2019, Vol.30, No.2

Korean Society and Public Administration 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.89

pISSN : 1225-8652
https://journal.kci.go.kr/kspa

This paper aims to explore the logic of devolving the authority or power from the central government to local governments through democracy and regional development perspectives. The novelty of this study is reviewing the devolution of the central power from the essential approach of designing local governments in contrast to previous studies’ comparative approaches with foreign countries. So far, local autonomy used to be viewed as the requirements of democracy, and as the efficient apparatus to raise people’s quality of life through regional development, but its operating mechanism would not be explained. This paper tries to explain how the devolution of the central authorities to local governments contributes to democracy and regional development. Individual freedom needs corresponding responsibility to make democracy work. Even the best designed representative democracy, if any, cannot realize the ideal goal of democracy. However, local autonomy at grass-root level, such as Maul(village), Myun(commune) and Eup(township), can complement representative democracy by promoting people’s initiatives and ownership, based on people’s direct participation. Regional development on people’s needs can be reproduced by distributing public benefits in the more fair way. Small is beautiful, and also forms the basis of big one by stratifying people’s demands in the public sector as well as in the private sector. This paper ultimately shows that justice in human society can be practiced better by local governments at the grass-roots level than by the centralized authority or bigger local governments. This paper also suggests local governments at the grass-roots level can satisfy the current paradigms of regional development such as ‘community governance’, ‘social capital’ and ‘sustainability’ effectively. In conclusion, small, dispersed and decentralized organizational entities can work better to meet people’s needs for public interests by promoting people’s initiatives and ownership. People’s initiatives and ownership can make democracy work better, and people’s needs for public interests are geared with quality of life, the final goal of regional development.

A growing body of literature has shown that public service motivation is a powerful factor of organizational effectiveness in the public sector. Yet, little attention has been paid to organizational contexts in which public service motivation can encourage public employees to generate new ideas and efficient ways to achieve work goals. Thus, using the survey data drawn from Korean central and local agencies, this study explores the impact of public service motivation on innovative behavior as well as the moderating role of transactional and transformational leadership on the relationship between the two. The statistical results indicate that public service motivation is positively related to innovative behavior. Further analysis shows that transactional leadership attenuates the positive relationship between public service motivation and innovative behavior, whereas transformational leadership enhances such relationship. The implications of these results for public administration and public administrators are also discussed.

This paper aims to examine whether firefighters’ public service motivation(PSM) affects their job satisfaction(JS), as well as whether the PSM-JS link is mediated by two types of value congruence(VC). Given that today’s Korean firefighters fall under the dual command structures of national and local governments, it should be noted that an individual firefighter can have differential VC for respective governments. Using the “Safety, Health, and Welfare of Firefighters” data collected in 2014, we estimate a parallel two mediator model with multiple individual and organizational variables being controlled. Results from a series of SEM approaches indicate that PSM has a direct effect on JS, as well as that only one type of VC plays a mediating role in the PSM-JS relation. Specifically, employee-national government VC mediates the impact of PSM on JS, but employee-local government VC fails to reach statistical significance. Stemming from these findings, several policy implications are highlighted.