Administrative Leadership in the Public Sector

Montgomery Van van Wart, Lisa Dicke, Montgomery Van van Wart, Lisa Dicke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315497952
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Administrative Leadership in the Public Sector is an ideal resource for any Public Administration course involving leadership and public management.

Each of the book's nine main sections begins with introductory text by the volume's editors, Monty Van Wart and Lisa Dicke, followed by relevant readings. The volume includes some of the most important readings on public leadership published in the last eight decades. More than just an anthology, Administrative Leadership in the Public Sector provides a unique and useful framework for understanding the vast subject of leadership.

PART 1

INTRODUCTION

Leadership studies are important for many reasons. First, leadership is a topic of great interest to practitioners, academics, and the lay public. The topic applies to nearly every aspect of human endeavor when groups of individuals are working together.

Second, the quality of leadership makes a difference. Even in the case of a first-level supervisor in a highly rule-bound work setting where differences are marginalized, employee turnover is frequently directly related to the quality of leadership. Further, leaders are called upon to make decisions that affect the quality of life for thousands of people and sometimes involve life-and-death decisions.

Third, the study of leadership is important because it is complex (Bass 1990). Although everyone assumes an intuitive working knowledge of the topic, it is beyond most people’s ability to do more than make a few vague assertions about the nature of leadership, who ideal leaders are, how you cultivate leaders, and so on. Part of the complexity arises from the fact that leadership is inevitably nested among so many related fields—politics, organizations and systems, management, motivation, learning, and ethics to mention only a few. Another aspect is the complexity of the phenomenon itself, with its substantial subjective component. That is, since leadership is entirely a social construct, it can be defined in an almost infinite number of ways, depending on the value preferences of the commentator.

Some Important Distinctions

Some preliminary distinctions are important for those new to the field of leadership. One important distinction is that types of leadership vary substantially. This book will focus primarily on organizational leaders but there are many other fundamentally different types of leadership. One of the first types of leaders we customarily think about are political leaders. There are also leaders of social networks and even of intellectual movements. Different types of leaders do have some extremely broad similarities. However, the differences in various types of leaders are as important as the unifying elements. For example, two of the more fundamental conceptions of leaders are that they lead followers and motivate them. Yet consider the differences among the types of followers—voters, paid employees, volunteers, and ideological and intellectual consumers. The manner in which a politician motivates a self-interested constituent is different from the way a boss motivates a new hire, a religious leader inspires a zealot, or an intellectual stimulates an unknown reader-follower. Here, the dissimilarities can be more critical than the similarities. Even within the organizational leader setting, the differences among private-and public-sector leaders are not insignificant (R. Terry 1993; L. Terry 1995). There are vast differences between a corporate profit-making environment in which loyalty to shareholders is key and a nonprofit agency within a democratic political system in which accountability to the public at large is essential (Goodsell 1994).

A second important distinction has to do with the difference between descriptive/analytic research and prescriptive analysis. Descriptive research attempts to clarify facts and analytic research attempts to identify relationships. For example, what is decisiveness and how does it relate (if at all) to leadership? Prescriptive research, on the other hand, seeks to provide guidelines for effective action. For example, if decisiveness and leader effectiveness are shown to be highly related to situational characteristics, then leaders should learn to identify when those factors are present (e.g., during crises, in situations with extreme time constraints, when a leader has a good command of the facts, when followers’ self-interests are likely to cloud logic, etc.).

A related variant of this distinction is the difference between the study of leadership to expand basic knowledge and the study of leadership for applied purposes. This is a classic bifurcation of purposes, which at its extreme results in very different types of writings and analysis, although it results in useful overlap as well.

Basic research on leadership is interested in identifying underlying principles of leadership and verifying them in a scientifically rigorous manner. It is concerned with conceptualization, methodological validity and reliability, lack of bias, and generalizability. At a minimum this perspective seeks accurate descriptive accounts of narrowly circumscribed processes; at a mid-level it seeks to explain processes; at its most rigorous it seeks to reliably predict outcomes.

Applied research is more apt to study leadership in its natural settings. Therefore, applied research generally studies leadership as a complex process and takes advantage of natural comparative examples, but it rarely has anything approaching more scientifically rigorous controlled settings. Applied researchers will more often report on findings after analyzing a specific case, or after analyzing the leadership survey instruments of many managers. Greater emphasis is placed on the proper way to be an effective leader and on prescription (advice).

Ideally, basic scientific research provides the detailed conceptualizations and broader theories that are then tested in multiple, different, applied settings. These applied settings should transfer knowledge to practitioners in useful ways. At its worst, basic scientific studies can be trivial, rarified, and/or unnecessarily obscure; applied research can be overly simplistic, overly generalized, and theoretically naïve.

A third useful distinction is the level of focus of various theories: organization, group, dyadic (two people), or intra-level characteristics. These distinctions provide a useful variety in the readings but also make comparisons more difficult. For example, nearly all the articles in parts 2 and 3 are at the organization level, looking at such issues as agency structure, quality systems, systems priorities and assessments, and accountability. A focus on the relationship between the leader and individual follower (dyadic) also occurs frequently in research on behaviors and leadership exemplars. For example, Daley and Naff consider a variety of behavioral differences with an eye to gender: do men and women behave differently toward their subordinates, and is this good, bad, or indifferent in terms of effectiveness? Looking more closely at the internal cognitive workings of leadership, Marshall Dimock (in part 4) focuses on the deeply personal and imaginative aspects of administrators in “Creativity.” This is a common focus for many articles on leadership traits and skills.

Organization of the Book

After the introductory section, the book is organized to emphasize the normal causal chain of events that generally affect individual leaders. In the first phase, a leader assesses the environment in which s/he will act (part 2), sets goals (part 3), utilizes and improves personal traits (part 4), and adjusts her/his style to suit the situations and personality of the leader (part 5). In the next phase, the leader acts using an assortment of techniques in a variety of functional domains (part 6). Finally, the leader evaluates the success and failures that s/he has had in the organizational setting (part 7). Preceding and concurrent with these phases, leaders are engaged in development (part 8). Finally, it is useful to consider concrete examples of administrative leaders as they range from exemplars to autocrats (part 9).

The introduction offers an overview of leadership as a field of study. It provides a background on the leadership literature and the perennial debates, the strengths and weaknesses of that literature, and the differences between the mainstream organizational literature and the public-sector subset, which sometimes seems to function as a distant cousin. It also provides a contrast between the research perspectives of the leadership literature and the broader public governance model.

Contrary to some overly simplistic notions of leadership that prescribe identical actions regardless of the situation, leaders must engage in preliminary assessment to act effectively. Leaders must be able to assess the dynamics occurring in the organization, the external environment, and the constraints that they face in carrying out routine functions and nonroutine changes. How well do followers understand their roles, do they have all the skills necessary, and are they motivated to work hard? Are organizational processes supportive of productivity, teamwork, and morale? Is the organization creative and innovative enough to stay abreast of contemporary organizational practice? Does the organization have an eye to the opportunities and threats occurring outside its boundaries, and is it able to adapt quickly and flexibly? In addition, leaders must know their constraints: by law, by position, by resources, and by their own leadership limitations. They must know how to push these bounds back (with the exception of the law in the public sector), when necessary over time, in order to meet the challenges leaders face.

In conducting this ongoing assessment, leaders must be able to set goals and priorities for themselves and for their organizations. They must make decisions about where to focus their attention and their time in daily activities. To what degree are leaders going to focus on technical and operational issues, on the motivation and development of people, and/or on the alignment and success of the organization at large? While these different foci are ultimately self-supporting, leaders’ time and resources are always limited, and choices must be made about the relative importance of each. Further, leaders must decide the degree to which operations and organizational structures, culture, and so on should be maintained, refined, or changed. Even when a change orientation is appropriate, leaders must decide whether an incremental or a radical change strategy is more appropriate.

Leaders come to various situations in varying stages of readiness. Leader characteristics are a large part of that readiness. Although no absolute set of characteristics is necessary in all leadership situations, certain traits and skills tend to be significantly more important than others. Traits are those characteristics that are primarily inherent and become a part of one’s personality (e.g., self-confidence, energy, the need for achievement, etc.), while skills are characteristics that are primarily learned (e.g., communication, analytic, and influence skills). This is not to say that traits cannot be enhanced, especially through training and/or indoctrination; nor is it to say that some people do not have a natural gift with some skills. For example, self-confidence tends to be an innate personality characteristic; nonetheless, with training and experience an individual can become far more self-confident. Likewise, while communication skills take practice and study to master, some people clearly have greater native abilities in oral and writing skills.

Leaders also bring a leadership “style” to situations. A style can be thought of as the dominant pattern of leader behavior in a position or situation. Rather than referring to all aspects of leadership, style most commonly refers to the pattern of follower inclusion in decisions, although it can also refer to the communication patterns, individual versus group/team patterns of leadership, and use of influence tactics. People have a preferred mode of leadership. Good leaders generally have alternate modes so that they are not dependent on a single style and can adjust to a variety of situational needs. Like leader characteristics, styles are antecedent to leadership in that they are prior aspects of the leaders’ repertoire and to some degree are an explicit method of accomplishing specific goals. Yet styles, like leader characteristics, are expressed through the concrete actions that leaders take in doing their jobs.

Leaders act. These actions or behaviors can be thought of as occurring in three domains. First, leaders have tasks to accomplish. Their organization, division, or unit has work that it must produce, no matter whether it is a concrete product or a relatively nebulous service. Second, leaders have followers and it is the followers who actually accomplish the mission of the organization. Thus, good leaders never lose sight of the fact that they accomplish their goals through and, as importantly, with others. Finally, leaders are expected to know more than how to design and coordinate work processes; they are expected to know how the product of these efforts will integrate and compare with other organizations and external entities. If production and people constitute the mission of leadership, then organizational alignment and adaptability constitute the vision of leadership. Today more than ever, good leaders must not only be competent in their professional skills, they must also be able to articulate a vision that is compelling to a wide variety of constituencies.

From time to time leaders must be able to evaluate (and be evaluated on) how they have done. This is an ongoing and complex activity. It requires balancing numerous competing interests. It also requires adjusting plans and priorities as new operational problems occur, problems are resolved, and, less frequently but very critically, new opportunities and threats materialize. It requires continual examination of one’s own performance as well as the performance of the organization.

Developing leaders is also no easy task. The type of leadership training that is required depends in part upon the level of leader being trained: lower-level supervision, mid-level management, or executive. It also depends on the type of function being performed, such as staff or line. It even depends on the type of organization and inherent characteristics of the business: auditing or corrections versus economic development or public relations. To what degree do certain leaders need more technical, interpersonal, or basic management skills training, or preparation on abstract executive competencies such as change management or visioning? Even when it has been decided what is to be taught, there are questions about the best methods for doing so, such as technical briefings, mentoring, or case studies in executive seminars.

The final section of the book takes a brief look at some examples of administrative leaders. As discussed earlier, much can be learned by looking at examples of those who are successful or not successful in fulfilling the leadership function. Such cases are particularly useful in thinking about the larger roles that administrators do or should play in a democratic system. In particular, to what degree should nonelected leaders shape public policy, and just what is policy and what are simply large implementation issues?

Review of the Selections in Part 1

James Fesler’s 1960 editorial on administrative leadership “Leadership and Its Context” provides an inspirational call for more attention to the subject. What is remarkable about this single-page editorial is that it surveys so much history and asks just about every major question in the leadership literature. What are the ideal qualities of the good administrator? Who is the great leader? What ...