Public sector leadership: new perspectives for research and practice

Abstract

In this article, we aim to portray the state of the art in public sector leadership in order to recommend directions for research and training practice. To this end, we review the scattered strands of literature on public sector leadership (PSL) and classify them in a single framework. The results of the study suggest that public sector leadership is emerging as a distinctive and autonomous domain in public administration/public management studies, although the debate is still underdeveloped compared to business administration studies. Leadership skills truly do matter in improving the performance of public sector organizations, and it is highly likely that the optimum leadership style is an integrated one: Public sector leaders should behave mainly as transformational leaders, moderately leveraging transactional relationships with their followers and heavily leveraging the importance of preserving integrity and ethics in the fulfillment of tasks.

Points for practitioners

This study on public leadership suggests that administrative leaders in the public sector behave differently from their counterparts in the business world, and as a result there is a great need for leadership development programs which focus on these differences instead of merely mimicking programs designed for leaders in the private sector.

Keywords

change management leadership modernization public sector reform

Introduction

The debate about administrative leadership in the public sector has seen a resurgence of interest among both researchers and practitioners. This new focus has been linked to the widespread diffusion of public management reforms in Europe and in the US (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000) and to the general shift from managerialism to ‘leaderism’ (O’Reilly and Reed, 2010). Greater responsibilities and higher autonomy on the part of senior public officers have, in fact, augmented their level of freedom and the possibility of exercising their leadership in different ways (Dull, 2009). For these reasons, practitioners and scholars have frequently questioned whether or not administrative leadership (also called ‘public sector leadership’, or PSL) is different from leadership in the private sector (Rainey, 2003; Rainey and Bozeman, 2000). To date, the debate has generally developed in a very fragmentary way, with different definitions of administrative/public sector leadership and a general lack of communication among scholars, practitioners and education/training agencies in charge of developing leadership programs in public sector organizations.

This article aims to facilitate this dialogue among the different audiences interested in public sector leadership by reviewing the scattered knowledge on the topic and classifying that knowledge in a single framework. Our ultimate goal is to understand what has been achieved so far in order to suggest directions for future research and to inspire practitioners involved in leadership development programs. We base our study on Van Wart’s (2003) literature review on public sector leadership. Apart from being the first and best-structured review of this kind in the last decade, Van Wart’s work is also the most-cited article on the topic since 2003; this is confirmed by citation count searches in the ISI Web of Knowledge as well as Science Direct and Google Scholar. Drawing on this study, we review all subsequent scholarly and practice-oriented contributions in order to identify advances in the debate on public sector leadership in the last decade. Among other results, we suggest that public sector leadership is emerging as a distinctive and autonomous domain in public administration/public management studies, although the debate is still underdeveloped compared to business administration studies. Leadership skills truly do matter in improving the performance of public sector organizations, and it is highly likely that the optimum style is an integrated one: Public sector leaders should behave mainly as transformational leaders, moderately leveraging transactional relationships with their followers and heavily leveraging the importance of preserving integrity and ethics in the fulfillment of tasks.

The article is structured in four sections: In the next section, we briefly present the main leadership theories characterizing the debate since its inception as well as Van Wart’s (2003) summary on public sector leadership. In the ensuing section, we describe the methods we employed in our own review. We then present and discuss our main findings, after which we recommend future directions which may be suitable for advancing theories and underpinning the choices of practitioners involved in developing public sector leadership.

Background

Leadership became the focus of organization studies with the emergence of the ‘great man’ theory, according to which leaders have specific traits such as intelligence, self-confidence, determination, integrity, flexibility, sociability and emotional maturity (Yukl, 1989). In the second half of the twentieth century, Ralph Stogdill opened up the leadership research field to new theories and perspectives (Stogdill, 1948). In particular, the shift from studying leaders’ traits to investigating leadership behaviors (Blake and Mouton, 1964) led scholars to focus on the fit between the leader’s style and the internal context of the organization: Situational theory and contingency theory implied that a particular leader is likely to be effective in different situations only if s/he is flexible enough to assume the most suitable leadership style for each situation (Adair, 1973; Fiedler, 1967; Hersey and Blanchard, 1977; Tannenbaum and Schmidt, 1958). During the 1970s many new theories emerged, such as the servant–leader theory (Greenleaf, 1970) and later the team leadership theory (Belbin, 1981). It was not until 1978 (when Burns’ book on leadership appeared) that the seeds of the transactional and transformational leadership theories emerged in the literature. These theories are still mainstream in the contemporary debate (Burns, 1978). Transactional leadership implies that leader–follower alignment occurs through the strategic use of pecuniary incentives (i.e. rewards and punishments). On the other hand, transformational leadership is often associated with leaders who set a vision and goals for an organization, who consistently communicate that vision and motivate followers using non-pecuniary incentives (i.e. appeals to morality and ethics, persuasion and inspiration) (Bass, 1998; Bass and Avolio, 1994).

At the same time, public sector leadership did not occupy an autonomous domain in the leadership debate. The general belief that administrative leadership did not exist to an appreciable degree was linked to public executives’ low level of control over the ‘forces’ pervading public administration (i.e. political power and regulatory procedures) (Terry, 1995). Much later, in 2003, Montgomery Van Wart published a article in Public Administration Review assessing the importance of leadership in the public sector and highlighting the most significant contributions from 1995 to 2001. Van Wart retraced the history of public sector leadership through the work of many scholars, in particular Selznick’s (1957) classic Leadership in Administration and the first empirical works by Golembiewski (1959). According to Van Wart, interest in the topic resurged in parallel with the transactional/transformational leadership debate in the 1980s and then culminated in the 1990s, when public management studies began to focus on the differences between leadership in public administration and leadership in business: Specific traits of public sector organizations (such as complex planning processes, higher complexity and the idiosyncratic values of public sector leaders) prompted scholars to wonder whether a ‘new’ type of leadership was emerging. On this basis, Van Wart (2003) highlighted four main areas for further investigation.

The first area concerned the problem of definitions. Van Wart (2003) proposed a uniform definition of public sector leadership, suggested the need for boundaries, and raised a related question: Does public sector leadership exist in its own right, or is it merely private leadership applied to the public domain?

The second issue raised by Van Wart was whether public sector leaders are ‘born’ or ‘made’. He suggested that while doubts about leadership development have generally been overcome, future studies should focus on the impact of leadership development programs.

Related to the first two issues, Van Wart (2003) posed a third question: Does a ‘best leadership style’ exist? He claimed that the various leadership styles proposed in the literature were each a universe of their own, and future studies should suggest broader categories which could encompass similar styles and umbrella concepts to organize them in a hierarchical manner.

Finally, Van Wart’s last question concerned the impact of public sector leadership. His literature review supported the conclusion that leadership has a positive impact on groups and organizations, but he called for further specification and empirical research on this topic. In the following, we review the literature in an attempt to assess whether any answers to these questions have been found in the scholarly and practice-oriented debate.

Methodology

In order to review the literature published since Van Wart’s (2003) article and to assess whether or not the aforementioned questions remain unexplored, we designed a two-step procedure. The goal of the first step was to identify and collect further studies on public sector leadership. We conducted an initial keyword search in three databases (JSTOR, Science Direct, Business Source Complete) over the period from 2003 to 2011. We selected ‘Journals’ and ‘Books’ as the target media and input the following word combinations in the ‘Title’, ‘Abstract’ and ‘Keywords’ fields:

Public sector + Leadership

Public administration + Leadership

Public service + Leadership

Government + Leadership

Public + Leadership

To complete this first step, we carried out the same search routine in the most-cited journals in the field, analyzing every issue from 2003 onwards in a search for public sector leadership articles. We selected journals on the basis of their impact factor (IF) as published in the ISI Journal Citation Reports for 2009. The journals selected were The Leadership Quarterly (IF 2009: 2.202), Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (IF 2009: 2.086), Governance (IF 2009: 1.646), Public Administration Review (IF 2009: 1.141) and Public Administration (IF 2009: 1.188).

These two searches were integrated with a cross-reference analysis of the principal articles, resulting in a total of 97 articles after the removal of duplicate records. Finally, the titles and abstracts of the articles retrieved were screened according to relevance; this yielded a total of 75 articles, of which 49 were theoretical-qualitative contributions (reviews, research agendas, qualitative research) and 26 were empirical-quantitative works. We analyzed these publications carefully in order to verify their relevance to our research aims.

The second step was data reduction: While reading the selected articles, we systematically listed the definitions of public sector leadership stated by the authors, noting whether the article could contribute to answering to the main research questions proposed by Van Wart. We based our article analysis and grouping on the empirical articles, after which we extended our analysis to the theoretical and normative works.

Results

In the following, we present our findings in four subsections, which are structured according to the questions posed in Van Wart (2003). The first subsection provides a synthesis of definitions of public sector leadership and underlines differences between private and public sector leadership. The second subsection analyzes the effects of leadership development programs, and the third subsection portrays advances in research on the ‘best’ leadership styles. The final subsection presents an exhaustive analysis of research about the impact of leadership on performance.

What is public sector leadership? Is it different from private sector leadership?

Van Wart (2003) defines public sector leadership as the process of: (1) providing the results required by authorized processes in an efficient, effective and legal manner, (2) developing and supporting followers who provide those results, and (3) aligning the organization with its environment. Although other authors have more recently tried to provide their own definitions (see e.g. Dodge et al., 2005; Getha-Taylor et al., 2011; Robbins and Coulter, 2007), Van Wart’s definition has served as a ‘category anchor’ definition. Taking for granted that public sector leadership exists (according to Fairholm, 2006, one can only know it when one sees it), public administration scholars and practitioners have recently tried to demarcate the public leadership domain more clearly (Wallis and McLoughlin, 2007).

In particular, leadership and management in the public sector are no longer seen as opposing concepts, and a shared leadership approach (in which leadership skills and competencies are dispersed among actors within teams and public networks) has begun to emerge (Dunoon, 2002; Saz-Carranza and Ospina, 2010). Consequently, the difference between leadership and management has been linked more and more to civil servants working at different hierarchical levels: The role of public managers is now said to consist in achieving organizational performance using existing managerial techniques and exploiting available resources, and the role of administrative leaders is to proactively provide line managers with the most appropriate tools, resources and competence to achieve organizational performance (Coupland et al., 2008; Podger, 2004).

Considerable debate has also emerged on the degree to which public administration and business administration/management are similar or different and on the manner in which these differences influence the leadership process. Many authors have focused on specific aspects pertaining to this difference, such as:

Goal complexity and ambiguity: The assertion that public sector organizations are characterized by greater goal complexity and ambiguity than private firms has been confirmed theoretically (Rainey, 2003). However, more recent empirical research shows that public sector leaders tend to believe that the objectives to be achieved are just as clear as those in the private sector (Saz-Carranza and Ospina, 2010).

Formalization and ‘red tape’: Public agencies are characterized by more formal rules and higher levels of red tape compared to private sector organizations (Rainey and Bozeman, 2000). Further studies have actually found that the level of bureaucracy is quite similar in some activities (such as starting a new project). In fact, only those activities related to personnel administration, such as hiring or rewarding subordinates, involve far longer delays (Rainey, 2003). Extensive studies and surveys of federal employees have also found that a large percentage of leaders and executives indicate that they do not have sufficient authority to remove, hire, promote and determine the pay of their employees, and that managers in public sector organizations experience longer delays in gaining approval to purchase goods (Rainey, 2003).

Work satisfaction: Many of the pre-2003 studies focusing on work satisfaction reported lower satisfaction scores among public executives than in the private domain (Van Wart, 2003). Recent literature has found that aggregate satisfaction levels are actually similar (Lindorff, 2009): Public sector leaders cite higher general work satisfaction in line with the level and importance of the position held, while low scores are given in reference to the constraints explained under ‘Formalization and red tape’ above (Rainey, 2003).

Motivation: Public sector respondents attribute greater value to work that is beneficial to others and to society, to involvement in important public policies, and to self-sacrifice, responsibility and integrity (Kakabadse et al., 2003; Kunthia and Suar, 2004). At higher management and professional levels, in particular, public sector respondents place less emphasis on money and high income as ultimate ends in work and life (Fernandez, 2005; Thach and Thompson, 2006).

Accountability to stakeholders: Recent studies have provided evidence that transparency legislation and technological innovation have resulted in myriad opportunities for different interested parties to access officials, meetings, and a range of documents (Coupland et al., 2008; Philippidou et al., 2004; Podger, 2004). This phenomenon has helped create an environment in which stakeholders can exercise greater control over public sector leaders than over their private sector counterparts (Van Slyke and Alexander, 2006).

Behavioral differences: A number of authors have studied the behavioral differences between public and private sector leaders, and between various groups of public sector leaders (Hamlin et al., 2010; Lindorff, 2009; Mujtaba et al., 2009). The major new finding is that leaders in both the private and public sectors make decisions using intuition, but while private leaders are motivated by power, public sector leaders are motivated by achievement (Andersen, 2010). Other authors cite contrasting findings with regard to specific groups: No significant gender-based differences are found in high-context cultures in the public sector (Mujtaba et al., 2009); significant gender-based differences exist in the public sector in low-context cultures (Lindorff, 2009); and no particular differences exist in low- or high-context cultures (Hamlin et al. (2010).

After Van Wart (2003), one might therefore say that nowadays we have more evidence for relevant differences between private and public sector leadership. Post-2003 studies suggest that, compared to their private sector counterparts, public sector leaders have to ensure higher accountability to different stakeholders and face higher levels of formalization and red tape (particularly in purchasing and hiring processes). Public sector leaders exhibit lower levels of satisfaction due to excessive constraints, but they are also characterized by higher public service motivation.

Are public leaders born or made?

The literature since 2003 is full of citations regarding various national leadership development programs (Alimo-Metcalfe and Alban-Metcalfe, 2006; Philippidou et al., 2004; Podger, 2004). All of these studies implicitly assume that everybody is potentially suited to leadership roles (Lemay, 2009). We can roughly divide research on this topic into two main categories: (1) reviews of major leadership development programs (i.e. the ways in which leaders can be ‘made’) and (2) studies on the impact and effectiveness of leadership development programs as well as methods of ‘teaching’ leadership (see e.g. Salm and Ordway, 2010).

As to the first point, the Executive Core Qualifications document published by the US Office of Personnel Management as well as Bass and Avolio’s Full Range Leadership Development (FRLD) program have frequently served as points of reference for developing leadership talent in local, county and state organizations. Newer development programs are also worthy of consideration: The Integrative Leadership System (ILS) developed for the Australian public sector, for example, has focused on more specific areas of public sector leadership such as (1) shaping strategic thinking; (2) achieving results; (3) cultivating productive working relationships; (4) exemplifying personal drive and integrity; and (5) communicating with influence. In the UK, various government agencies and public bodies have outlined ‘leadership frameworks’ according to which civil servants should develop and improve their skills (Bolden et al., 2003). In these cases as well, public sector leadership has been linked to a mix of skills and competencies supporting behaviors such as making a personal impact, giving purpose and direction, focusing on delivery, thinking strategically, getting the best out of people, learning and improving oneself. Civil servants have thus been involved in more traditional teaching activities such as courses, facilitating workshops, coaching and counseling, reflective writing, role playing and simulations (Bolden, 2005), or ‘360° feedback’, all of which are meant to support the development of transformational leadership in organizations (Alimo-Metcalfe and Alban-Metcalfe, 2006).

Despite the multitude of development programs, evidence regarding the effectiveness of these programs and the ways in which they are successfully implemented (or not) is still scant. Some studies have shown that much of the improvement experienced in the public sector has arisen more from individual empowerment than from team building (Boaden, 2005; Lawler, 2008; Lemay, 2009; Parry and Proctor-Thomson, 2003). McGurk (2009), for example, studied the effectiveness of leadership development activities among middle managers in a fire brigade and a railway operator. He finds that when leadership development is largely an exercise in regulatory compliance, it has little effect on managerial performance or organizational outcomes. McGurk (2009) also demonstrates the dangers of designing and implementing development programs without sufficient attention to professional practice and the realities of managerial discretion in public sector organizations: The limited success of training intervention for softer leadership skills can largely be explained by a failure to account for the operational context in which it is assumed that managers will apply and transfer their learning.

Critiques of the effectiveness of leadership development programs are not a recent addition to the literature (see e.g. Ortmeier, 1996). In particular, Meese and Ortmeier (2004) demonstrate that college programs generally lack a focus on communication, human relations, critical thinking, motivation, and problem solving skills. On this basis, it appears necessary to recruit, select and train on the basis of leadership potential, and to provide a vehicle for the development of leadership competence among those already employed in public service (Ortmeier, 2003).

What is the best leadership style to use?

If leadership can, in fact, be developed, another question still remains: Which behavior should public sector leaders adopt? The public administration/public management literature has largely abandoned the dyadic differentiation between transactional and transformational leadership and now suggests a variety of new and different leadership styles (Trottier et al., 2008b). Transformational leadership has assumed the form of relationship-oriented styles referred to as ‘visionary’ (Dilts, 1996; Nanus, 1992), ‘charismatic’ (House, 1976; Javidan and Waldman, 2003) and ‘inspirational’ (Secretan, 1999), and it includes certain behaviors exhibited by transformational leaders, such as: (1) articulating an appealing vision, providing meaning and a sense of purpose in what needs to be done, aligning employees’ values and organizational ideology, or inspirational motivation; (2) creating emotional challenges and enhancing followers’ pride and loyalty, or idealized influence; (3) viewing the world from a new perspective and creating work structures that encourage employee participation, or intellectual stimulation; (4) modeling pro-social behaviors (Albrecht, 2005; Leslie and Canwell, 2010; Paarlberg and Lavigna, 2010; Trottier et al., 2008a, 2008b). Recent literature has also advocated these types of behavior due to their empirically tested effectiveness (Bodla and Nawaz, 2010; Morreale, 2009; Rainey, 2003; Wright and Pandey, 2010). However, many scholars have argued that transformational approaches perpetuate an arrogance and grandiosity that allows leaders to flee from the harsh side of reality; that transformational leaders are expected to be less effective in public sector organizations than private sector organizations; that there is a lack of ethics in applying entrepreneurial versions of transformational leadership to the public sector; and finally that the commonly accepted model of heroic change leadership may not be valid for all countries, as leadership aspects such as showing genuine concern, encouraging change, inspiring others or focusing on team efforts are given low legitimacy throughout the public sector outside the US (Alimo-Metcalfe and Alban-Metcalfe, 2006; Currie and Locket, 2007).

Visionary leadership styles have therefore contrasted with more transactional ones, such as monitoring follower performance, intervening when standards are not met and taking corrective action when deviations occur, rewarding services rendered, and diagnosing the needs of each follower (Foldy et al., 2007; Trottier et al., 2008b).

Researchers and practitioners have more recently shifted their attention toward ‘integrated’ leadership. ‘Integrated’ leaders use a combination of transformational and transactional behaviors by ensuring the clarity of desired outcomes, increasing followers’ intrinsic motivation, recognizing accomplishments, rewarding high performance, and at the same time adopting varying degrees of transactional interactions with subordinates (Hanbury et al., 2004; Morse, 2010; Rainey, 2003; Silvia and McGuire, 2010; Van Wart, 2003).

One particularly interesting perspective on integrated leadership comes from Fernandez et al. (2010), who define five styles which might influence performance. The first three are nearly identical to those described above: (1) task-oriented leadership (i.e. setting and communicating goals, planning, coordinating subordinates’ activities, providing feedback); (2) relations-oriented leadership (i.e. treating subordinates as equals, showing concern for their well-being, appreciating their work, involving them in the decision-making process); (3) change-oriented leadership (i.e. making organizations more adaptive and responsive to the external environment, identifying the most promising strategic initiatives for the organization, encouraging employees to search for creative solutions to problems facing the organization). The final two types of behavior can be seen as derivatives of other leadership traits, as they are (4) diversity-oriented leadership (i.e. taking advantage of different points of view to ensure increasing quality in decision-making, a larger number of ideas and decision consensus); and (5) integrity-oriented leadership (i.e. leveraging legality, fairness, and equitable treatment of employees and service recipients) (Fernandez et al., 2010). Recent empirical tests have shown that the integrity-oriented leadership style is particularly effective in increasing employees’ work effort in highly bureaucratic settings such as federal or national offices (Orazi et al., 2012). Embracing the same integrated approach, Fairholm (2004) developed and tested a hierarchical model of leadership which includes ‘transactional leadership’ (with great emphasis on leaders’ understanding of the one best way to promote and maintain productivity), ‘transformational leadership’ (with emphasis on the relationship between leaders and their subordinates, on value sharing and on trust development) and ‘spiritual leadership’ (encompassing the first two styles but focusing on the whole-soul nature of both the individual leader and each follower).

Integrated approaches seem to be the future mainstream in public sector leadership styles and practices even if additional minor theories are still emerging (Currie et al., 2008; Gupta et al., 2004; Kakabadse et al., 2003; Kim and Lee, 2009; Kunthia and Suar, 2004; McDougle, 2006; Moynihan and Ingraham, 2004). Most of these ‘styles’ can be seen more as nuances that better characterize the leaders’ behaviors than entirely new leadership styles. Taking an overall view, however, more and more scholars have stressed the importance of ‘spirituality’ and ‘emotions’ in leadership (Albrecht, 2005; Benefiel, 2005; Fairholm, 2004; Fry, 2003). Spirituality focuses on the whole-soul nature of the individual leader as well as each follower: Leaders see others as whole persons with a variety of emotions, skills, knowledge and abilities that go beyond the narrow confines of professional needs. If more research is conducted on the topic, ‘spiritual leadership’ could be seen as the uppermost level of integrated leadership (Benefiel, 2005; Fairholm, 2004; Fry, 2003).

To what degree does leadership make a difference in public organizations?

In the last few decades, a number of scholars have found that managerial behavior does have an important influence on government performance. Although some authors have concluded that stronger determinants of performance are associated not with leadership but with contextual factors (Currie and Lockett, 2007), there is general agreement that leadership has a positive impact on organizational performance (Andrews and Boyne, 2010; Charlesworth et al., 2003; Coggburn and Schneider, 2003; Dull, 2009; Ingraham et al., 2003; Jas and Skelcher, 2005; Kunthia and Suar, 2004; Morreale, 2009; Parry and Proctor-Thomson, 2003). Empirical research on this topic has never been so prolific as in recent years, measuring in particular the impact of leadership on the performance and motivation of subordinates.

One major contribution has come from Fernandez (2005), who tested an integrative framework to assess the impact of leadership on educational outcomes at state schools. The findings confirm that some leadership traits and styles have a positive impact. In particular, (1) efforts to scan the organization’s external environment have a consistently positive effect on performance across all levels of task difficulty, with its impact increasing as tasks become progressively more difficult; (2) the amount of time spent managing the organization’s internal activities has little influence on performance, except when tasks are highly difficult; (3) a leader’s experience has a positive effect on performance at higher levels of task difficulty; (4) a transformational leadership style that gives greater discretion to subordinates is negatively correlated with performance given low task difficulty, but exerts a positive influence on performance when tasks become very difficult; and (5) a change-oriented style may have a negative influence on performance, particularly in the short term (Fernandez, 2005).

Park and Rainey (2008) also examined the impact of leadership on perceived performance. In particular, they analyzed the differences between transactional and transformational leadership and their effect on a number of exogenous variables. The authors’ analysis (based on a sample of 6900 US federal employees) revealed that when subordinates perceive that their leaders use a combination of transformational leadership and rewards for intrinsic motivation, it decreases turnover intentions and has a positive influence on performance, satisfaction and the quality of work (Park and Rainey, 2008). Many other authors have studied the impact of leadership on different outcomes rather than performance, but the results were not fully satisfactory and yielded no statistical significance (Javidan and Waldman, 2003; Song, 2010).

Exceptions include the works of Trottier et al. (2008a), Kim and Lee (2009) and Albrecht (2005). The first work attempts to explain relations between a given leadership style and follower satisfaction using the components of transformational and transactional leadership behaviors. The authors’ findings suggest that idealized influence (and thus the ability to become a source of inspiration), inspirational motivation, individualized consideration, and contingent rewards have a major impact on follower satisfaction and motivation. On the other hand, Kim and Lee (2009) investigate whether and how management capacity matters in the adoption and implementation of innovations in the Korean public sector. Their findings support the impact of innovative leadership on the adoption and implementation of innovations in government. In contrast to the literature supporting a strong tie between stable leadership and performance, the success of innovation implementation was determined by the willingness of new leaders to take risks on new projects and their fresh perspectives, not by their years of experience. Finally, Albrecht (2005) investigated the extent to which affectively and cognitively based perceptions of leadership influenced affective commitment, attitudes toward change, turnover intentions and extra-role performance. The results suggest that employees are only willing to go beyond what is strictly required of their roles if they feel ‘inspired’ and ‘motivated’ by their leadership group/team.

Conclusion

Table A1 (see Appendix) shows the main findings that public administration scholars have generated thus far on the topic of public sector leadership. The table distinguishes among the consolidated view summarized in Van Wart’s (2003) article, the fresh knowledge accumulated up to now, and future directions recommended for researchers and practitioners.

Appendix.

Table A1

Traditional view (up to Van Wart, 2003)	Fresh knowledge (up to now)	Future issues
What is public sector leadership? Is public sector leadership different from private sector leadership?	PSL can be defined as: • providing the results required by authorized processes in an efficient, effective and legal manner; • developing and supporting followers who provide those results; • aligning the organization with its environment. Public sector leadership does exist in its own right and is different from private sector leadership.	Public sector leadership skills and competencies may be dispersed among actors within teams and public networks. The main differences concern the following: • formalization and red tape in hiring/buying processes; • lower satisfaction levels arising from career, hiring and buying processes; • higher motivation (achievement-oriented vs power-oriented); • accountability to a wide variety of stakeholders.	What are the features of leadership processes which emerge in public networks and collaborative governance arrangements? Is administrative leadership different from political leadership? Is public network leadership different from administrative leadership or business leadership?
Are public leaders born or made?	Leaders can be made, and leadership can be developed.	Leadership development programs need to be designed and implemented with sufficient attention to professional practice and the realities of managerial discretion in public sector organizations. The limited success of training intervention for leadership skills can largely be explained by a failure to account for the operational and cultural context in which it is assumed that managers will apply and transfer their learning.	Which drivers accelerate the development of leadership skills?
What is the best style to use?	Three main leadership styles are identified: transactional, transformational and integrated leadership. The various styles can be seen as elements of a hierarchical model in which the third style encompasses the first two styles.	Public sector leaders should behave mainly as transformational leaders, moderately leveraging transactional relationships with their followers and heavily leveraging the importance of preserving integrity and ethics in fulfilling tasks. More and more scholars have pointed to the importance of ‘spirituality’ and ‘emotions’ in leadership.	What is the impact of ethics and ‘spirituality’ in leadership processes and organizational performance?
To what degree does leadership make a difference in public sector organizations?	Leadership does make a difference in the public sector.	The principal outcomes studied have been performance, motivation and satisfaction, and the findings show that efforts to scan the organization’s external environment, a leader’s experience, and transformational leadership styles have a positive effect on performance under certain conditions.	Is the same leadership style equally effective among different organizations operating in the public sector? Is the same leadership style equally effective in similar public sector organizations operating in different countries?

Overall, these results suggest that public sector leadership is emerging as a distinctive and autonomous domain, although the debate is still underdeveloped compared to business studies. However, the literature is still rife with different definitions and descriptions of ‘new’ or ‘emerging’ public sector leadership styles and traits (which differ only slightly from each other), and this seems to be an endemic feature of the leadership debate. Among the many proposals, our review shows that more and more scholars have insisted on the dispersed and shared characteristics of public sector leadership. This focus might pave the way for promising new research on leadership processes which emerge in networks of peer organizations and in collaborative governance arrangements (Ansell and Gash, 2008; Turrini et al., 2010). It seems that the deeper the insight on dispersed leadership in intergovernmental networks is, the deeper are the aforementioned differences between leadership in the public and private sectors. A number of advances have also been made in the last decade, especially in the investigation of whether leadership matters (it does) and how to develop it. The recent birth of numerous national leadership development programs underscores the strong desire of governments to improve the skills and performance of public leaders and managers. Our review reveals that the limited success of training intervention to date has resulted from a failure to account for the operational and organizational context in which it is assumed that managers will apply and transfer their learning. While this insight is useful for both practitioners and scholars in the public sector, it does not appear entirely sufficient. Research on leadership development programs should focus more on the features of public sector organizations which accelerate or slow down the development of leadership within those organizations. With regard to this issue, our literature review did not uncover any studies portraying how administrative leaders change their behavior and style over time. Longitudinal studies on the dynamics or virtuous/vicious circles in leadership behavior would be instrumental in closing this gap in the literature.

Our review shows that in more recent times, the role of a leader’s ethics and integrity as well as the importance of emotions and spirituality (i.e. the leader’s ability to see others as people with a variety of emotions, beliefs, skills, knowledge and abilities, and to direct the entire organization toward a clear vision and higher end) represent promising fields of investigation. However, the impact of a leader’s integrity or emotional intelligence on group performance is mainly theoretical in nature and lacks a solid empirical basis. Future empirical studies should devote more attention to this promising avenue of research.

Finally, it appears that the impacts of different leadership styles depend more on contextual factors such as the cultural and social environment in which the public sector organization operates. In this respect, future research should focus more on comparative empirical studies about the adoption of different leadership styles in different environmental contexts. In particular, the endemic debate on differences between the public and private sectors should be enriched by studies that investigate similarities and differences in leadership behaviors across countries or within the public sector. For example, our review shows that multi-country studies or the examination of similarities and differences between administrative and political leadership are largely absent from the debate among scholars and practitioners.

Footnotes

Davide C Orazi is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Management and Marketing, the University of Melbourne, Australia. His research interests encompass advertising, sustainable behaviors, decision-making processes and public policy. He has published in Micro & Macro Marketing and IEEE Engineering Management Review. He is currently working on fear appeals in public service announcements.

Alex Turrini is Associate Professor at the Department of Policy Analysis and Public Management at Bocconi University, Italy. His research concentrates on public governance and public sector leadership with a particular focus on the arts and culture policy field. He is also the Director of the Executive Master in Public Management at SDA Bocconi School of Management.

Giovanni Valotti is Full Professor of Public Management and Vice Rector for Institutional Relations at Bocconi University, Milan. His research concentrates on public sector reforms, organizational design and public personnel reforms, performance management, accountability and transparency in the public sector. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Public Administration Review, consultant for central government, regional and local governments and public agencies, co-editor (with Giovanni Tria) of Reforming the Public Sector: How to Achieve Better Transparency, Service and Leadership (The Brookings Institution Press, 2012).

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