Public leadership at the interface of politics and administration: a grounded theory approach towards the dimensions of the concept

A growing body of theoreticallydriven leadership research in public administration is addressing theuniqueness of leadership in the public context. On one hand Tummers and Knies(2015) and Fernandez et al. (2015), for example,... [ view full abstract ]

A growing body of theoreticallydriven leadership research in public administration is addressing theuniqueness of leadership in the public context. On one hand Tummers and Knies(2015) and Fernandez et al. (2015), for example, use a deductive quantitativeapproach to capture the specific dimensions of public leadership. On the otherhand there is a large number of qualitative case studies on the concept ofpublic leadership (e.g., Moynihan, D. P. (2004) in Chapman et al., 2015). However,insights from research on professionalism suggest that we have to be aware of environmentalchanges that might be of influence to the concept of public leadership incontemporary times. By applying the methodological approach of grounded theory,we develop initial propositions about the dimensionality of the publicleadership concept at the interface between politics and administration in an inductiveway. In particular, we conducted 24 interviews with leaders fromall seven ministries of the Swiss federal administration in 2015 and 2017.These ministries varied not only in terms of policy areas but also in theirstructure. The empirical findings exemplify and verify some dimensions of ourcurrent understanding of leadership in the general as well as public managementliterature. However, they also demonstrate that the ability to “translatebetween logics” the willingness and ability to “make at times pragmaticdecisions” are additional key dimensions of the concept of public leadershipwhen studied within the top level of Swiss federal Administration.