Public service motivation and continuous organizational change: Taking charge behaviour at police services

Building change capabilities into public organizations is a challenge for strategic management. This study focuses on the micro‐level of extra‐role behaviours that contribute to continuous improvements in working procedures at the front‐end of organizations (i.e., taking charge behaviour; TCB). More particularly, we examine public service motivation (PSM) as a key variable mediating between perceived practices and TCB of street‐level bureaucrats. The analyses are based on survey data from a state police force in Germany (N = 1,165). Results confirm the role of PSM as full mediator, but this mediation is limited to the relationship between leadership behaviours and TCB, while perceived organizational characteristics—except for red tape—have direct positive impact on TCB.     

Distributed leadership and performance-related employee outcomes in public sector organizations

Distributed leadership is the sharing of leadership tasks between managers and employees. This article demonstrates how a distributed leadership perspective adds to the public administration literature by including an important sensitivity to planned and nonplanned leadership. We propose a theoretical model that explains the impact of distributed leadership on employee outcomes which have a direct or indirect impact on organizational performance in public organizations contingent on alignment with individual leadership capacity and organizational goals. Our empirical analysis in the Danish hospital sector shows initial support for the expected relationships between distributed leadership and performance-related employee outcomes such as job satisfaction and innovative behavior. This indicates that the distributed leadership perspective holds the potential to strengthen service delivery in complex public service organizations while there is weaker support for the notion that the positive impact of distributed leadership depends on individual leadership capacity and their support for organizational goals.     

Change leadership and change embeddedness in public organizations: Connecting macrolevel reform to microlevel implementation

Governments initiate major public sector reforms for various reasons. Although change leadership appears crucial, its role in implementing reforms in public organizations receives scant attention. Insights from public administration and change management literature help to bridge the gap between these macrolevel and microlevel perspectives. Our multilevel study of two youth care organizations addressing public sector reform explores how leadership behavior—and in interaction between top and middle managers—contributes to the concept of what we call change embeddedness among front-line employees. The use of leadership behaviors during the reform that are leader centric (shaping) appear to be associated with greater ambiguity and worse change embeddedness. However, leadership focused on engaging employees and boundary spanning with external organizations seems to support the embeddedness of the reform, especially when these behaviors are connected to a clear sense of purpose around the change.     

Context matters: A Bayesian analysis of how organizational environments shape the strategic management of sustainable development

Public administration scholars have argued the need for a ‘general theory’ linking strategic management to the context in which public organizations operate. Understanding the interplay between organizational contexts and strategic management responses to urban sprawl and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions remains an underexplored avenue for empirical advancement of this goal. Using 2015 survey data, we employ a novel Bayesian item response theory (IRT) approach to test how land use policy comprehensiveness, organizational capacities, leadership turnover, and environmental complexities affect the strategic management of smart growth policy in local governments. We find that public organizations harness political, administrative, and community capacities in varied combinations to better achieve their policy objectives, but these influences may not be complementary. Also, policy comprehensiveness generally relates to more strategic activity, while municipal executive turnover offers opportunities and threats to some smart growth strategies. Implications of this research are discussed.     

Blunders and Blame: How Armed Non-State Actors React to Their Mistakes

Armed non-state actors make mistakes. Why this phenomenon occurs, and how organizations respond to their blunders, has remained understudied. This article draws on interdisciplinary research to examine sources of errors, and offers a public sensitivity argument to explain why groups claim and even apologize for their blunders. The quantitative analysis finds that all armed groups, regardless of ideology and organizational structure, are willing to apologize when there are unintended high casualty rates. A detailed analysis of three Provisional Irish Republican Army incidents reveals that public opinion is sensitive to the nature of the victims, and shows how public condemnation can impact organizational behavior.     

The role(s) of accounting and performance measurement systems in contemporary public administration

The spate of public sector reforms which have taken place in recent decades has triggered the development of a new body of research around public sector accounting and performance measurement both in public administration as well as in the (public sector) accounting literature. However, studies in accounting and public administration have at times ignored each other, proceeding in parallel. This symposium encourages the adoption of interdisciplinary perspectives in exploring the myriad roles played by accounting and performance measurement systems in contemporary public administration. Emphasizing that accounting and performance measurement systems are socially, politically, culturally constructed and, in turn, are implicated in the creation of organizations, society and political values, this symposium aims to extend the dialogue between accounting and public administration scholars in exploring how accounting, accountability and performance measurement considerations are connected to policy-making, public services and, more generally, the building and maintenance of modern states and democracies.     

Breaking the glass ceiling,but facing a glass cliff? The role of organizational decline in women's representation in leadership positions in Dutch civil service organizations

Despite efforts to increase gender diversity and equality worldwide, women are still underrepresented in leadership positions in public bureaucracies. This article speaks to the debate on how organizational context, more specifically organizational decline, may influence gender representation in such leadership positions. Based on role congruity theory and glass cliff theory this article empirically examines whether and how excessive workforce reductions are associated with changes in the representation of women in leadership positions in Dutch civil service organizations. Panel analyses on administrative data show that women's representation in leadership positions varies over time, but is not significantly affected by excessive workforce reductions. Overall, the analyses do not provide evidence for a glass cliff for women in Dutch civil service organizations. Implications for theory and future research are discussed.     

Mapping Organizational Change in the State: Challenges and Classifications

The article discusses possible answers to the question of what constitutes different types of change of state organizations. Drawing upon contributions from organization theory and public administration, classifications of different types of births, survivals, and deaths, are discussed and outlined, providing a mapping of organizational change in state administration along the horizontal as well as the vertical dimension. As an illustration, the article also shows how a detailed classification has been used in the Norwegian State Administration Database.     

LEARNING FROM PERFORMANCE FEEDBACK: PERFORMANCE INFORMATION,ASPIRATION LEVELS,AND MANAGERIAL PRIORITIES

While performance management is increasingly widespread, we still know little about how performance information generates learning and affects organizational responses. Recent work on performance information and learning in private business organizations, however, suggests that perceived negative performance triggers important strategic responses related to problem identification, search, and change. In turn, how performance is perceived depends on whether performance falls short of aspiration levels that are based on an organization's historical performance and the performance of peer organizations. This article adapts this model to a public sector context and tests one implication of the model, namely that public managers will increase their prioritization of goals that are currently performing below aspirations. This question is central to the study of public organizations pursuing multiple and democratically contested goals. Empirical findings based on administrative performance data and a survey of Danish school principals support this prediction.     

Managing life cycle demands through a leadership agenda

This article stresses that leaders can prepare their organizations to manage successfully life cycle demands by systematically developing administrative responses to life cycle demands. To this end, organizations are prepared to cope when leaders develop agendas that systematically manage chance. In this process change is anticipated, information is collected, and organizations are positioned to satisfy life cycle demands. It is our view that successfully managing life cycle demands enhances organizational survival. Further, most discussions of organization life cycle theory concentrate on the private sector. We develop a leadership agenda model with applicability to the public sector. The model is applied by examining the life cycle experiences of the Municipality of Metropolitan Seattle (Metro). Applying the leadership agenda model to Metro provides a longitudinal analysis of how life cycle demands emerge, re-emerge, and are satisfied. We argue that Metro's leaders were able to anticipate or respond to life cycle demands, collect information, and change their organization to cope with life cycle demands. Therefore, leadership agendas were used to minimize systematically the impact of chance on Metro's development.     

Assessing Public Managers' Change-Oriented Behavior: Are Private Managers Caught in the Doldrums?

This article presents a concept and a measurement of managers' change-oriented behavior related to the initiation and implementation organizational change. It is argued that managers have an optimal potential for achieving organizational changes if they have the change-centered leadership style, are intuitive, recognize demands for change, and have power-motivated behavior. Public and private managers are significantly different in relation to change-oriented behavior based on data from 343 managers in two public organizations and one private. One result was unexpected: public managers are more change-oriented than managers in business organizations. As expected, there is no significant difference in change-oriented behavior among managers in public agencies. Possible explanations for these outcomes are presented.     

How to Make the Mix Matter: A Case Study of Post-Transformational Leadership in Hybrid Public Management

The purpose of this article is to explain how public managers can influence the mix of institutional logics in a process of organizational change. To do this, the concept of post-transformational leadership is related to institutional logics. The article is based on a case study of the Danish Crime Prevention Council. The study shows how post-transformative leaders are urged to move from strategies of collaboration to strategies of manipulation, hypocrisy, and the hijacking of institutional logics.     

Discretion drift in primary care commissioning in England: Towards a conceptualization of hybrid accountability obligations

In the context of welfare delivery, hybrid organizations mix public and ‘new’ market, social, and professional types of mechanisms and rationales. This article contributes to our understanding of accountability within hybrid organizations by highlighting how accountability obligations can become hybrid, simultaneously formal and informal. Instead of seeing accountability as hybrid only in the sense of the coexistence of types of organizational mechanisms and structures (i.e., the prevalence of both state and market types), we examine accountability arrangements governing a hybrid model—primary care commissioning in England—and interrogate the relationships between accountability actors and their accountability forums. We conceptualize ‘hybrid accountability obligations’ as a state whereby the nature of obligation underpinning accountability relationships is both formal-informal and vertical-horizontal concurrently. The article concludes by highlighting the consequences of this kind of hybridity, namely how it extended discretion from welfare delivery to the domain of welfare governance.     

Innovation in Public Management: Is Public E-Procurement a Wave of the Future? A Theoretical and Exploratory Analysis

Project management has become an answer to many traditional organizational structuration and performance shortcomings, while gaining currency in business and public sector organizations. Public procurement systems have evolved into public electronic procurement systems with variations and distinctions in the age of globalization and digitalized complexities. This article examines the development of public e-procurement as an innovation in public management in the contexts of project management, public procurement management, and e-governance. It also links practice to theory—through a fourfold theoretical perspective—with contributions to the knowledge in public procurement, governance, and public administration.     

Locating Al Qaeda's Center of Gravity: The Role of Middle Managers

This article claims that the ongoing debate about the structure and dynamics of Al Qaeda has failed to appreciate the importance of an organizational layer that is situated between the top leadership and the grass-roots. Rather than being “leaderless,” it is the group's middle management that holds Al Qaeda together. In Clausewitzian terms, Al Qaeda's middle managers represent a center of gravity—a “hub of … power and movement”—that facilitates the grass-roots’ integration into the organization and provides the top leadership with the global reach it needs in order to carry out its terrorist campaign, especially in Europe and North America. They are, in other words, the connective tissue that makes Al Qaeda work. The article substantiates this hypothesis by providing a number of case studies of Al Qaeda middle managers, which illustrate the critical role they have played in integrating the grass-roots with the top leadership. The policy implications are both obvious and important. If neither the top leadership nor the grass-roots alone can provide Al Qaeda with strategic momentum, it will be essential to identify and neutralize the middle managers, and—in doing so—“cause the network to collapse on itself.”     

How can network leaders promote public value through soft metagovernance?

The aim of this article is to explore the opportunities and challenges of employing ‘soft’ metagovernance to promote public value in governance networks. Soft metagovernance can be defined as a form of relational leadership that is exercised through face‐to‐face contact. This involves making an emotional connection with people to exert influence through a collaborative endeavour, rather than employing bureaucratic authority. Drawing on a case study of a local social enterprise—The Bristol Pound—in the UK, this article examines how soft metagovernance can be used by non‐state actors as a form of leadership to create public value. Evidence reveals that relational forms of leadership are a powerful asset in helping leaders of networks to create public value. Moreover, if network leaders understand how soft metagovernance functions they can use it more purposefully to maximize public value creation and mitigate the risks of public value destruction in governance networks.     

High Performance Expectations: Concept and Causes

Employees contribute more when they are aware of their leaders’ high performance expectations (HPE), but how can leaders successfully convey HPE? Here it is argued that both transformational and transactional leadership behaviors involve goal-setting, which can affect employee-perceived HPE. Using a leadership training field experiment with 3,730 employees nested in 471 organizations, the findings support that training in transformational, transactional and combination leadership training significantly increased employees’ HPE relative to a control group. Furthermore, transformational leadership and pecuniary rewards seem to be important mechanisms. This implies that public leaders can affect HPE through leadership and thus potentially organizational performance.     

LEADERSHIP IN PUBLIC SERVICES NETWORKS: ANTECEDENTS,PROCESS AND OUTCOME

In this article, the authors examine the implementation of policy aimed to promote the role of organizational networks and distributed leadership in the establishment and consolidation of public service reform. In theory, leadership and networks should complement each other, with the less hierarchical logic of the network allowing leadership of change, distributed among network members, rather than led from a single organizational apex, to flourish. In practice, as a consequence of inherent bureaucracy, power differentials between network participants, and a strong centralized performance management policy regime, a relatively parsimonious form of distributed leadership is enacted, with the networks tending towards ‘managed partnerships’.     

The Public Sector Reform Movement: Mapping the Global Policy Network

Public sector reform in both developed and developing countries has now become a routine matter of public policy—reform is almost continuous, if not always successful. While the role of international transfer agents such as the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in promoting reforms has often been noted, there has been no comprehensive mapping of the global network on public sector reform. This article makes a first attempt to map the close to 100 organizations that make up a loose global network around public administration and governance. It then provides a brief history of the evolution of the network, and the key events that encouraged a substantial degree of coherence among its members. It examines the practices and tools that are specific to this global public policy network, and concludes with some observations on policy transfer models. The article shows that in trying to understand the dynamics of public administration reform, we need to pay greater attention to this network, its members, and its influence over national policy priorities.     

Open Source Governance—A More Ambitious Cousin of Collaborative Governance

Open source represents a model generally known for its success in software production. The objective of this article is to establish a new strategic approach of using open source development principles for managing collaborative arrangements between citizens and public administration. The identity of open source governance is developed by highlighting how it is different from its main “competitor”—collaborative governance, and from other two popular concepts—open government and e-democracy. The other sections are designed to answer to public managers regarding why and what to adopt from this governance model for public sector services.