Abstract

Risk is omnipresent in public service delivery, which can be difficult to accept politically. Risk management is leadership behavior targeted toward enabling frontline workers to mitigate negative consequences to service recipients in risky situations. The aim of this article is to develop a theoretical framework of risk management in public service delivery and an associated, standardized, individual-level scale for use in studying leadership behavior. The article develops and tests a second-order model of risk management, employing insights from qualitative interviews with 16 public service managers and data from a survey of 187 public service managers and 698 of their employees. The factor structure was tested and validated using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. The results show that the scale correlates with public service motivation, turnover intention, and visionary leadership, which provides evidence of criterion and convergent validity. The scale has no relationship to number of work hours or age, which is supportive of discriminant validity.

摘要

风险在公共服务提供中无处不在，这在政治上可能难以接受。风险管理是一种领导行为，旨在使一线员工能够减轻风险情况下对服务接受者的负面影响。本文的目的是开发一个公共服务提供风险管理的理论框架，以及一个相关的、标准化的、个人层面的量表，用于研究领导行为。本文开发并测试了风险管理的二阶模型，采用了对 16 名公共服务经理的定性访谈和对 187 名公共服务经理及其 698 名员工的调查数据的见解。使用探索性和验证性因素分析对因素结构进行了测试和验证。结果表明，该量表与公共服务动机、离职意愿和有远见的领导力相关，这提供了标准效度和收敛效度的证据。该量表与工作小时数或年龄无关，这支持区分效度。