
Contextual stress

association between perceived school principals’ com-

mitment to PV and perceived charismatic leadership
(b = 0.65, SE = 0.08, p < .001). We also found that the
Turnover

7 Since we used organizational-level data to conduct this CFA, we used

item parceling (aggregating pairs of PV items into a single indicator) to
a
10

compensate for the smaller number of observations (Matsunaga 2008).

1
2
3
4

5
6
7
8
9
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2021, Vol. XX, No. XX 11

Table 5.  Regression Results

Dependent Variables
Perceived Charismatic
Leadership (OLS Linear
Regression) Employee Turnover (Negative Binomial Regression)
Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6
Independent variables

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Perceived commitment to PV 0.65 −0.15 0.00 −0.01
(0.08) (0.06) (0.09) (0.09)
[0.000] [0.010] [0.976] [0.884]
Perceived charismatic leadership −0.23 −0.18
(0.09) (0.09)
[0.012] [0.034]
Contextual stress −0.03 0.15 0.14 0.11
(0.10) (0.09) (0.08) (0.08)
[0.700] [0.082] [0.085] [0.204]
Charismatic Leadership × Contextual Stress −0.12
(0.05)
[0.031]
Control variables
School past performance −0.12 −0.20 −0.20 −0.12 −0.18 −0.17
(0.15) (0.15) (0.13) (0.14) (0.12) (0.13)
[0.419] [0.171] [0.116] [0.393] [0.143] [170]
Number of teachers −0.01 0.00 0.02 0.03 0.03 0.04
(0.02) (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) (0.01)
[0.719] [0.988] [0.073] [0.018] [0.002] [0.000]
Students per class −0.03 −0.03 −0.03 −0.03 −0.05 −0.05
(0.03) (0.02) (0.02) (0.01) (0.01) (0.01)
[0.233] [0.204] [0.074] [0.014] [0.000] [0.000]
Principal gendera 0.07 0.07 0.46 0.38 0.43 0.37
(0.27) (0.27) (0.25) (0.28) (0.27) (0.28)
[0.795] [0.775] [0.070] [0.179] [0.112] [0.184]
Teachers per student −12.99 −11.63 3.37 1.23 −2.96 −5.37
(15.19) (12.19) (9.73) (8.42) (6.08) (5.77)
[0.395] [0.343] [0.720] [0.883] [0.626] [0.352]
Number of classes −0.03 −0.01 −0.01 −0.02 −0.02 −0.03
(0.03) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02) (0.01)
[0.429] [0.652] [0.611] [0.252] [0.058] [0.020]
Constant 3.08 2.55 1.38 1.54 2.36 2.59
R2 (Pseudo R2) 0.13 0.49 (0.03) (0.06) (0.07) (0.08)

Note: N = 87. Non-standardized coefficients. Robust standard errors in parenthesis.

a
Male = 1, female = 2.
p values are reported in brackets.
OLS, ordinary least squares.

relationship between perceived charismatic leadership Noteworthy, perceived leader commitment to

and employee voluntary turnover is negative and sig-
nificant (b = −0.23, SE = 0.09, p < .05). It means that,
on average, in schools led by principals perceived as
less charismatic (1 SD below the mean), 3.52 teachers
left the school in 2017 (turnover rate of 12%), whereas
in schools led by principals perceived as more charis-
matic (1 SD above the mean), this number goes down
to 2.23 (turnover rate of 7.5%). This finding provides
support to H2, which predicted that perceived charis-
matic leadership would be associated with lower levels
of teacher turnover.
PV also had a negative association with turnover
(b = −0.15, SE = 0.06, p < .05; see Model 4, table 5).
However, this association disappeared after the inclu-
sion of perceived charismatic leadership in the model
(Model 5, table 5), which suggests that the relationship
between perceived commitment to PV and turnover
is fully mediated by perceived charismatic leadership
(Baron and Kenny 1986). To further analyze this result,
we conducted more strict mediation tests with GSEM.
Regarding H3, we predicted that more stressful
and demanding environments would strengthen the
12 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2021, Vol. XX, No. XX
Figure 3.  Relationship between perceived charismatic leadership and turnover in high- versus low-stress contexts.
relationship between perceived charismatic leadership
and turnover. Supporting this prediction, we found a
negative interaction between contextual stress and per-
ceived charismatic leadership (b  =  −0.12, SE  =  0.05, p
< .05). It means that perceived charismatic leadership is
more strongly associated with lower teacher turnover in
schools located in more stressful environments (figure 3).
Illustrating that, figure 3 shows that in high-stress contexts
(continuous line), the average teacher turnover per school
in 2017 goes from 4.07 to 2.25 (a reduction of 45%) as
a function of perceived charismatic leadership. However,
in low-stress contexts (dashed line), the decline in turn-
over associated with perceived charismatic leadership is
rather small (goes from 2.59 to 2.28). Indeed, simple main
slope analysis confirm that the relationship between per-
ceived charismatic leadership and turnover is significant
in high-stress contexts (1 SD above the mean; b = −0.93,
SE = 0.27, p < .01) but not in low-stress contexts (1 SD
below the mean; b = −0.15, SE = 0.28, p = .57). Figure 4
provides a more nuanced analysis of this interaction effect.
It shows the distribution of the contextual stress variable
and how the relationship between perceived charismatic
leadership and turnover changes as a function of it.
Additional Structural Equation Modeling Analysis
As a robustness check of our results, we estimated the
entire model with GSEM. Further, as perceived leader
commitment to PV was shown to be associated with
perceived charismatic leadership, which, in turn, relates
to lower turnover—especially in more stressful con-
texts—we also tested whether perceived charismatic
leadership functions as a mediator of the relationship
between perceived leader commitment to PV and turn-
over. To do so, we conducted a conditional path analysis
(Hayes 2013), testing the indirect relationship between
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perceived leader commitment to PV and turnover (me-
diated by perceived charismatic leadership) at different
levels of contextual stress. We followed the procedures
outlined by Hayes (2013).8 All the paths to perceived
charismatic leadership were modeled with linear regres-
sion. The paths to employee turnover were modeled
with negative binomial regression (figure  5). Results
supported all the hypothesized relationships.
The results of the conditional path analysis suggest
that perceived leader commitment to PV is indirectly as-
sociated with lower levels of turnover through the me-
diation of perceived charismatic leadership, especially in
more stressful work environments. The average indirect
relationship was b = −0.15, SE = 0.06, p < .05. Regarding
the conditional indirect relationships, table  6 shows
that the indirect relationship between perceived leader
commitment to PV and turnover (through perceived
charismatic leadership) reaches statistical significance
only when contextual stress is either average (b = −0.12,
SE = 0.06, p < .05) or high (b = −0.19, SE = 0.06, p <
.01). At low levels of contextual stress, the indirect re-
lationship between perceived leader commitment to PV
and turnover is not significant (b = −0.04, SE = 0.08, p >
.05). Finally, the non-significance of the direct relation-
ship between perceived leader commitment to PV and
turnover (c', figure 5) suggests full mediation.
Discussion
Drawing on the literature on charismatic leader-
ship and the social identity theory of leadership, we
8 The script for conditional path analysis (moderated mediation) for Stata
Statistical Software can be found at https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/stata/
faq/how-can-i-do-moderated-mediation-in-stata/.
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2021, Vol. XX, No. XX 13

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Figure 4.  Marginal effects of perceived charismatic leadership on turnover. Note: The dashed lines refer to the 95% confidence interval of
charismatic leadership’s effects on turnover.

Figure 5.  GSEM results—full model. Note: N = 87. *p < .05 ***p < .001. c': Direct effect of perceived leader commitment to PV on turnover.
Control variables: Only significant paths are shown.

proposed that public leaders’ perceived commitment
of PV can be a critical ingredient for attributions of
charismatic leadership in the public sector, especially
in street-level bureaucracies, where PV tend to be more
salient (Fernández-Gutiérrez and Van de Walle 2019).
When leaders are not perceived by followers to embody
the core values and beliefs of the group, their ability
to be perceived as charismatic is limited (Conger and
Kanungo 1988; Klein and House 1995; Platow et al.
2006). Our results indicate that the values, beliefs, and
expectations that makeup group prototypes in the con-
text of street-level bureaucracies encompass the ideal-
ized principles of public administration—the PV.
Moreover, our results are consistent with pre-
vious claims that charismatic leadership can be ef-
fective in the public sector (Moynihan, Pandey, and
Wright 2014; Paarlberg and Lavigna 2010; Wright
and Pandey 2009), particularly in preventing high
levels of employee voluntary turnover. We argue this
may happen because charismatic leadership can create
a more meaningful and satisfying work experience
for front-line public servants, mainly by increasing
person-organization value congruence (Jensen 2018).
However, it is important to note that we could not test
the value congruence hypothesis; it is only an assumed
mechanism that requires further investigation.
14 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2021, Vol. XX, No. XX
Table 6.  Conditional Path Analysis (Moderated
Mediation)
Conditional Indirect Effects of Perceived
Leader Commitment to PV on Turnover
Contextual
stress level b SE 95% CI
Low −0.04 [0.581] 0.08 −0.19 0.11
Average −0.12 [0.045] 0.06 −0.23 −0.01
High −0.19 [0.001] 0.06 −0.31 −0.07
Note: N = 87. “Low” = 1 SD below the mean; “Average” = mean;
“High”  =  1 SD above the mean. Pairwise comparisons show that
differences between the conditional indirect effects are all significant
(p < .05).
p values are reported in brackets.
Our results also indicate that more attention
needs to be given to the context in the study of cha-
rismatic leadership, as suggested by Javidan and
Waldman (2003). Specifically, we have found that
perceived charismatic leadership was more strongly
associated with lower employee turnover in stressful
work environments characterized by higher levels of
local violence and poverty. In low-stress contexts,
perceived charismatic leadership’s association with
turnover was not significant. While some public ser-
vants can feel motivated to work in more stressful
environments with the purpose of “making a differ-
ence” (Cochran-Smith et al. 2012), if they do not find
the necessary administrative and psychological sup-
port to conduct their activities, they are more likely
to get frustrated and leave the organization (Kraft
et al. 2015).
Our findings suggest that, in such contexts, PV-based
charismatic leadership may help create a more sup-
portive and meaningful work environment, thus
preventing high levels of employee turnover. The re-
sults of the path analysis (moderated-mediation model)
suggest that perceived leader commitment to PV is in-
directly associated with lower turnover through its re-
lationship with attributions of charismatic leadership
in more stressful and demanding work environments.
In more stable work environments, the indirect rela-
tionship between perceived leader commitment to PV
and turnover was not statistically significant. It seems
that perceived leader commitment to PV relates to em-
ployee job attitudes and behaviors mostly because it
helps create more engaging/meaningful forms of lead-
ership (i.e., charismatic leadership). Maybe for other
outcome variables, like ethical climate (Shin 2012)—or
a “PV climate”—the effect of perceived leader commit-
ment to PV would be more direct.
Theoretical Contributions
We believe our study advances the current knowledge
of both public leadership and PV in four major ways.
First, unlike many previous public leadership studies
(Denhardt and Campbell 2006; Getha-Taylor et  al.
2011; Newell 2007) that focused on the link between
public leaders’ commitment to PV and societal-level
outcomes, our study shifted the focus to the internal
environment of public organizations to explain how
perceived leader commitment to PV may be related to
intra-organizational outcomes. Moreover, while pre-
vious behavioral public administration studies have
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examined the effects of public servants’ values on their
behaviors and decisions (Witesman and Walters 2014),
we explore how public servants’ perceptions of their
leaders’ commitment to specific values can be asso-
ciated with attributions and behaviors. Since leader-
ship is also a socio-cognitive process (Lord and Maher
2002), it is important to assess not only what leaders
are or do, but also how followers perceive and inter-
pret their values and behaviors as well as the outcomes
of such perceptions.
Second, this study helps identify the factors asso-
ciated with charismatic leadership attributions that
may be unique to public organizations, especially in
street-level bureaucracies. Given that such forms of
leadership were shown to be positively associated with
public organizations’ outcomes (Van Wart 2013; Vogel
and Masal 2015), advancing our understanding of
charismatic leadership in street-level bureaucracies is
important in realizing such benefits.
Third, we show that contextual factors must be con-
sidered in the study of charismatic leadership in the
public sector. Most previous studies have considered
charismatic leadership a universally positive form of
public leadership. Our results, however, provide sup-
port for past theoretical claims that higher levels of un-
certainty or turbulence may enhance the effectiveness
of charismatic leadership (Javidan and Waldman 2003;
Shamir and Howell 1999). In addition to illustrating
the potentially beneficial role that charismatic lead-
ership may play in buffering employees from the ad-
verse effects of stressful work environments, our study
suggests that the publicness in public leadership is im-
portant. Street-level employee perceptions that their
leaders are committed to PV can be indirectly associ-
ated with employee turnover, although perhaps only
in the more stressful work environments. Reducing
teacher turnover can be particularly important in such
environments by reducing costs and improving student
learning outcomes (O’Toole and Meier 2003; Simon
and Johnson 2015).
Finally, we believe our study takes another step to-
ward connecting the PSM and the more general PV
literature. Following Maesschalck, Van der Wal, and
Huberts’ (2008) view that PSM-related values and
“classical” PV complement each other, we combined
both sets of values to form our perceptual measure of
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2021, Vol. XX, No. XX
leader commitment to PV. Our results provided sup-
port for such integration.
Limitations and Future Research
We acknowledge that this work has important limita-
tions, which opens several avenues for future research.
First, although we have used a split-sample design
and objective outcome variables to mitigate response
biases (Ostroff, Kinicki, and Clark 2002; Podsakoff,
MacKenzie, and Podsakoff 2012), we could not ad-
dress all sources of endogeneity that are common to
cross-sectional studies, which prevents us from con-
cluding that the empirical associations found in this
study are causal. We also cannot rule out the possibility
of reverse causality. We highlight that both leader com-
mitment to PV and charismatic leadership measures
have been based on the followers’ perceptions, making
spurious correlations more likely to occur. Moreover,
the split-sample design has prevented us from using
hierarchical models that could have accounted for
some individual-level characteristics of respondents.
As such, we believe that future work can conduct both
longitudinal multi-level studies and field experiments
(e.g., by giving training to public leaders on how to ex-
emplify and communicate PV) to further test the pro-
posed causal relationships. Further, by relying only on
follower perceptions, we could not assess precisely how
much leaders are personally committed to PV (an inner
mental state) and how it affects their actual leadership
behaviors. We believe this can be an interesting avenue
for future research.
Moreover, while we show that our final sample of
schools is quite representative of the population being
studied, our reduced sample size (87 public schools)
and the specificity of the context (public educational
arena) point to the need for future replication results
to ascertain their generalizability. We have also focused
on street-level bureaucracies, where PV are more likely
to be shared by public servants (Fernández-Gutiérrez
and Van de Walle 2019). Future research is also needed
to investigate if the association between perceived
leader commitment to PV and perceived charismatic
leadership weakens in public organizations that are
more distant from the “street level,” since PV may be
less salient in such contexts. Future studies should also
further develop our perceptual measure of leader com-
mitment to PV by including other relevant PV or test
our hypotheses using other recently developed instru-
ments (Wang and Wang 2020).
Another limitation related to our sample refers to
self-selection and survival biases. As previously noted,
the Rio de Janeiro Board of Education’s structure
limits teachers’ ability to self-select into specific schools
when they join the public service. However, subsequent
self-selection can occur (after 5 years of work in a given
15
school, teachers can ask to be assigned to a different
school), which can make schools differ (in terms of the
composition of their members) in systematic ways that
have not been accounted for in our analyses. Relatedly,
a survival bias might also have created systematic differ-
ences between high- and low-stress schools. That is, at
any given point in time, the pool of remaining teachers
in a school will be selective of those who have chosen to
stay. Such potential selection and survival biases might
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have affected not only the characteristics of teachers
but also of principals since they come from the pool of
teachers in the school. With the data in hand, however,
we could not address these limitations. We believe that
randomized controlled trials would be the best solution
to address these issues.
Furthermore, we have focused on the association be-
tween perceived leader commitment to PV and charis-
matic leadership attributions. However, we believe that
perceived leader commitment to PV can have other im-
portant direct effects on followers and inspire the cre-
ation and conservation of PV by guiding how and how
well employees perform their work (Crosby and Bryson
2018). For instance, based on social learning theory,
the ethical leadership theory proposes that leaders can
influence followers’ ethical conduct via role modeling
(Brown, Treviño, and Harrison 2005). We believe the
same rationale can be applied to PV-based leadership.
Leaders holding strong values of self-sacrifice and
compassion may inspire their followers to work harder
and be more sensitive to their clients’ and community’s
needs. As such, future research may examine the ex-
tent to which public leaders’ commitment to PV can be
modeled and emulated by followers. Regarding our de-
pendent variable (employee turnover), future research
could also investigate what type of turnover occurred
(e.g., out of teaching, moving to a wealthier district, or
even involuntary turnover).
Finally, although we have focused on the leadership
of people occupying formal positions of authority in
public organizations, we believe that our study does
not conflict with the contemporary public leadership
literature that calls for more distributed, collabora-
tive, and relational conceptualizations of leadership
(Crosby and Bryson 2010; Ospina 2017). The exist-
ence of participative, “horizontal” leadership processes
is not at odds with the existence of a more vertical,
formal leadership (Pearce 2004). On the contrary, as-
signed leaders, especially when guided by PV, may act
as facilitators and catalysts of collaboration processes,
stimulating internal and external stakeholders to ac-
tively participate in creating PV (Campbell 2018). In
this regard, future research may explore the import-
ance of formal (vertical) PV-based leadership to the
emergence of informal leadership networks at all levels
of public organizations.
16 Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2021, Vol. XX, No. XX
Conclusion
We believe that this work contributes to our know-
ledge about how and when PV may influence public
leadership processes and outcomes. By showing that
commitment to PV is not only a public leader’s ob-
ligation (from a normative perspective) but also an
important predictor of more engaging, inspirational
forms of public leadership, we bring more publicness
to public leadership research (Vogel and Masal 2015).
Moreover, we address Crosby and Bryson’s (2018) re-
cent recommendation that we should pay more atten-
tion to both PV and the existing leadership theories
with the objective of integrating these theories into the
public leadership research agenda.
Supplementary Material
Supplementary data is available at the Journal of Public
Administration Research and Theory online.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the Rio de Janeiro Board of Education for giving us
full support to conduct this research. We also thank all the teachers who gently
agreed to participate in this study and the three anonymous reviewers for their
insightful comments and suggestions.
Data Availability
The data underlying this article will be shared on rea-
sonable request to the corresponding author.
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