A social exchange perspective on employee performance in Sierra Leone’s public sector: the roles of authentic leadership, participative decision-making, and trust

RichardOkay, this is a weird one: A social exchange perspective on employee performance in Sierra Leone’s public sector: the roles of authentic leadership, participative decision-making, and trust. Tell me I'm not the only one who noticed.

ElenaWait, really? The idea that letting staff have a say stops them from burning out feels completely backwards when you see how hard people work just to get paid on time. It sounds like management is trying to fix broken systems with a little bit of team bonding.

RichardThat theory actually spells out why PDM works through affective commitment and organizational citizenship behavior, not just morale. In Freetown’s ministries, where pay cycles can drag on for months, asking leaders to consult staff on workflow changes directly targets those engagement gaps rather than ignoring the cash problem.

ElenaI don't buy that workflow tweaks solve anything while the treasury keeps delaying payroll. You can ask a clerk in Bo about "participative decisions" all day, but they're still stuck waiting for basic supplies to arrive. That gap between the academic model and the empty shelves is where the whole premise falls apart.

RichardPicture a hospital administrator in Makeni who starts holding brief weekly meetings to let nurses flag supply shortages before they become critical patient risks. SET predicts that kind of consistent, transparent dialogue builds the affective trust needed to sustain effort even when central funding stalls out. That mechanism holds up regardless of whether the treasury is delayed.

ElenaPicture a nurse in Makeni who gets told to “flag” shortages during her break, knowing the budget won’t clear until the next quarter; she ends up hiding the problem because reporting it changes nothing but adds scrutiny. That silence isn’t a failure of the meeting format, it’s a rational response to a system where input doesn’t translate into action.

RichardThe data tracks OCB specifically, proving staff go beyond their job descriptions once trust forms. Hiding problems isn't the alternative; it's the cost of losing that exchange entirely.

ElenaYou’re right that walking away from that exchange leaves no room for anyone to step in for a sick colleague or cover a shift. But in a district office in Koinadugu, the first sign that trust is building isn’t extra help—it’s a junior clerk finally telling his supervisor about a filing error without getting written up for it. That kind of psychological safety has to exist before you can expect the good stuff to follow.

RichardAdmitting that a clerk correcting a filing error signals real psychological safety hits closer to home than my abstract models do. SIP research confirms that processing information safely must precede deeper relational bonds, meaning that initial low-stakes honesty is the actual foundation for every subsequent trust metric we track.

ElenaComparing a nervous clerk whispering about a typo to laying a brick is like calling a leaky roof a structural upgrade. Until that supervisor stops seeing honesty as a threat, the best thing you can hope for is silence. Psychological safety in Koinadugu means nobody loses sleep over admitting a mistake, and right now, most people lose sleep just making it to work.

RichardThe research highlights authentic leadership as a separate driver, suggesting that a minister’s visible willingness to own a policy failure can reset expectations faster than procedural fixes alone. When a public figure absorbs blame for a missed deadline, it validates the social exchange at the top level, signaling to junior staff that risk-taking carries less personal penalty.

ElenaA minister owning a failure sounds great until the junior staffer still gets blamed for the paperwork trail. Authenticity at the top doesn't reach the desk where the ink runs dry.

RichardSET specifies reciprocal obligations across levels, implying the paper trail is itself part of the exchange rather than a barrier to it. If accountability stays concentrated at the bottom while leadership claims authenticity above, the transaction remains lopsided and unsustainable.

ElenaIn Freetown, the "paper trail" often looks like a stamped form sitting in a drawer for six months because the next signature authority went on leave. Calling that bureaucracy a "reciprocal obligation" misses that the clock is broken long before anyone files the document.

RichardBroken clocks are a logistical failure, not a violation of the social contract, yet they force staff into silent compliance because the system gives them no reason to engage further. The research argues that when PDM actually functions, trust becomes the mechanism that keeps performance alive despite those administrative dead zones. We cannot fix the stamping process overnight, but we can stop pretending that broken procedure erases the human need for fair treatment.

ElenaStopping the pretense that broken stamps erase the human need for fairness is exactly the starting point, but it ignores the reality that in Bo District, a single missing signature can freeze a salary disbursement for three months. Trust isn’t built by acknowledging the delay; it’s forged when a manager bypasses the stalled protocol to ensure their team eats that week. That practical rescue, not theoretical reciprocity, is what turns survival into engagement.

RichardYour manager bypassing protocol to pay salaries is a discretionary act, not a systemic variable, which makes it impossible to scale across Sierra Leone's public sector without collapsing under its own inconsistency. The study asks whether participative decision-making creates durable trust, but if that trust depends entirely on individual heroics rather than institutional capacity, the model fails to predict performance once the benevolent manager leaves.