Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: is public leadership generic?

Leadership matters in the public sector. However, it is contested whether public leadership is ‘a thing’ or rather many different ‘things’. On the one hand, parts of the literature claim that we should apply and... [ view full abstract ]

Leadership matters in the public sector. However, it is contested whether public leadership is ‘a thing’ or rather many different ‘things’. On the one hand, parts of the literature claim that we should apply and research generic leadership practices like transformational leadership. On the other, others point to the many contingencies of public management and argue that differences in tasks, organizational structures and individual public managers suggest that we cannot think of leadership practices as generic across the public sector. The ambition of this paper is to test these two competing claims. We do so using a representative sample of all Danish public managers (N= 2,119) collected in spring 2017. This sample allows us to compare public managers’ self-reported leadership practices across a number of factors. While our sample does not allow us to generalize beyond a Danish context, within this given cultural context, we have the opportunity to put the two claims to a number of hard tests.

Analyzing different tasks and organizational structures, we identify only limited variation, pointing to the relevance of treating public leadership as a generic phenomenon. However, looking at personal factors, we find important variations, emphasizing that it may not be the usual suspects in contingency theory, tasks and structural conditions, which should be our primary point of departure, when we argue that public leadership is contingent.