How to influence the professional discretion of street-level bureaucrats: transformational leadership, organizational learning, and professionalization strategies in the delivery of social assistance

Developing professional discretion of street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) is not only an important strategy for bridging the gap between public service rules at policy level and sophisticated individual service needs at practical level, but it also has recently become a hot topic in public management. This study advances the SLB theory by providing empirical evidence that organizational learning capability and organizational type buffered the impact of transformational leadership on professional discretion in a sample of 595 Chinese professional social workers. This research showed that establishing an internal professional learning mechanism in public service agencies was conducive to improving SLBs' professional discretion.