New Insights on the Role of Spiritual Leadership in Positive Outcomes in the Scottish Public Sector

Spiritual leadership, a leadership style that focuses on creating vision and values congruence across the strategic, empowered team, and individual levels to achieve positive outcomes, is well suited to supporting employees’ service-oriented behaviours and creativity behaviours in the public sector. However, we still know little about how spiritual leaders shape behaviours in the public sector. Drawing on social learning theory and service linkage research, this article produces novel theoretical insights and tests a model in which spiritual leadership and ethical climate foster conditions to enhance positive service climate and subsequent (a) service-oriented behaviours and (b) employee creative behaviour. The research hypotheses were tested, using evidence from the public sector, on a sample of 400 from Scotland. Results show that all hypotheses were supported.