Leadership in the public sector: What do we know?

The goal of this paper is to review the academic literature on leadership in the public sector. We contribute to the literature in three ways. First, we analyze the notion of publicness (Bretschneider & Bozeman, 1994). To... [ view full abstract ]

The goal of this paper is to review the academic literature on leadership in the public sector. We contribute to the literature in three ways. First, we analyze the notion of publicness (Bretschneider & Bozeman, 1994). To what extent, and if so, how, do public sector leadership studies claim that specific characteristics of the public sector are important? How do they test whether these specific characteristics truly influence their results? Analyzing this will show firstly how scholars define the notion of publicness in their studies and secondly whether they truly test to which extent publicness is influential in driving their results.

Second, regarding methods, we contribute by analyzing which causal identification strategies public sector leadership studies use to assess the relationship between leadership and outcomes. Following Antonakis et al. (2010), we study the methodological rigor of the causal claims being made in public sector leadership studies and furthermore analyze how these evolved over time.

Third, we analyze which concepts are being used to study leadership in the public sector. This is valuable as general management have highlighted criticisms regarding often-used concepts (including transformational leadership, see Van Knippenberg & Sitkin, 2013) and have shown that new concepts are emerging (for an overview, see Antonakis & Day, 2017).

We aim to reach these contributions by analyzing and contrasting leadership studies on the public sector in three top general management journals (Leadership Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management) and three top public administration journals (Journal of Public Administration, Research & Theory, Public Administration Review, Public Administration) using all studies published in the last 30 years (1987-2017) that focus on leadership in the public sector. This allows us to identify similarities and differences between general management journals and public administration studies. PRISMA guidelines will be used for full transparent reporting.

The review will provide future research directions for scholars interested leadership in the public sector, especially concerning theory building (analyzing publicness and concepts used to study leadership) and methodological strength (especially causal identification).