Only When We Agree! How Value Congruence Moderates the Impact of Goal‐Oriented Leadership on Public Service Motivation

Questions of how and when managers can motivate the workforce of public organizations are fundamental for scholars and practitioners alike. A dominant assertion is that goal‐oriented leadership strategies, such as transformational leadership, foster public service motivation (PSM). However, existing studies rely on designs that are vulnerable to endogeneity and rarely investigate the scope conditions of the leadership‐PSM relationship. Combining a field experiment with 364 managers and surveys of their 3,470 employees, the authors show that transformational leadership and transactional leadership, when induced experimentally, do not have the claimed positive effect on PSM. In fact, the results indicate that goal‐oriented leadership can have demotivating effects when employee and organizational values are incongruent. Public managers should therefore carefully assess existing levels of value (in)congruence before implementing goal‐oriented leadership strategies, and—in case of value conflicts—seek to align perceptions of the desirable among members of the organization.     

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.     

information technology and the political world: the impacts of it on capabilities,interactions, orientations and values

A framework is developed for analyzing the impacts of information technology on politics and the public sector. By analyzing the findings in all relevant empirical research studies published in 16 scholarly journals during a six-year period, the incidence and direction of key impacts of IT are specified. In general, there is a limited number of empirical studies, with more case studies than studies based on survey-research, more analyses of U.S. politics and government than ones on other advanced democracies, and more focus on the local level than the national level. Overall, the research concludes that the impacts of information technology are generally positive, especially regarding the enhancement of capabilities, such as efficiency, effectiveness, and information quality. Impacts are more mixed on patterns of individual and group interactions and on orientations toward decision and action. The area in which the research identifies the most negative effects is the impacts on values, such as privacy, legal security and job enhancement.     

Policy Implications of Limiting Immigrant Concentration in Danish Public Schools

Immigrant students in Denmark on average perform worse in lower secondary school than native Danish students. Part of the effect may not stem from the immigrant students themselves, but from the student composition at the school. From a policy perspective, the latter aspect is quite interesting since it is more feasible to change student composition in schools than the socioeconomic status of the individual students. This article describes theoretically the circumstances under which total student achievement can be increased by reallocating certain groups of students. Empirical analyses of Danish register data of more than 40,000 students suggest that the gain in total student achievement by reallocating immigrant students is minor. The educational outcome of immigrant students can however, ceteris paribus, be increased, at minimal expense to the majority of native Danish students' educational outcome, by limiting the share of immigrant students at grade level at any one school to less than 50 percent. The policy implications of this finding are discussed.     

Information technology and transitions in the public service: A comparison of scandinavia and the united states

New information technologies have the potential for transforming the ways governments are organized, the activities they perform, how they perform them, and the nature of work itself. Governments in the U.S. and Scandinavia have followed fundamentally different approaches to the introduction of computing and to dealing with its effects. These differences in approach to automation have influenced each country's view of the role of government in anticipating and dealing with the effects of changes in computer technology on the public service workforce.     

Bargaining Power, Political Transaction Costs and Institutional Change: Private and Public Dental Care in Denmark1

Rational choice institutionalism underexposes institutional change as well as the interaction between institutions at different levels, and this article therefore investigates national and local institutional change. In the Danish dental care sector private and public provision of services have coexisted since the establishment of a publicly financed dental health care system, and the fight between supporters of the two solutions has generated many institutional changes, both nationally and locally. This article analyses all Danish parliamentary proposals and local decisions regarding dental care coverage and provision. The general finding is that increasing pro-public bargaining power seems to promote higher coverage and public provision, while increasing pro-private bargaining power leads to stable coverage and private provision. The institutions do not, however, change whenever bargaining power changes, and national institutional change does not necessarily result in local change. The article explains this in terms of political transaction costs. These costs might also explain why national institutions change more often than local ones, and why local pro-public changes are faster and more frequent than local pro-private changes.     

Electoral Trends in Denmark in the 1980's

The article examines the 1984 election in a longer time perspective. As compared to the turbulent 1970's it appears that the class polarization in voting between the 'old' classes has been reestablished but that the new social cleavages in party choice are at the same time reinforced. It furthermore turns out that the consensus on the welfare state which was lost in the 1970's is now reestablished, that radical socialist sentiments are weakening, and that the political distrust of the 1970's is declining. In shon, the elections of the 1980's signal a definitive break with the political climate of the 1970's. Opinion polls furthemore indicate that Denmark is heading towards a reestablishing of the 5-party system before 1973, but with differences in relative strength between the parties, and with a different, but still group-specific. social base.