Cultivating social orientation behavior in public service: the interplay of servant leadership, job fulfillment, social impact HRM, and compassion

Abstract

Public sector organizations increasingly rely on employees who will act beyond their prescribed role to deliver value for citizens. In practice, encouraging this kind of discretionary, socially oriented behavior is difficult, and it is not well explained by traditional motivational accounts. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory (SDT), the study aims to examine how servant leadership (SL) influences social orientation behavior (SO) among public sector employees in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Job fulfillment (JF) is proposed as the psychological mediator linking SL to SO. Social impact Human Resource Management (HRM) (SIHRM) and compassion are then introduced as moderators, the former operating at the organizational level and the latter at the individual level. Dyadic data were collected from 185 employee–supervisor pairs across several UAE public organizations. The mediation and moderated mediation hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling and Hayes’ PROCESS Macro (Model 21), with bias-corrected bootstrapped confidence intervals. Four results emerged. SL was positively associated with SO. JF mediated this relationship. SIHRM strengthened the effect of SL on JF. Compassion strengthened the effect of JF on SO. For public sector managers, the findings point to a few concrete moves. Leadership development programs should give explicit attention to servant leadership behaviors rather than treating them as soft skills picked up on the job. HRM practices need to make societal contribution legible in things such as appraisal criteria, recognition and recruitment messaging. In addition, compassion should be treated as a trainable capability, not just a personal disposition. These priorities sit comfortably with the UAE’s policy emphasis on citizen happiness and public value. Three contributions sit at the center of the paper. First, SIHRM is proposed as a new construct that distinguishes socially oriented HRM from more conventional performance-focused HRM. Second, JF is positioned as the psychological route through which SL translates into SO, addressing a gap in how the SL–SO link has usually been explained. Third, compassion is examined as a moral condition that strengthens prosocial behavior rather than only a felt response to suffering. The UAE setting, with its collectivist orientation and explicitly citizen-facing public services, gives the model a context where prosocial action carries real institutional weight.