Leadership Quality on Service through Career Development and Public Service Motivation

The issue of leadership quality is a complex and multifaceted topic. Leaders who lack a clear vision are less likely to direct their team or organization effectively. With specific goals, formulating strategies or inspiring others becomes easier. This study aimed to determine and analyze the impact of leadership quality on service in Central Mamuju Regency, focusing on career development and the motivation of public service employees. Employing a survey design and a quantitative approach, the research involved 124 employees as respondents. These respondents were selected using a simple random sampling technique, with the Slovin formula applied to refine the sample size. For data analysis, path analysis was utilized. The results indicated that in Central Mamuju Regency, the most effective way to enhance the quality of service is by focusing on employee career development. Employees who receive attention and appreciation from their leaders are more capable of delivering better service quality compared to the impacts of leadership quality and public service motivation. However, these variables also play a significant role in improving employee service quality. Career development motivates employees to be more creative, improve their abilities, and receive recognition, facilitating a better career path at work.


Introduction
Human resource management is one of the essential aspects of management science that carries out the process of managing apparatus resources and is a milestone in the success of an organization in achieving its goals (Umar et al., 2019).The vital role of human resource management concerns many parties and becomes a challenge in organizations when human resource management is not placed in the right portion and situation.Humans in an organization have a central role because they are the executors who carry out all organizational operations (Awaluddin A et al., 2019;Sahabuddin et al., 2019).Talking about service quality is related to the satisfaction felt by the service recipient in examining the quality of service; many factors influence achieving the expected service quality.Therefore, to ensure good service quality, it must prioritize meeting the community's needs and satisfaction.Especially for public organizations, which are different from private organizations, the quality of service that can be provided tends to be different and even lower than that of private organizations.Most government employees providing services will focus on themselves as public servants, and although not all of them, in many cases, the behavior and ways of government or public employees cause many complaints from the community or service recipients (Tamsah et al., 2020), assume that employees have the same service orientation.Even though they spend the same time and energy, it does not have much impact on them.The quality of leadership is the quality possessed by a leader in an organization who not only gives influence and orders to his subordinates but also has underlying orientations and characteristics; it can be shown by leaders who have sensitivity in the sense that the leader can understand and appreciate the feelings and views of his subordinates and can place himself following the situation.The role of leadership quality is exciting in an organization because quality leaders can build communication and be responsible with their leadership.The most important thing is that leaders mean nothing except with the proactive involvement of their subordinates.Therefore, seeing the quality of leadership is essential and needed by an organization to make changes, including in producing service quality; it is only natural that a leader is valued and respected and becomes a role model for all subordinates (Yusriadi, Farida, et al., 2019;Yusriadi, Sahid, et al., 2019).In carrying out their duties and functions, sub-district employees have duties and functions, including organizing general government affairs such as administration, finance, staffing, and planning; further coordinating village or community empowerment activities; coordinating efforts to organize public peace and order; coordinating and supervising the implementation of village or activities, coordinating the implementation of government activities carried out by regional apparatus at the sub-district level, carrying out other tasks ordered by applicable laws and regulations, and so on.The duties and responsibilities of sub-district employees are complex and touch on several aspects from the sub-district to the village level, which, of course, have much to do with public service functions.This study involves the variable of leadership quality as an independent variable by seeing that the problem of service quality is not maximized by employees because the quality of leadership carried out has yet to influence the work activities of its employees fully.Then, researchers in this study also involved the intervening variables of career development and public service motivation by considering that employees are maximized at work when they can meet their needs.In this case, clear career development is given to employees.Likewise, it builds and realizes that as an employee, his main task is to provide public services to the community, so public service motivation must exist and be inherent in him.Leadership quality is the most influential factor and supports all variables, such as career development, public service motivation, and service quality.

Methods
Research methods are ways and stages of conducting research that are arranged systematically to facilitate the achievement of research objectives.Good research has a clear, systematic, and sequential nature, making it a reference for finding solutions to the problems faced.This research method can be described in more detail in the following section:

Research approach
This study uses a survey design or design where survey research is conducted and data on opinions and beliefs about the relationship between variables with certain characteristics.Meanwhile, in this study, the approach used is a quantitative approach, which is an approach that can conduct tests on existing theories related to research or concepts and previous research that is a reference in a study.

Location and time of research
This research was conducted in Central Mamuju Regency, West Sulawesi Province, precisely at all regional sub-district offices.This research was conducted for two months, from August to September 2023.Given that the nature of this research is quantitative, most of the desired data is data on the perceptions of respondents or employees who utilize questionnaires as the main data collection so that within the specified time, all questionnaires can be returned promptly.

Data collection
The data collection techniques in this study were carried out in several ways to obtain the most appropriate information related to the problems raised in this study.Although this research is quantitative research, with the main data collection using questionnaires, it does not rule out the possibility that to support this research, researchers collect data by observation, interviews, and documentation.

Data analysis
The data collected from the questionnaire was tabulated and then processed using the Path Analysis model.Path Analysis is used to analyze the relationship pattern between variables to know the direct or indirect effect of a set of independent variables on the dependent variable.

Result Leadership quality on service through career development
With a total research sample of 124, the t table value obtained through the t distribution table is 1.979.While the calculated t value is obtained through data processing results.Based on the results of data analysis, the calculated t value is 9.319, compared to the t table value of 1.979, which is still greater than the calculated t value so it can be concluded that leadership quality has a significant effect on employee career development at the sub-district office in Central Mamuju Regency.The indirect effect value is the multiplication of the X coefficient on Y1, which is 0.645, with the coefficient (Y1) on (Z), which is 0.297, obtained = 0.191 plus the relationship value (X) on (Z), which is 0.254.Thus, the indirect effect path coefficient value is 0.445 points.Based on the results of the Sobel test calculation, it shows that the t value (Sobel test) is obtained at 2.933 and a p-value of 0.003, meaning that t count> t table (2.933> 1.979) so it can be concluded that there is a significant mediating effect on the effect of leadership quality on service quality through career development.

Leadership quality on service through public service motivation
The indirect effect value is the multiplication of the X coefficient on Y2, namely 0.604, with the coefficient (Y2) on (Z), namely 0.260, obtained = 0.157 plus the relationship value (X) on (Z), namely 0.254.Thus, the indirect effect path coefficient value is 0.411 points.Based on the results of the Sobel test calculation, it shows that the t value (Sobel test) is obtained at 2.954 and a p-value of 0.003, meaning that t count> t table (2.954> 1.979) so it can be concluded that there is a significant mediating effect on the effect of leadership quality on service quality through public service motivation.Thus, in the indirect effect, the intervening variable of career development is still better than public service motivation, meaning that with the quality of leadership in the sub-district office agencies in Central Mamuju Regency, respondents considered it more effective in encouraging better employee career development.Thus, for the hypotheses stated in the previous chapter, it can be concluded that all hypotheses are accepted, both direct and indirect effects.

Discussion
Based on the results of the research described in the previous chapter, the career development of subdistrict employees in Central Mamuju Regency can be positively and significantly improved where the coefficient value is obtained at 0.645 and a significance of 0.000.This shows that the better the quality of leadership applied by the sub-district, the better the employee's career is developed, and vice versa when the quality of leadership is poor, the career development of sub-district employees in Central Mamuju Regency will also be poor.
Leadership plays a very important role in improving the careers of employees.An effective leader can influence the growth and development of his/her team members in various ways, such as a leader who must be able to communicate the vision and goals to his/her team members.By understanding this vision, employees can set appropriate career goals and strive to achieve them, and in addition a leader who cares about the development of his team members will provide the necessary training and support to help them improve their skills and knowledge.This could be formal training, mentoring, or other resources.As stated by (Sahid et al., 2020;Yusriadi et al., 2023) that leadership is an activity to influence people to be directed to achieve organizational goals.Ensuring employee career development has many benefits and its importance cannot be ignored, career development can help organizations identify internal talents who may be suitable for higher roles or greater responsibilities so as to reduce the need for organizations to recruit from outside.The existence of good career development in an agency will guarantee that employees can demonstrate behavior at work that benefits the agency itself.This is supported by (Ilyas et al., 2021;Setiawan et al., 2021) that career development is personal changes that a person makes to achieve a career plan.
Likewise, the quality of leadership that provides a way for employees to plan their careers can encourage changes in achieving organizational goals.This is supported by the opinion (Ansar et al., 2019) that leadership is any action taken by individuals or groups to coordinate and give direction to individuals or groups who are members of a particular container to achieve predetermined goals.
The research that supports this finding is research (Nellyanti et al., 2021) that career success is influenced by leadership factors.Also, research (Delle & Searle, 2020) shows that the quality of leadership that continues to develop significantly affects careers especially for those with low levels of optimism.Furthermore, research (Zamad et al., 2021), which showed that responsible leadership has a stronger positive effect on work engagement among individuals who have high self-improvement motives.There is no evidence in the literature on the underlying process by which responsible leadership impacts employee success, but this study addresses this gap by suggesting work engagement as a mediator of responsible leadership's influence on individual career success at different levels of self-enhancement motives.
This study provides evidence that among the research respondents believe that the quality of leadership carried out in their agency is very supportive of career development, although the important evaluation material carried out by the agency, especially for the leadership, is in terms of decision making, employees expect their leaders to be more assertive and have consistency in the decisions taken.Meanwhile, in terms of career development, employees want the mutation process implemented in the office to be more considerate of work needs and not due to other factors.
Research in line with these findings is (Jufri et al., 2021) showing that leadership quality has a significant effect on public service motivation, that leaders must be able to balance different leadership styles according to staff profiles, the nature of tasks and organizational culture to increase public service motivation, intrinsic motivation and organizational commitment.Complex leaders, by applying the right mix of transactional, transformational, and distributed leadership styles, can increase public service motivation, organizational commitment, and extra role behavior.Also, research (Wirdawati et al., 2021) shows that leadership plays an important role in fostering public service motivation, public service requires motivated employees to rebuild dysfunctional public administration institutions, and there is a need to maintain the motivation of civil servants in order to achieve the government's agenda.Furthermore, research (Nengsih et al., 2021) that leadership has a significant influence on public service motivation, various management ways can be used to increase public service motivation, and there is a possibility to turn theoretical findings into practical steps that can be used by public managers to increase employee motivation.

Conclusion
This improvement in the quality of employee service cannot be separated from the quality of leadership.
Employees feel that the leader with his authority in leading is very capable of exercising a positive form of power, especially providing a sense of security and comfort to his subordinates at work, and with this the leader is considered to have tried to build an organizational culture oriented towards quality service, which can create values, work ethics, and norms that support better service.The quality of leadership in this study bridges the productive work behavior of employees in providing the best service.
Leaders who can ensure that employees have the necessary resources, such as work tools, technology, and personnel support, to provide quality services can be guaranteed by leaders.With the quality of leadership applied, it gives a good impression to the sub-districts in Central Mamuju Regency by improving the quality of service of its employees.According to (Ikbal et al., 2021) service quality is the level of quality expected, and controlling diversity in achieving that quality to meet the needs of others.