THE DETERMINANTS OF INNOVATIVE BEHAVIOUR IN THE CANADIAN PUBLIC SECTOR
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the factors that influence creative behaviour among public servants in Canada, with the aim of contributing to the broader understanding of public sector innovation. As governments contend with increasingly complex policy and operational challenges including technological disruption, climate change, and evolving citizen expectations, there is always an interest in understanding how creativity within public institutions can be fostered. In response, this study examines how individual characteristics, leadership behaviours, and organizational climate conditions may shape the potential for public servants to engage in creative practices. The dissertation is informed by the interactionist model of creativity which holds that creativity arises from the interaction of individual, group, and organizational factors. Adopting a three-paper model, the dissertation is structured around three central research questions: (1) What motivates Canadian public servants to be creative in the workplace? (2) How do leaders influence public servants’ creative behaviours? (3) How does the organizational climate influence public servants’ creative behaviours? Each question is addressed through a separate empirical chapter drawing on quantitative data collected from 286 public servants through a web-based survey administered between February and June 2023. The first study focuses on individual-level motivational factors, specifically altruism, risk-taking, job satisfaction, and job performance, and their relationship with creative behaviour. Using stepwise ordinal regression analysis, the findings suggest that risk-taking, job satisfaction, and job performance are positively associated with creative behaviour. Altruism shows a weaker, statistically inconsistent association, indicating that its influence on creative behaviour is limited in this context. The second study investigates leadership practices including participative decision-making, information sharing, leading by example, and the use of humour. The results indicate that participative leadership and information sharing are most consistently associated with employee creativity. Humour and leading by example were not demonstrably influential in this study. The third study explores organizational climate variables such as autonomy, meaningfulness of work, internal communication, and organizational vision. Among these, autonomy, a sense of meaningful work and internal communication are most strongly correlated with creative behaviour, reinforcing the importance of workplace conditions that empower employees and align their efforts with broader public service goals. This dissertation offers an initial contribution to the public administration literature by examining motivational and organizational factors that may underpin creative behaviour in Canadian government workplaces, providing empirical considerations and broad guidance for developing environments that support creativity as a pathway to public value creation. While the findings offer preliminary insights for public sector managers and policymakers, limitations (including the use of convenience sampling and self-reported measures) highlight the need for more targeted, and multi-method research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".