ROOM FOR LEADERSHIP? A COMPARISON OF LEADERS IN PUBLIC, PRIVATE AND HYBRID ORGANIZATIONS?

One of the most common assumptions concerning differences between leaders in public and private organizations is that there is more room for leader discretion in private organizations. The reasons for this, among others, are... [ view full abstract ]

One of the most common assumptions concerning differences between leaders in public and private organizations is that there is more room for leader discretion in private organizations. The reasons for this, among others, are more goal ambiguity, centralization and bureaucratization due to political ownership and a demand for predictability and transparency in decision processes in public organizations. How, then, is the situation for leaders in hybrid organizations? Over the last decades the distinction between the public and the private has become more blurred as hybrid forms of organizations mixing the public and the private sector proliferate. There are few studies on leader discretion in hybrid organizations, and even fewer comparing leader discretion between hybrid organizations and “pure” private and public organizations. Building on the theory of publicness with the continuous dimensions of ownership (political authority) and financing (economic authority), this study distinguishes between four types of organizations; two “pure” and two hybrid forms. The pure forms are privately owned business organizations operating in a market, and publicly owned organizations receiving all their funding over public budgets. The hybrid forms are publicly owned business organization operating in a market and thus basing their resources on income from sales in a market, and share-holding companies jointly owned by private and public investors. This assumption is investigated through data from the largest survey of leaders ever conducted in Norway (almost 3000 respondents). The analysis compares leader discretion directly between leaders in the four types of organizations. Through multivariate analysis it is investigated what the effect of publicness is on leader discretion, while controlling for important elements like organizational size and the main task or technology of the organization.