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The purpose of this paper is to compare two mediating mechanisms of servant leadership’s effect on followers’ work engagement: the social exchange mechanism (represented by leader-member exchange (LMX)) and the social learning mechanism (represented by public service motivation in Study 1 and prosocial motivation in Study 2).

In Study 1, the authors collected two-wave matched data from 216 public sector employees. In Study 2, the authors collected two-wave matched data from 178 private sector employees. The authors use hierarchical regression and bootstrapping to test the hypotheses.

Servant leadership is positively related to follower’s work engagement and this relationship is mediated by LMX, but not by public service motivation (Study 1) or prosocial motivation (Study 2). It suggests that servant leadership promotes followers’ work engagement mostly through the social exchange mechanism.

The data were collected from Chinese employees, and future studies are necessary to verify the findings in other cultural contexts.

This study sheds light on a more nuanced picture of the effect mechanisms of servant leadership.

This study's purpose is to examine ethical leadership's effect on followers' positive work behaviors, as mediated by prosocial motivation and moderated by job autonomy.

Two-wave survey data were collected from 200 Chinese employees working in various industries. A hierarchical regression and a bootstrapping test were used to test the hypotheses.

Ethical leadership is positively related to followers' positive work behaviors, and prosocial motivation partially mediates this relationship. Job autonomy moderates the relationship between ethical leadership and prosocial motivation, as well as the indirect effect of ethical leadership on positive work behaviors via prosocial motivation.

The findings' generalizability is limited because only Chinese employees were investigated and a snowball sampling method was used. Future research should utilize other sampling methods and explore other contexts to determine whether the results can be replicated.

Organizations should provide employees with greater behavioral discretion to benefit from the positive effects of ethical leadership. They should use selection and job design tools to boost their employees' prosocial motivation.

The extant literature has largely applied the cognitive process approach to link ethical leadership and positive behaviors, treating ethical leadership as a risk-reducing or reciprocity-inducing factor. This study introduces a responsive process approach whereby prosocial motivation is established as a mediator between ethical leadership and positive work behaviors. Also, job autonomy is identified as a boundary condition of ethical leadership's effect.

Based on person-job fit and self-determination theory, this paper examined the effects of (in)congruence between autonomy expectation and perceived autonomy on proactive behaviour, and the moderating role of humble leadership in this relationship among Chinese public employees.

Data were collected from a two-wave survey, and the research model was tested using polynomial regression and response surface methodology.

Results suggested that employees' proactive behaviour will be highest when autonomy congruence was achieved, while autonomy incongruence led to different levels of proactive behaviour based on the specific situations. Furthermore, the moderating effect of humble leadership was proved such that it accentuated the positive influence of autonomy congruence on proactive behaviour.

Managers should be fully aware of the benefits and importance of person-job fit and strive to reduce autonomy incongruence. Meanwhile, humble leadership should be considered in the context of granting autonomy to boost proactivity.

This paper re-emphasises the importance of autonomy by utilising a congruence perspective to understand the effects of autonomy on proactive behaviour. Meanwhile, it incorporates an important boundary condition, humble leadership, on the effects of autonomy congruence and thus offers a more nuanced understanding. Further, this paper not only highlights the significance of underexplored concepts among public employees, but also extends autonomy (in)congruence study to a new context and culture.

The exploratory study introduced the tri-axial model as a basic framework of cultural value to Chinese public sectors. The study tries to display value mapping of the Chinese public sectors and to examine the relationship between the identified values with organizational outcome variables, which is normally characteristic of an exploratory research. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

404 civil servants were asked to classify 62 cultural values into three axes, emotional, economical and ethical, and to attain the importance of the 62 values.

Five cultural values including happiness, belonging, harmony, achievement, and efficiency are identified to be the most important values in Chinese public sectors. Harmony and achievement were found to affect organizational outcome variables.

Sample size is relatively small, and more cultural differences have been neglected within Chinese culture. And the paper collected data twice and used different means, but analyzed the combined data, which could be problematic.

The findings suggest that Chinese civil servants pay much attention on emotional-developmental type of cultural values. Ethic-related culture needs to be emphasized more on culture building behaviors both at the organizational level and at the national level.

This is the first time the tri-axial model was introduced into Chinese culture. Testing with Chinese samples, the tri-axial model appears to address some of the important limitations of previous models that were summarized before. The paper successfully grouped all the cultural values into three pre-defined axes. The most important values are identified.