Examining the Nature and Significance of Leadership in Government Organizations

Though the mainstream organizational literature has advanced in the last 20 years with the integration of transformational and distributed leadership theories, as well as genuine attempts at comprehensive models, the public sector literature has lagged, especially in utilizing large‐scale empirical studies. This study takes advantage of a very large government data set to test the utility of one of the best known theories, the “full range” leadership theory of Bernard Bass. It addresses three important research questions: How inclusive is Bass’s operational definition of leadership? How much of an impact do Bass’s leadership competencies have on follower satisfaction? Finally, how important is transformational leadership compared to transactional leadership in government settings? The results indicate that Bass’s broad definition of leadership comes quite close to capturing what federal employees perceive to be effective leadership. The relationship between good leadership in an organization and follower satisfaction is also presented as an important outcome in the federal government. Finally, both transactional and transformational leadership are perceived as important in the federal government, although transformational leadership is considered slightly more important even after shifting one important factor, individualized consideration, back to the transactional model.     

In Good Company: Why Social Capital Matters for Women during Disaster Recovery

Although social capital has made inroads into the public administration literature, little is known about the gender dimensions of social capital in the context of a disaster. This article examines what kind of benefits, if any, social capital offers for women who are affected by disasters. Studying this question is important because it would help public administrators overcome the unique vulnerabilities of women and strengthen their capabilities in preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disasters. This case study of the city of Gölcük, Turkey, suggests that social capital offers benefits for women affected by disasters because it is therapeutic in nature and helps women gain empowerment and avoid the stigma of public assistance. The article offers lessons on how public administrators could build social capital in disaster‐stricken communities by enabling face‐to‐face interaction, initiating leadership programs, and putting in place institutions and policies that are conducive to collective action.     

Tracing leadership: the ECB’s ‘whatever it takes’ and Germany in the Ukraine crisis

Abstract

Political scientists face problems when assessing a leader’s impact: how can we know that a policy outcome or institutional change is caused by leadership? This article argues that in addition to relying on comparisons and counterfactuals, we need to trace the causal mechanisms by which leadership affects outcomes. Therefore, the article proposes a way to trace leadership and applies it to two cases of EU crisis management: the European Central Bank’s role in announcing Outright Monetary Transactions in the eurozone crisis, and Germany’s role in shaping the EU’s response to the Ukraine crisis. Systematic process-tracing shows that both actors provided leadership ‘by default’. However, while the ECB had to combine the provision of knowledge with unilateral action in order to overcome the eurozone crisis, Germany could use manifold bargaining-based strategies and thus became the EU’s de facto agenda setter and main representative in managing the Ukraine crisis.     

Some Lessons of the SDP for Labour's Present Predicament

Jeremy Corbyn's election and re‐election as Labour leader, together with the emergence of a new Conservative Prime Minister committed to Brexit, has led to renewed speculation about the possibility of a new party appealing to the ‘politically homeless’ in the centre and centre‐left of British politics. This article draws lessons from the SDP experience in the early 1980s. Are the structural conditions more favourable to the progressive centre‐left now than they were then? Is there the sociological, electoral and ideological space for a new party? Does first past the post remain an insuperable barrier to an electoral breakthrough? From whom and in what circumstances might the leadership for a new party come? For all the depth of Labour's current problems, a new party seems an unlikely immediate prospect. In 1981, the SDP made a major miscalculation about the irreversibility of Labour's decline. However, the process of fragmentation in British politics seems set to continue.     

Beyond Cognition: Affective Leadership and Emotional Labor

How do the concepts of emotional labor and artful affect translate into our understanding of leadership? Where would one find affective leadership in practice? To address these questions, the workdays of civil servants are examined. Based on interviews and focus groups, the authors set forth in their own words how social workers, 911 operators, corrections officials, detectives, and child guardians experience their work. These interviews reveal the centrality of emotion work in the service exchange and underscore affective leadership in practice. The authors conclude that the most important challenge facing public administrators is not to make work more efficient but to make it more humane and caring. Affective leadership, and recognition of the centrality of emotional labor therein, are the means by which this approach is championed.     

The Pracademic and the Fed: The Leadership of Chairman Benjamin Bernanke

When President Barack Obama nominated Ben Bernanke for a second term as chair of the Federal Reserve Board in August 2009, he emphasized Bernanke's “bold action and outside‐the‐box thinking” in preventing the recent financial collapse from turning into another Great Depression. While many saw this renomination as providing monetary policy stability and necessary institutional continuity during the crisis, Bernanke's “bold action” has generated robust criticism, mainly because Bernanke initiated fundamental reforms of traditional Fed practices. How has Bernanke's leadership style at the Fed evolved as the financial crisis of 2008–2009 has unfolded? Did his prior academic experience influence his decisions? What are the long‐term implications of Bernanke's innovative strategies for the Federal Reserve as an independent, powerful, policy making institution, traditionally one that possesses tremendous financial and political autonomy? If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured, dualistic subject‐object knowledge, although necessary, isn't enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what's good. That is what carries you forward … It's not just “intuition,” or unexplainable “skill” or “talent.” It's the direct result of contact with basic reality … —Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance There are no atheists in foxholes and no ideologues in financial crises. —Benjamin Bernanke, 2009 ¹ 1 This statement was widely cited in media news outlets from NPR to Face the Nation and the New York Times. See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/business/21paulson.html .
     

Affective Leadership and Emotional Labor: A View from the Local Level

At first glance, readers of Professors Newman, Guy, and Mastracci’s article may conclude that emotional labor and affective leadership are obvious qualities that we should expect from adults in the workplace. It seems that effective employees and managers have always shown strengths in these competencies. Is this another academic effort to explore an area that practitioners already understand and manage fairly well? Further reflection reveals, however, that taking emotional labor and affective leadership for granted can lead to dire consequences. Failure to empathize and manage emotions during citizen contact events can create costs in money and, in the most severe cases, costs in lives. A lack of appreciation for affective leadership can produce productivity and morale problems that, again, create costs for all involved.     

The ‘Othering’ of ‘Red Ed’, or How the Daily Mail ‘Framed’ the British Labour Leader

This article takes as its starting point the attack on the late Ralph Miliband, the left‐wing intellectual and father of the current Labour leader Ed Miliband, by the Daily Mail in late 2013. It argues that this attack was a response by the Mail to its failed campaign to dub the Labour leader ‘Red Ed’. The article demonstrates that ever since Miliband won the Labour leadership in 2009, the Mail has sought to ‘other’ him by presenting him as ‘alien’—this by constant references to his Jewish background, his upbringing in a wealthy North London intellectual milieu, his supposed extreme left‐wing views and his ineffable ‘oddness’—at least, an oddness as characterised by the newspaper. The paper will conclude by asking why the Daily Mail's ‘Red Ed’ moniker failed to catch on, while noting that their ‘Odd Ed’ moniker seems to have had more resonance.     

论纳税人诚实推定权的入法途径

诚实推定权由纳税人财产权与人格尊严权衍生而来,在立法中加以确认有助于落实税收法定、践行量能课税和提高纳税人遵从度。诚实推定权借鉴了刑法上的无罪推定和民法上的善意推定,其基本内涵是税务机关认为纳税人有少缴税款嫌疑时,应由该机关承担举证责任,证明强度应达到优势证据标准。我国应在修改《税收征收管理法》时,明确表达纳税人享有诚实推定权,同时准确界分纳税人的协力义务和税务机关的举证责任,强调逃税行为必须具备主观故意的要件,合理限定税收检查权。诚实推定权入法将对税收征纳实践产生影响,提高现有“计税依据明显偏低”的认定标准,使纳税人的正当理由诉求更有可能被认可,对逃税行为的界定也将更为精确。     

Democracy Without Parties? Italy After Berlusconi

This article looks at the legacy of ‘Berlusconism’ for Italian politics. On the right, we identify a process of fragmentation. As a result of the personalised leadership of Silvio Berlusconi, where loyalties and ties were to il cavaliere as an individual rather than to a party or a political tradition, there is little by way of legacy on the right. Surprisingly, we find that Berlusconi's greatest legacy lies on the left of Italian politics, in the figure of Matteo Renzi. In his savvy manipulation of the media and in the careful construction of his own image, accompanied by a non‐ideological set of political slogans, Renzi has gone even further than Berlusconi. As a result, he may be the one to final bury Italian ‘party government’ and all its associated traditions and ideals.     

Public sector reform in Sub‐Saharan Africa: what can be learnt from the civil service performance improvement programme in Ghana?

This paper focuses on public sector management reform ‘best‐practice’ case experience from Sub‐Sahara African (SSA). Given that ‘best‐practice’ is a relative concept and often debatable, the paper uses the Ghana Civil Service Performance Improvement Programme (GCSPIP) experience as rather a ‘good‐practice’ case with the view to sharing the outcome and lessons to encourage collaborative‐learning. It seeks to share the outcome and lessons learnt by the Ghana civil service reform with future public service reformers and to contribute to the literature. The paper concludes with an adaptable three‐dimensional framework. The framework argues that successful future public service reform (PSR) should consider three broad issues: first, are the ‘critical success factors’, including wholehearted political leadership commitment; wholehearted bureaucratic leadership commitment; thoughtful synergistic planning/preparation; patience for implementation and evaluation; capacity to convince; neutralise and accommodate reform‐phobias and critics; sustainable financial and technical resource availability and conscious nurturing of general public support. Second, is the need for reformers to appreciate the concerns of the public and the civil society scepticism of public ‘institutions’ and its ‘operatives’ and finally placing any reform programme in a country‐specific context, including understanding its history, culture, politics, economy, sociology, ideology and values. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Defining E‐leadership as Competence in ICT‐Mediated Communications: An Exploratory Assessment

While many aspects of the dramatic shifts caused by digital government have made enormous progress, the leadership of those who serve the public via electronic means has yet to take a significant step forward. This article addresses three questions: How significant has e‐leadership become? What are the challenges in trying to create a more comprehensive model of defining and measuring e‐leadership? And, based on current knowledge, what skill and behavioral elements are candidates for a concrete e‐leadership model? The authors develop and test an original model that focuses on e‐leadership as a competence in virtual communications (i.e., the use of ICT‐mediated communications) and the digital opportunities and challenges that are created. The results provide strong support for the proposed model. The article concludes with a discussion of a future agenda for e‐leadership research that can be developed in a manner that is fruitful for theory and practitioners.     

Beyond Bureaucracy—Public Administration as Political Integrator and Non‐Weberian Thought in Germany

The political role of public administration holds an ambiguous status in public administration theory. The dominant paradigms of the discipline offer more or less negative perspectives. Max Weber’s notion of bureaucracy conceives public administration as the apolitical tool of government, while the public choice school conceives it as the realm of individual selfishness and rent seeking at taxpayers’ expense. In this unfavorable epistemological environment, positive concepts of what makes public administration “political” can hardly flourish. However, as public authorities may organize clientele participation and consequently co‐opt stakeholders, they provide for symbolic sense making and create patterns of identity. Public administration thus works as a political integrator in its own right. Unfortunately, this subject is not prominent within contemporary scholarly research. German political integration through administration is analyzed here in order to address these and related theoretical questions.     

Prosecuting Nazi Collaborators and Terrorists: Eli Rosenbaum and Managing the Office of Special Investigations

This Administrative Profile charts the remarkable career of Eli Rosenbaum, currently the director of human rights enforcement strategy and policy in the Human Rights and Special Prosecution Section of the Criminal Division in the United States Department of Justice. Until very recently he served as the director of the DOJ’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI)that was recently merged into Human Rights and Special Prosecutions. He held the OSI Directorship since 1995 and this essay focuses on his accomplishments as the OSI director. The prosecution of Nazi collaborators now is situated in Human Rights and Special Prosecutions. During the OSI directorship, he successfully targeted and prosecuted Nazi collaborators as well as global terrorists. Mission‐specific recruitment and team building by Rosenbaum were key factors in his effective leadership at OSI. Managing this unique agency required affective (emotional) skills in addition to cognitive and technical expertise.     

Learning from NHS Inquiries: Comparing the Recommendations of the Ely,Bristol and Mid Staffordshire Inquiries

If one of the key reasons for an inquiry is to learn lessons and prevent similar events from reoccurring, recommendations must be implementable and implemented, but it is clear that lessons have not been learned and recommendations not implemented. This paper compares the ‘implementability’ of recommendations from the three inquiries of Ely, Bristol and Mid Staffordshire to stress the importance of learning lessons. It examines two broad issues of ‘who?’ and ‘what?’. First, some 80 per cent of the Ely recommendations were aimed at the institution, while 72 per cent of the Bristol and Mid Staffordshire recommendations were aimed at the system. Moreover, about 7 per cent of Ely's forty‐four recommendations have a clearly identified agent, compared to 15 per cent at Bristol and 41 per cent at Mid Staffordshire. Second, the policy tool of ‘sermons’ accounts for some 89 per cent of Ely recommendations, compared to 66 per cent at Bristol and 63 per cent at Mid Staffordshire. However, the earlier sermons did not appear to prevent the events at Mid Staffordshire occurring. Pulling these issues together, it can be suggested that, given the large number of potentially responsible agencies, recommendations should be ‘active’ with a clearly identified agent and that a clear policy tool or mechanism should be identified rather than rely on a vague tendency to sermonise.     

The Boston Marathon Bombings: Who's to Blame and Why It Matters for Public Administration

This article examines how elite attributions of blame—statements from politicians and high‐level public administrators assigning responsibility for failure to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings—affect citizens’ beliefs regarding which government organizations, if any, are culpable for failing to prevent the bombings. The primary hypothesis is that public administrators, owing to their greater credibility relative to politicians, will more strongly influence citizens’ notions of who is to blame. Findings show that public administrators are viewed as significantly more credible among Democrats, and this credibility advantage translates into influence. Additionally, blame statements implicating the Federal Bureau of Investigation for failing to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings are particularly influential among Republicans, and exculpatory statements are particularly influential among Democrats. As discussed in the context of the Boston Marathon bombings, the public process of attributing blame for a perceived governmental failure has important implications for public administration.     

Social Policy and the Authority of Evidence

The growing call for social policy to be evidence‐based implies that ‘evidence’ possesses an intrinsic authority. Much of the evidence used by governments to formulate or evaluate social policy is signified through statistics and the language of quantification. Evidence presented in this way has the appearance of certainty and a legitimacy that seems beyond challenge. Having an appreciation of the history and sociology of the ‘science of the state’, as statistics was originally defined, helps demystify the authority of social statistics. This enables policy‐makers and program administrators to better discern the policy merit of numerical evidence.     

Defining Asia Capabilities for Australia's Public Service

Twenty‐three years ago, questions posed in this journal asked whether and how the Australian public service was prepared to engage effectively in Asia. More recent meta‐analyses of public policy scholarship suggest that Western policy scholars and administrators continue to pay limited attention to Asian policymaking, despite the rise of Asia in the 21st century. This article contributes a research‐derived Asia capabilities framework for Australia's public service, distilled from a qualitative study with public administration leaders at Commonwealth, state, and local government levels. It taps scholarly literature in ‘cultural intelligence’, global leadership competencies, and training to provide a robust conceptual underpinning for the framework. The framework defines the knowledge, skills, capabilities, and experiences vital for Australia's public service to engage effectively with the region in a rapidly changing policy environment.     

Equity in Federal Contracting: Examining the Link between Minority Representation and Federal Procurement Decisions

The federal government increasingly relies on nongovernmental organizations for procuring goods and services. This long‐term trend presents a significant challenge for administrators because it risks the egalitarian values of democracy by further distancing administrative action from direct, participative, democratic oversight. The authors put forward a theory of representative bureaucracy as a way to reconcile democracy with the reality of the contemporary policy process in which unelected officials are the principal decision makers. The theory is tested in the domain of federal procurement, specifically within the contract award decisions of 60 federal agencies over three years. The authors argue that increased minority representation in leadership positions results in an increased proportion of federal contracts awarded to small minority‐owned firms.     

Reflections on Leadership: An Interview with Sean O'Keefe

This interview with Sean O'Keefe by PAR Associate Editor W. Henry Lambright is a departure from traditional Administrative Profiles. It represents an opportunity to elicit from a man who has held executive positions in government, industry, and the university lessons he has learned about leadership from those experiences. It is his perspective, in his own words, about a host of questions of interest to scholars and practitioners of public administration. These include commonalities and differences in leading organizations in various sectors. O'Keefe discusses how executives can deal with people and get the most from them, how executives use administrative power in achieving organizational goals, and why executives sometimes make the wrong calls in key decisions. He comments on what he learned about leadership from mentors during his formative years. He explains the limits he faced in making controversial decisions, such as his termination of a Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission.