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The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between employees’ perception of their jobs and attitudes by investigating the effect of job resources (i.e. social support) on the relationship between job demands (i.e. workload, role ambiguity) and job-related well-being (i.e. efficacy, job satisfaction) among government employees.

Data were obtained from federal government employees responding to the 2012 Federal Employees Viewpoint Survey (US Office of Personnel Management, 2012). To test the hypotheses, hierarchical regression analyses were conducted.

Results revealed that social support served to mitigate feelings of inefficacy and simultaneously enhanced job satisfaction among employees experiencing work overload or role ambiguity, which supports the buffer hypothesis.

Since this study analyzes data collected by OPM, some items could not be modified, and using a limited number of items could be a limitation of this paper. Given that there has been a research stream linking public service motivation to work attitudes in the field of public management, the current study suggests there may be additional factors (i.e. job demands and resources) to enhance public sector employees’ work attitudes.

This study suggests the importance of government agencies adopting management strategies that encourage higher levels of social support from supervisors or colleagues in order to increase employees’ positive attitudes toward organizations.

This study focuses specifically on public sector employees, a population that has received limited attention in this area.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the effectiveness of transformational leadership behaviors are moderated by a country’s cultural values and cultural practices.

The authors describe a meta-analytic review of the relationship between transformational leadership and employee performance (task performance and OCBs) using data from over 57,000 individuals, 215 samples and 34 countries. The authors examine whether this relationship is moderated by the cultural values and practices of the country in which the study was located – after first controlling for methodological factors.

The authors find that cultural values and practices moderate the transformational leadership – employee performance relationship such that the relationship is much stronger in countries whose culture is incongruent with transformational leadership.

Data were only available for 34 countries and it is unclear what role industry type and job type play in determining transformational leadership effectiveness or if these situational variables are confounded with culture. The findings call into question the generalizability of transformational leadership across countries and cultures.

The findings suggest that the value of transformational leadership behaviors may be limited in developed economies such as Western Europe and North America, while transformational leadership is most effective in Africa, the Middle East, South America and parts of Southeast Asia.

This is the first paper to examine the generalizability of transformational leadership across 34 countries and is by far the largest review ever conducted into the relationship between transformational leadership and subordinate performance.