Supportive culture and job involvement in public sector: the mediating role of participation in decision making and organizational learning

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPSM-09-2021-0218
• Published date: 12 April 2022
• Date: 12 April 2022
• Pages: 549-567
• Subject Matter: Public policy & environmental management,Politics,Public adminstration & management
• Author: Pavan Kumar Saraf,Shilpi Saha,Amitabh Anand

Supportive culture and job

involvement in public sector:

the mediating role of participation

in decision making and

organizational learning

Pavan Kumar Saraf

School of Management, National Institute of Technology Karnataka,

Mangalore, India

Shilpi Saha

Manel Srinivas Nayak Institute of Management, Mangalore, India, and

Amitabh Anand

Excelia Business School, CERIIM, La Rochelle, France and

CERGAM, Aix Marseille Univ, Aix-en-Provence, France

Abstract

Purpose –The purpose of this study is to determine whether participation in decision-making (PDM) and

organizational learning (OL) act as mediating factors in the relationship between supportive culture and job

involvement.

Design/methodology/approach –Data were collected from 712 employees working in different public

sector undertakings (PSUs) across India. Necessary condition analysis (NCA) analysis and partial least square

(PLS) analysis were used to test the proposed hypotheses.

Findings –The findings of the present study indicated that PDM and OL act as a full mediator respectively in

the relationship between supportive culture (SC) and job involvement (JI). The SC was positively and

significantly related to PDM and OL. However, SL did not have a significant impact on JI. In addition, higher

PDM and OL were found to be significantly impacting JI.

Practical implications –The results suggest that PDM and OL facilitate the impact of SC on JI and may help

organizations to retain their employees. The implications of these findings for all hierarchical levels in PSUs are

discussed.

Originality/value –OL and PDM as mediators between SC and JI have received very little attention from the

context of India. The results add to the growing literature of culture from a non-western context as this study is

based on Indian samples. This study has taken care to provide unbiased responses by utilizing data from

employees working in various functional units of the organizations.

Keywords Supportive culture, Participation in decision making, Organizational learning, Job involvement,

Employees, Public sector undertakings

Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction

People working in organizations depend on each other for doing their daily assigned tasks.

This is because they do not possess all the work-related skills and experiences that they need.

It takes less time for an employee to grasp a skill if employees share personal experiences and

skills among themselves. It is generally acknowledged that employees talk and benefit each

other from a supportive culture. Vorholter (2012) asserts that the presence of supportive

culture (SC) provides employees a common frame of reference for learning exchanges in an

organization. Hence, this could be a crucial factor for successfully implementing any changes

in the system, structure or process. While this can be very beneficial to the organization, this

is also supposed to benefit employees by enriching their skills. The more willing an employee

Decision

making and OL

549

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

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Received 11 September 2021

Revised 22 November 2021

Accepted 8 March 2022

International Journal of Public

Sector Management

Vol. 35 No. 5, 2022

pp. 549-567

© Emerald Publishing Limited

0951-3558

DOI 10.1108/IJPSM-09-2021-0218

is to learn and share his knowledge with others, the more chances of him/her getting involved

with his/her job. The more involved employees are with their organization, the better will be

the productivity. This will lead to the organization’s success.

Job involvement (JI) can be hence viewed as an important measure by the organizations. It

becomes necessary to promote all factors that can make employees more and more involved.

One such important factor that has been often less acknowledged and researched is the SC in

the Indian context. SC is characterized by confidence, motivation, mutual trust, loyalty,

support and people-oriented work culture (Wallach, 1983). If the manager develops a

supportive culture, it acts like a glue that guides our extent of being involved with our job and

shapes organizational decision-making (Tambur and Vadi, 2012). SC empowers employees

by giving them a certain amount of decision-making power. Does this mean that they execute

this power and to what extent? Does the participation of employees in making decisions

benefit them and the organization in the long run? The extent to which employees participate

in the decision-making process needs to be measured. This can shed some light on how

employees share their work-related experiences and learning happens among them.

Significant research has been conducted on organizational learning (OL) among private-

sector employees (Chiva, 2017;Swift and Hwang, 2013). While employee satisfaction and

commitment have been dominant research topics for decades (Bui et al., 2016), there is less

research on the presence of certain extraneous variables in the form of mediators in the public

sector (Malik and Lenka, 2019;Johari et al., 2018). A total of 63 of India’s 255 public sector

undertakings (PSUs) or central public sector enterprises (CPSEs) have been included in the

Fortune 500, 2020 list (PSU Watch, 2020). Though the effectiveness and success of an

organization are highly dependent on the employee’s knowledge and skills acquired through

OL (Yan et al., 2019), developing OL in an organization can occur in response to pressures of

different natures, such as job-related learning or informal learning that occurs through work-

related activities and responsibilities (Ions and Minton, 2012). As a result of the increased

focus on performance and results-oriented government services, researchers in the public

sector have emphasized that successful human resource management strategies such as

participation in decision-making (PDM) are critical (Kim, 2018;Malik and Lenka, 2019).

On one hand, employees must be intrinsically motivated or have a desire to be engaged in

their work because it is exciting and satisfying, as opposed to extrinsic motivation such as

rewards or recognition (Fernandez and Moldogaziev, 2015). Work can be exciting and

satisfying when employees can make their own work-related decisions. On the other hand, to

succeed and perform, businesses require a human resource pool that cannot be imitated or

substituted by rivals (Barney, 1991). Since, employees are the foundation of any

organization’s growth, the self-determination theory (SDT) assumes that the workforce can

be inherently intriguing and rewarding (Gagn

e and Deci, 2005) based on three components –

autonomy, competence and social relatedness. Furthermore, according to SDT, it is

dependent on whether persons feel autonomous (i.e. the ability to participate in making

decisions) or controlled (Gagn

e and Deci, 2005).

Kim (2018) asserted that genuinely driven personnel in the public sector demonstrate

desirable behaviors such as workplace participation. These studies show a direct link

between satisfying these needs, such as participation in decision making and skill

development through learning (the competence component of SDT), and behavioral

outcomes, such as the extent of JI (the social relatedness component), making SDT worthy

of explaining relationships in public sector employees. When an organization provides

opportunity and flexibility to its employees, they start exhibiting JI. In this context, OL

provides a support system and SC can be an apt construct to demonstrate how JI is influenced

by various human factors as it determines values, beliefs and work systems that encourage

involvement. There are only a few studies that cover OL in the public sector (Raj and

Srivastava, 2013;Laloux, 2014;Saha and Kumar, 2018). These characteristics help to

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