There are various leadership studies which are conducted in the public sector, which use general leadership concepts, such as transformational and transactional leadership (Wright, Moynihan, & Pandey, 2012) and Leader-Member... [ view full abstract ]
There are various leadership studies which are conducted in the public sector, which use general leadership concepts, such as transformational and transactional leadership (Wright, Moynihan, & Pandey, 2012) and Leader-Member Exchange (Tummers & Knies, 2013; Hassan & Hatmaker, 2014). These concepts are highly valuable, but they do not capture specific behaviors which are especially important for leaders within public organizations. These behaviors include executing governmental regulations (Hill & Hupe, 2009), accounting for actions to external stakeholders (Bovens, 2007) and showing political loyalty, even if this incurs personal costs (Christensen, 1991).
By and large, previous studies have relied upon ad hoc scales to measure public leadership. Moreover, there exists a dearth of literature where psychometrically developed scales have been used to measure this phenomena. Tummers and Knies (2016) has validated a scale of public leadership roles in western context as the sample of the study was largely collected from a range of public sector organizations based in Netherlands. Tummers and Knies (2016) studied four public leadership roles encompassing accountability leadership, rule following leadership, political loyalty leadership, and network governance and found them to be associated with work engagement, organizational commitment, and OCB and turnover intentions.
The public sector of developing countries are also subject to grave problems due to ineffective public leadership. Public Institutions in such developing countries are facing serious problems due to poor governance, absence of accountability and subservience to dominant political will while leading to distress and unrest throughout the society. The current study is an attempt to examine the four public leadership roles (Tummers & Knies, 2016) for their potential organizational outcomes in a developing country context. The study will make meaningful contribution in the literature from developing country standpoint.
The design of the study is essentially cross sectional and it utilized the public leadership roles scale (Tummers & Knies, 2016) to study the situation in a developing country public sector. The standardized scale of public leadership roles was adapted to the local context to ensure its reliability i.e a pilot study was done to achieve the purpose. Survey questionnaire method has been used to collect data. A quantitative study was carried out with a sufficiently large sample size from five public sector higher education institutions. The target population comprised of full time faculty members in a public sector higher education institution and a sample size of a 1000 was administered the survey.
The study attempted to answer the following research questions:
Q1. What are the outcomes of Public leadership roles in higher education institution in a developing country?
Q2.How public leadership roles affect employees’ behavior in higher education institution in a developing country?
Q3. Does public leadership roles induce organizational effectiveness?
The study revealed that out of all four public leadership roles network governance plays the least important role in bringing out desired organizational outcomes such as job satisfaction, work satisfaction and turnover intention in a developing country.
