A vast body of empirical and theoretical work on the topic of leadership has accumulated over time, yet as one leading expert asserts: ‘‘leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth’’(Burns, 1978). Additionally, in the field of Public Administration, the amount of studies on leadership in the public sector is lagging behind (Trottier, Van Wart, & Wang, 2008). Most of this work in Public Administration uses generic leadership concepts, such as transformational leadership (TFL) (Wright, Moynihan, & Pandey, 2012). These concepts are highly valuable, but they do not capture specific leadership behavior based on public values, which are mentioned as typical contextual differences between the public and the private sector (Denhardt & Campell, 2009).
Therefore, Tummers and Knies (2014) developed a first public sector leadership (PSL) measurement scale including five sector specific dimensions: accountability, lawfulness, ethical, political loyalty, and network governance leadership. This effort in PSL is highly promising if it helps to disentangle certain facets of a PSL phenomenon.
Leadership has been suggested as an important lever for improving public sector performance, but we lack an assessment of whether public sector specific leadership behavior explains more than the frequently used TFL approaches (Ladegaard, 2014). Therefore, this study compares the generic approach of TFL with the PSL concept. Thereby this study aims to provide important insight into the functional and behavioral approaches defined by the literature review and framework for future research in PSL by Vogel and Masal (2014).
To that end, I use a dataset of two public offices in the state of Bern/Switzerland compromising 410 respondents from the tax office and 584 from penitentiary office (response rate 52.8%). First, there will be a validation of the existing PSL-scale and the global TFL scale for our samples. Second I provide more insight in the macro level of the functional approach of the framework. There for an OLS regression is applied in order to analyze the relationship between the TFL and the PSL scale as well as the associated behavioral outcomes turnover intention, deviant behavior, and followers’ performance evaluated by their supervisor.
References:
Burns, J.M. 1978. Leadership. New York: Harper and Row.
Denhardt, J.V. and K. B. Campbell. 2006. 'The Role of Democratic Values in Transformational Leadership', Administration & Society, 38, 5, 556-572.
Ladegaard, L., Andersen, L.B., Bøllingtoft, A., Eriksen, T.L.M., Holten, A-L., Jacobsen, C. B., ...Westergaard-Nielsen, N. 2014. Leadership training, leadership strategies and organizational performance: Designing an experiment to test the causal effect of leadership on performance. Paper presented at IRSPM 2014, Ottawa, Canada.
Trottier, T.,M. Van Wart and X. Wang. 2008. 'Examining the nature and significance of leadership in government organizations', Public Administration Review, 68, 2, 319-333.
Vogel, R. and D. Masal. 2014. 'Public Leadership: A review of the literature and framework for future research', Public Management Review, 1-25.
Wright, B.E., D.P. Moynihan and S.K. Pandey. 2012. 'Pulling the Levers: Transformational Leadership, Public Service Motivation, and Mission Valence', Public Administration Review, 72, 2, 206-215.
IRSPM_Behavioral_Outcomes_of_Public_Sector_Leadership_Muriel_Baertschi.pdf 