Leadership and Public Service Motivation in the Military Organization: The Moderating Effect of Age

Drawing on survey data from 1,746 enlistees in the Republic of Korea military, this paper examines the moderating effect of age on the impact that the leadership of superiors have on their subordinates' public service motivation (PSM). Our analysis shows that transformational leadership and transactional leadership both have a positive statistical correlation with PSM. Furthermore, the relationship between transformational leadership and PSM is negatively moderated by age. This means that the higher the age, the smaller the positive influence of transformational leadership becomes on PSM. Based on our analysis, to cultivate public service motivation within a military organization, we make policy recommendations for building and practicing an integrated form of leadership that combines the advantages of the transformational and transactional methods, and in terms of discovering and applying forms of leadership in pursuit of the public good and social responsibility as organizational goals.