Leadership in the Public Sector

Promises and Pitfalls

Christine Teelken, Ewan Ferlie, Mike Dent, Christine Teelken, Ewan Ferlie, Mike Dent

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415525831
• eBook ISBN: 9781136316883
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

In view of the approaching age of austerity for the public sector, leadership is likely to continue to become a key theme. This edited volume brings together a host of material from the public sector to analyze the issue internationally.

Teelken, Dent & Ferlie lead a team of contributors in examining three key aspects of this increasingly important theme:

• the meaning of public sector leadership, and how this changes in different contexts
• the implications for leadership style given the growing role of the private sector
• the response to the leadership issue from professionals moving into senior management roles.

With contributions from respected academics such as Jean-Louis Denis, Mike Reed and Mirko Nordegraaf, this book will be an invaluable supplementary resource for those undertaking studies across public sector management and administration.

1
Introduction

An overview and conceptualization

Christine Teelken

Purpose of the book

Currently, we cannot come up with a more accurate illustration of the title of our book than the positioning and discussions around the leadership of US President Barack Obama. After being elected in the autumn of 2008 with much fanfare, his Inaugural Speech was given on 20 January 2009, promising change and providing inspiration and hope for US citizens and the rest of the world. However, two and a half years later, the media, which were first so enthusiastic about his presidency and leadership, play a very different tune and sound increasingly disappointed and disillusioned. As Drew Weston commented in the New York Times of 6 August 2011:

The public was desperate for a leader who would speak with confidence, and they were ready to follow wherever the president led. Yet instead of indicting the economic policies and principles that had just eliminated eight million jobs, in the most damaging of the tic-like gestures of compromise that have become the hallmark of his presidency – and against the advice of multiple Nobel-Prize-winning economists – he backed away from his advisers who proposed a big stimulus, and then diluted it with tax cuts that had already been shown to be inert. The result, as predicted in advance, was a half-stimulus that half-stimulated the economy. That, in turn, led the White House to feel rightly unappreciated for having saved the country from another Great Depression but in the unenviable position of having to argue a counterfactual – that something terrible might have happened had it not half-acted.

After a promising start and a revival of his popularity in spring 2011 (e.g., through the elimination of Osama bin Laden), Obama’s presidency seemed to develop into a nightmare in the summer 2011, as this quote shows. In the middle of worldwide financial turmoil and a serious economic crisis, he is increasingly accused of a paralyzing lack of decision-making capacity and strength to act. His failure to settle the issue of the escalating national debt resulted in decreased US financial credibility, consequently leading to chaos at the stock exchange and speculation that there might be a new recession. Westen (2011) particularly emphasizes Obama’s avoidance of expressing a clear point of view in political and philosophical debates, while instead showing a postmodern duplicity by considering the various sides of such discussions. An additional explanation of the current state of his presidency is that voters place too much faith in individual leaders and that structural factors – such as a divided Congress – constrain Obama’s ability to realize promised change. Voters move from excessive hope to excessive disillusion across the electoral cycle. In other words, despite his promising election campaign and very high popularity in the beginning of his term, Obama has failed to act as a political leader who is able to stand up to the current economic, financial and social problems in the USA and abroad.

Although, as editors writing and compiling this book, we cannot pretend that we are able to solve any of the serious problems of current worldwide politics and economics immediately, we do, however, believe that our book will contribute to the leadership debates within the broader contexts of narratives of public service reform. By combining a variety of empirical studies carried out in the field of public sector leadership in diverse sectors and countries, we attempt to explain why and how leadership, as one among other policy instruments, can play a crucial role in pursuing successful public management reform. However, next to investigating the opportunities of leadership, we also want to explore the limitations of leadership in relation to its political and organizational context.

The composition of the book is based on a number of EGOS papers that were presented at the meeting of our standing working group ‘Organizing the Public Sector’ in Amsterdam in July 2008.

Quite deliberately, we have not requested that the authors use a certain theoretical framework – we have simply left it up to them to decide what suited their empirical situation best. However, we did compose a more general review of the various academic literatures and debates on the broad theme of leadership in public services organizations in advance. This review usefully served to solidify the theoretical basis of the book, enabling all chapter authors to place their empirical material within a more theoretical perspective.

The purpose of this introductory chapter is threefold. First, we will provide a review of the relevant literature currently available on public sector leadership, and after defining the major theme of this book, explain our standpoint in this context with reference to the debate about the ‘promises and pitfalls’ of public sector leadership. This standpoint will be used for the second purpose, the presentation of the key concepts and the new leadership approach, as the chapter provides a general interpretative framework for taking an overview across the various empirical studies presented in this book. Third, we will offer an overview of the content of the following eleven chapters and their relationship with the general theme of the book.

The leadership field in the public sector is highly contested with a number of different and, indeed, competing perspectives, which we will review here briefly, as this book intends to go beyond a mere definition of public sector leadership. We want to give a background on the various empirical settings of public sector leadership by relating them to the various discourses and theories seen as relevant for public sector leadership. The empirical settings vary per chapter, but are all related to the general theme of the book and use an institutional/organizational perspective. We will therefore sketch the various dominant discourses as they provide an overall framework in which the empirical studies on leadership, presented in this book, have been emplaced.

Defining leadership

Leadership was and still is one of the main themes in organizational studies and neighbouring fields for research, often influenced by more psychological perspectives. Leadership studies have greatly expanded over the last thirty years, along with the greater emphasis on the role of senior leaders in ‘turning round’ failing private or, indeed, public sector organizations and also the teaching demands of MBA programmes. Higgs (2003) states that we have been obsessed with (effective and ineffective) leaders for centuries. For example, in 1999 over two thousand books were published on the topic of leadership (Goffee and Jones, 2000, quoted in Higgs, 2003).

Bess and Goldman (2001) distinguished the situational, charismatic, transformational, path–goal, and leader–member exchange models as influential approaches to core leadership theories. The heroic individual leader model has been particularly influential in received private sector accounts, and there is a tendency to import such concepts into the public services. Examples of these are the use of ‘superheads’ to turn failing schools round (Currie et al., 2005) and the charismatic leader who is expected to transform the culture of a health care organization and thereby substantially improve the quality of its services (Gray, 2009). There is always an underlying debate about the relative importance of structure against action within social science and this applies particularly to leadership theories that are often highly action orientated. We will explore these tensions further in the concluding discussion. These leadership theories often do not take underlying social structures or the institutional environment adequately into account, which is particularly relevant in public sector research, as it is here powerful groups (e.g. medicine) are well established and ‘the state’ tends to be very different institutionally from ‘the firm’.

The leadership theme has played an important role in recent discussions concerning improvements of the public sector in the public policy domain (Newman, 2001; 2005; O’Reilly and Reed, 2010). Through this more specific focus evidence concerning leadership theories can be drawn from public sector research. In this light, particularly interesting questions involve: why has there been a growth of policy emphasis on the greater use of leadership-based approaches to securing major organizational change over the last decade (Newman, 2005)? What lies behind this? And how do we assess the literature in this field? While many ideas concerning leadership began in the private sector, it is remarkable that a critical investigation of public sector leadership followed at a comparatively leisured pace (Currie et al., 2009).

The context of public sector leadership

Currently, public leadership finds itself under increasing scrutiny. Through the international financial crisis, but also through older, gradual but persistent developments such as the New Public Management (NPM) and now network governance reform narratives, public leaders have been under close communal scrutiny, not only by the media who meticulously follow certain incidents but also by the increased pressure for accountability towards their clients, employees or local authorities. With the decline in conventional vertical line management, new control modes are coming to the fore in the public services. There is an increased public hunger for effective leadership from elected politicians and, indeed, public service managers, as seen in the response in the USA to President Obama, whose leadership style we commented on earlier. Within the academic domain, there is a rapidly developing literature on public services leadership – which can be seen as a live and compelling theme internationally – and to which we are well placed to contribute.

Hogan et al. (1994) present a timeless and morally neutral description of leadership, in an attempt to make the concept more accessible for a larger public of researchers. This description can be applied to a variety of situations, for example, a Somali warlord trying to pursue a common goal of protecting communal food supplies versus a Chicago minister attempting to bring together a group of parishioners to help the homeless. Interestingly, they see persuasion as a major feature of leadership, as leadership only functions when others willingly adopt the goals of the group as their own and team performance plays a crucial role (1994: 493).

Denis et al. (2005: 450) summarized the central dilemma of public sector leadership in one central question: ‘Can leaders intervene proactively or not in public organizations?’ In order to answer this question, they distinguish between the entrepreneurial view and the stewardship view on leadership. While the entrepreneurial view refers to innovative behaviour, with emphasis on the demands of the environment and the preferences of stakeholders, stewardship leadership concerns a more conservative role, implying conformation to bureaucratic rules, focusing on continuation and negotiations with the various stakeholders. The entrepreneurial view should be considered in line with the so-called model of transformational leadership, while the stewardship view remains more closely connected to transactional leadership. Given high institutionalization, there may be obstacles to enacting entrepreneurial leadership in public sector contexts (Currie et al., 2008). Denis et al. suggest that leadership in public organizations falls somewhere between those two poles. Transformational leadership may be more likely in simpler settings such as schools (Currie et al., 2005). There is also the important question of whether leadership patterns in the public sector are individualized or involve a small team setting and are dispersed in nature (Denis et al., 2001; Buchanan et al., 2007).

Recent investigations by Ferlie et al. (forthcoming) in the British health and social policy sector show that a shift towards ‘public policy networks’ will also involve the displacement of vertical management by broader and lateral forms of leadership, with public sector leaders as active agents of government reform, demonstrating personal/individual characteristics such as charisma and vision, and developing into a more entrepreneurial style of leadership. There is also the question of how these leaders influence important constituencies of public services professionals (e.g. doctors, nurses).

The particular circumstances of public sector (or non-profit) organizations (Denis et al., 2005) make a contextualized study on leadership even more important. The emphasis on values and norms plays a critical role in assessment of leaders, going beyond more straightforward criteria such as amount of profit or percentage of satisfied clients. Compared to the private sector, a different and more complex set of pressures and obligations plays a role, involving a focus on processes and skills that implies much more than formal leadership only. In addition, public organizations have to deal with a complex system of rules and programmes, which require a considerable amount of knowledge. More specifically, public sector leaders have to cope with a complexity and ambiguity of power that is dispersed throughout the whole political and administrative context (Denis et al., 2005). Successful leaders, particularly in the sectors with larger organizations, should be able to bridge the gap between decisions at the top and the daily realities of professionals at the operational level (Coble Vinzant et al., 1998).

Background: key concepts and debates

Before going on with an overview of the contents of this book, we will briefly go into the well-known debate of transformational versus transactional forms of leadership, and place this against the context of the public sector background. In brief, transactional leaders intend to preserve the status quo by rewarding subordinates’ efforts and commitment and maintaining a task-focused attitude, clarifying their expectations, while transformational leaders intend to change this status quo by mobilizing and motivating their staff and being more responsive to the environment (Bass and Riggio, 2006; Burns, 1978). In addition, ‘transformational … leaders emphasize emotions and values’ (Yukl, 1999: 285) and ‘motivate behaviour by changing their followers’ attitudes and assumptions’ (Wright and Pandey, 2009: 76). Transformational leadership can be considered ‘one of the most prominent theories of organizational behaviour’ (Wright and Pandey, 2009: 76).

Interestingly, Wright and Pandey suggest a discrepancy between mainstream leadership theoretical expectations and empirical investigations. On one hand, they state that ‘transformational leaders are expected to be both less common and less effective in public sector organizations than private sector organizations because the former are thought to rely more on bureaucratic control mechanisms’ (2009: 75–76). On the other, two meta-analyses showed that transformational leadership is actually common and effective in public organizations (Dumdum et al., 2002, quoted in Wright and Pandey, 2009). Public sector organizations often have a societal mission (teach students, care for patients), which is potentially more motivating for employees than, say, selling hamburgers. This may add to the suitability of transformational leadership in such organizations.

An explanation for this discrepancy theoretical expectations and empirical investigations is that government organizations are less bureaucratic than assumed by mainstream leadership theorists, and only show moderate levels of bureaucratic control. An additional explanation may be that reliance on bureaucratic control mechanisms has no effect on transformational leadership. The recent work by Wright and Pandey, who investigated senior managers in US local government, shows that municipal chief administrative officers exhibit higher levels of transformational leadership than expected. They had assumed on the basis of mainstream leadership theory that due to relying on bureaucratic control mechanisms, leaders in public sector organizations would demonstrate less ‘transformational’ behaviour (Wright and Pandey, 2009). However, Currie et al. (2009) investigated the occurrence of transformational leadership within secondary schools in England and were unable to establish a statistically significant relationship between leadership style and a school’s performance, showing rather that a contingency type of leadership style prevailed – in other words, principals combined a number of leadership styles, with overlaps between these various styles.

Yukl (1999) explains that charismatic and transformational leadership theories are useful and provide essential insights, but several con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Glossary of abbreviations and acronyms
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: An overview and conceptualization
• PART I The meaning of public sector leadership and its changing forms
• PART II Leadership style in the public services
• PART III Leadership and public sector professionals
• Index