There have been a great number of studies emphasizing leadership with belief that heroic leaders are the key factor to resolve social problems or improve organizational outcomes. Recently, scholars have pointed out that leaders and their roles per se may not be distinctive factors relevant to organizational performance with advent of followers. In this vein, there have been a number of studies on followership, exploring types and traits of effective followers as well as providing prescriptions to promote effective followership. Among studies dealing with followership, however, many have overlooked ethical aspects of followers while emphasizing follower effectiveness. As witnessed in some cases, ethical followers are the last ones to uphold principles of an organization in which leaders tend to be the main agents of scandals and corruption. It is increasingly recognized that the role of moral followers is critical in organizational performance and leadership.

The purpose of this study is to theoretically and empirically explore the major traits of a follower in public organizations with different characteristics such as size, depth of hierarchy, and culture. We attempt to investigate perceptions and behaviors of followers, and which factors significantly influence in forming moral attitudes of those followers in public organizations. We categorize four types of followers considering two dimensions: efficacy and morality. Efficacy is defined as the belief that a follower possesses with regard to his or her ability to affect the outcomes of the organization. Morality is defined as an attitude not to violate any legal or moral rules or regulations. Consequently, the traits of each four types of followers created by the two dimensions are identified in terms of participation-oriented behavior, goal-oriented behavior, and the behavior in accordance with organization and its members which are being thought as desirable.

Then, we invite ideas of self-concept, leadership, and organizational context to identify factors affecting follower morality and efficacy in the public sector. Leadership is considered in line with social exchange theory and leader member exchange theory. Organizational context comprises reward and punishment system and its perceived fairness. These are major factors found by previous studies on followership formation.

We use survey data from about one thousand central government employees in South Korea in 2013. We first develop a typology of followership considering efficacy and morality. Then we identify traits that are found to be distinct across the four types of followership by analyzing the survey data. We also analyze what factors are related to traits of each type of followership. This study can contribute to the literature by focusing on the dimension of morality in followership which has been relatively neglected in the literature, and by developing and applying a conceptual framework of followership to public sector employees.