Managing the Entanglement: Complexity Leadership in Public Sector Systems

Complexity in public sector systems requires leaders to balance the administrative practices necessary to be aligned and efficient in the management of routine challenges and the adaptive practices required to respond to dynamic circumstances. Conventional notions of leadership in the field of public administration do not fully explain the role of leadership in balancing the entanglement of formal, top‐down, administrative functions and informal, emergent, adaptive functions within public sector settings with different levels of complexity. Drawing on and extending existing complexity leadership constructs, this article explores how leadership is enacted over the duration of six urban regeneration projects representing high, medium, and low levels of project complexity. The article suggests that greater attention needs to be paid to the tensions inherent in enabling leadership if actors are to cope with the complex, collaborative, cross‐boundary, adaptive work in which they are increasingly engaged.     

The Policy Sciences: The Challenge of Complexity

This essay reviews some of the recent criticisms of positivist science. It interprets this criticism, more generally, as directed towards the complexity of social science phenomena and the difficulty of dealing with complexity epistemologically and methodologically. Rather than ignoring complexity, changing the subject matter or explaining it away, we argue that complexity may be acknowledged and studied systematically withn the context of post-positivist approaches. The essay than proposes several strategies for conceptualizing and researching complexity (at a "meta-level" from substantive policy research) that are based in systems theory.     

公共管理者的角色：挑战与创新

公共管理者是政府部门以及非政府部门中依法担任公职,行使公权力,并负有相应责任的公职人员。公共管理者的角色是社会期望与个体扮演能力的辩证统一。公共管理者应注重自身角色的塑造,不断创新,努力成为宪法的捍卫者与执行者、人民的信托者、技术专家、治理者、公共企业家、故障排除者、孜孜不倦的学习者和战略管理者。     

Collective Leadership and Context in Public Administration: Bridging Public Leadership Research and Leadership Studies

This article challenges the view that public leadership research should maintain a separate perspective in the study of public leadership. It discusses the benefits of further embedding the public leadership research domain within leadership studies, constructing a cross‐fertilization that contributes to advance both. The article maps key concerns in relational leadership theories, contrasting them with current work in the public leadership research domain and offering suggestions to close the gap. It highlights public leadership scholarship's competitive advantage to contribute to theorizing about leadership, given the importance of context for building contemporary theories of relational leadership.     

Crisis Management in the Catholic Church: Lessons for Public Administrators

The Catholic Church offers a timely, significant case study of institutional failure. Looking at an in‐depth examination of the sex abuse scandal conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the author discusses how the church crisis relates to classic public administration and crisis management theory. Given the similarities between the church and the government as public bureaucratic institutions, public administrations have much to learn from the case. Lessons include immediately sharing harsh truths with the public, accepting the stark realities of higher “public” expectations, establishing appropriate accountability systems, and fostering trust by building close community relationships. It is equally important to consider that church leaders neither fully considered nor absorbed key lessons from existing administrative theory. Concepts such as inappropriate organizational culture, bureaucracy, technicism, and goal displacement often blind leaders to adopting best practices based on well‐established theory.     

Citizenship and Government: The Challenge for Management in the Public Domain

The domains of the public and private are different. Analysis of management which obscures their distinctive characteristics will miss the significance of each domain. This paper seeks to analyse the values, institutional conditions and management tasks which are unique to the public domain. It is argued that the distinctive challenge for the public domain derives from the duality of publicness: the need to enable citizens in their plurality to express their contribution to the life of the community and out of that plurality, to enable a process of collective choice and the government of action in the public interest to take place.     

Continuity and Change in Executive Leadership: Insights from the Perspectives of State Administrators

Executive leadership in state government is examined at two levels, both from the perspectives of the heads of state administrative agencies responding to mail question surveys in 1994, 1998, and 2004. At one level, the status and strength of the governor in controlling and leading the executive branch are assessed. At the second (agency) level, state executives (and their agencies) are assessed on four criteria that are connected, directly or indirectly, with the aims of the Winter Commission: leadership, responsiveness, reforms (at the agency level), and performance (through contracting). State administration generally reflects a balance between continuity and change, with more of the former at the gubernatorial (and legislative) level, and more of the latter at the state agency level.     

The Politics and Reality of Environmental Justice: A History and Considerations for Public Administrators and Policy Makers

This article provides a short history of the environmental justice movement in the United States and discusses four dominant problems in environmental justice discourse. It also will discuss three other aspects of the environmental discourse: weak empirical research; the failure to recognize the distinction between hazard and risk; and the possibility that environmental justice is more about fear, blame, procedural inclusion, and power politics than it is about public health in minority and low–income communities. More rational mechanisms for managing the issue would better serve the ideal of democracy, giving society a better chance of solving public health problems in minority and low–income communities.     

Understanding Leadership in Public Administration: The Biographical Approach

This essay reviews the range of literature that uses a biographical approach to probe leadership in public administration. What are the variations in this approach? What have we learned? What should be done in the future? The genre is examined through several books and articles that have studied agency leaders and government departments.     

Creating Public Value with Tax and Spending Policies: The View from Public Economics

According to the framework rooted in public economics, governments can create public value by focusing tax and spending policies on remedying market failures and addressing concerns about fairness embodied in a social welfare function. By pursuing optimal tax and spending policies, governments navigate the omnipresent trade‐offs between equity and efficiency. Of course, in practice, the process by which policies are adopted does not resemble the planner's problem in social choice theory. In addition, real fiscal policies do not look much like the recommendations that arise from the optimal tax literature. Governments operate in public choice environments that are not conducive to focused remedying of market failure, and they suffer from their own tendencies to fail to achieve their objectives. Nevertheless, many of the tools are in place to help the federal and state governments focus tax and spending in ways that can maximize public value.     

Boutique Government and the Challenge of Contemporary Leadership

The demands on natural leaders have changed dramatically in recent decades. Opportunities for bold innovation appear to have passed, prompting instead a focus on consensus building and partnership. Drawing on evidence from five Anglo-American democracies, this article argues that a diminished faith in public institutions and declining willingness to support altruistic community programs are reshaping the possibilities for national chief executives.     

The Reformer's Spirit: How Public Administrators Fuel Training in the Skills of Good Governance

The public administration literature has long identified public administrators as key players in achieving government reform. Public managers may be motivated to provide employee access to training in governance skills by several factors, including the need to fulfill the current functions of government, to expand employee responsibilities, or to reform administrative processes and/or programs. The authors examine the impact of public managers on the availability of governance skills training by observing how the desire to achieve reform influences their training decisions in light of other motivating factors. They find that training in citizen input, client relations, and performance indicators are significantly and substantively more prevalent in organizations when public managers believe that such training is necessary for reform, and that the more “democratic” a skill, the more likely a reform motivation will outweigh other factors.     

Transformational Leadership and Organizational Processes: Influencing Public Performance

Leaders are essential actors in public performance improvement and organizational change. However, a key question has not been adequately addressed in prior literature on the topic: how do leadership processes make a difference? Using data on New York City public schools, this article explores the organizational mechanisms by which a specific form of principal's leadership—transformational leadership—influences objective organizational outcomes as measured by standardized test scores. The empirical results indicate that a principal's transformational leadership style affects student test scores through the mediating effects of purposeful performance information use and stakeholder engagement.     

The INSPIRE Framework: How Public Administrators Can Increase Compliance with Written Requests Using Behavioral Techniques

Public administrators rely on written communications to send information to citizens and stakeholders, and they are among the heaviest users of the postal service. Behavioral science research has identified several techniques that public administrators can use to increase compliance with written requests and, in turn, increase effectiveness. Currently, however, many written communications from government bodies are not written in a manner that utilizes these techniques. It remains an ongoing challenge for public administrators to identify, understand, and use these techniques in the written communications sent by their organizations. This article presents a framework capturing seven prominent techniques in a simple mnemonic—INSPIRE—that is already being used by several government bodies in Australia. It also provides practical examples of how to use each technique and demonstrates that using these techniques could result in large aggregate improvements in effectiveness and socially desirable outcomes of public administrators' written communications.     

The Role of the Public Manager in Inclusion: Creating Communities of Participation

In this article, we focus on the role of the public manager in bringing about inclusion. While inclusion often implies public participation, we have observed that one of the challenges for public managers practicing inclusive management is the necessity of combining information and perspectives of three domains: the political, the technical, and the local or experiential. Inclusion, from this perspective, involves the creation of communities of participation in which representatives of these three domains can use their knowledge to address public problems. We examine the ways in which managers do informational and relational work to enact such communities of participation.     

Public versus Private Managers: How Public and Private Managers Differ in Leadership Behavior

This article aims to find out whether there are behavioral differences between public and private sector managers. Two groups of public managers (managers of social insurance agencies and public school principals) and a group of private managers (two samples) are investigated. Behavioral dimensions are investigated including leadership style (task, relationship, and change orientation), decision‐making style (the functions of sensing, intuition, thinking, and feeling), and motivation profile (achievement, affiliation, and power motivation). An analysis of data from 459 managers in four organizations in Sweden reveal significant differences in behavior between public and private managers. However, no significant differences in leadership behavior are discovered among public managers. Possible explanations for such differences and similarities are explored.     

Public Leadership in Times of Crisis: Mission Impossible?

Crisis management (prevention, preparedness, response, and reconstruction) is a tough task for political and bureaucratic leaders. This article documents the persistent tensions between the expectations and realities of crisis leadership. It explores the popular notion that crises provide key opportunities for reform. The very occurrence of a crisis is then thought to expose the status quo as problematic, making it easier to gain momentum for alternative policies and institutions. We argue that the opportunities for reform in the wake of crisis are smaller than often thought. The prime reason is that the requisites of crisis leadership are at odds with the requirements of effective reform.     

Exploring Charismatic Leadership in the Public Sector: Measurement and Consequences

A survey of more than 203 middle and upper–middle managers that assessed their superiors ( N =51) in the Canadian public sector showed that charismatic leadership in such a setting comprises four dimensions: (1) energy and determination; (2) vision; (3) challenge and encouragement; and (4) risk taking. However, such leadership is only modestly related to motivational consequences and is not significantly related to unit performance. We discuss our findings in terms of their theoretical implications for leadership research in general and for the public sector in particular.