VALIDATING PUBLIC LEADERSHIP TOOL IN THE CONTEXT OF PAKISTAN

Leadership is one of the most extensively researched areas in psychology and management but in the context of public sector management, much more is warranted in view of paucity of the relevant literature. Despite an increased... [ view full abstract ]

Leadership is one of the most extensively researched areas in psychology and management but in the context of public sector management, much more is warranted in view of paucity of the relevant literature. Despite an increased realization of the significance of leadership in the public sector organizations, the development of public leadership scale has been quite recent (Fernandez et al, 2010; Tummers & Knies, 2016). The present study undertook the validation of the public leadership tool developed by Tummers and Knies (2016) constituting four Public leadership roles a) accountability b) rule following, c) political loyalty and d) network governance, in the context of Public sector organizations of Pakistan. The Public sector of Pakistan riddled with the issues of ambiguous accountability, rules bending, and a great deal of political interference was considered vastly different from that of the developed countries. Thus validating the public leadership tool in the developing country like Pakistan was expected to add value to the contemporary literature emphasizing context specificity and cross-cultural comparisons of public leadership (Raffel, Leisinik & Middlebrooks, 2009a). The scale was administered to 873 public sector employees from the range of sectors including health, education, administration, Police, judiciary and other regulatory agencies. Factor structures were tested using EFA and CFA and the reliability was checked through Cronbach alpha obtaining satisfactory results. A good fit to the model was established after removal of two items. The scale was also related to leadership effectiveness, organizational citizenship behavior and work engagement to measure its convergent and criterion related validity. In the light of empirical findings of this study, it was concluded that the public leadership roles measure is applicable in the context of Pakistan according to its psychometric properties.