Determining how to stimulate public employees’ change-oriented organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) has become a critical issue in both theory and practice. This article draws on the theories of job demands-resources (JD-R), leadership, and public service motivation (PSM) to propose a moderated mediation model to explore how empowering leadership shapes public employees’ change-oriented OCB. We conducted a two-wave investigation of 267 public employees in a large metropolitan city in Northern China to test this study’s hypotheses. The results show that empowering leadership significantly predicts employees’ change-oriented OCB by enhancing job crafting. Furthermore, PSM moderates the relationship between empowering leadership and job crafting. These findings advance our understanding of how to motivate employees’ change-oriented OCB from the perspective of empowering leadership in public organizations.
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