Search

Changing bureaucratic structures and increasing collaboration within public service delivery create new questions for leadership. With formal authority becoming more dispersed and various actors increasingly involved, revised expectations as to who contributes to organizational coordination are emerging. We investigate how both managers and non-managerial employees use leadership behaviours and how characteristics of the organizational context affect their engagement in leadership. Analyses of survey data collected among public servants (n = 1,266) in the Netherlands show that employees both with and without formal leadership positions demonstrate more leadership behaviour in situations of higher environmental complexity, but the latter group faces more bureaucratic constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complexity of today's local and global challenges requires us to look critically at both the concept and the practice of leadership in society, government, business and national and international networks. This article reviews recent critiques of leadership theory and practice and focuses on the significance of purpose as a central concern. It goes on to frame multi-level leadership for the collective good as a spectrum and identifies four angles or approaches of significance. These are defined as the Intra-Organizational angle, the Macro-Meso angle, the Distributed and Shared angle and the System Wide Change angle. The article briefly reviews articles in the special issue Multi-Level Leadership for Collective Good and their connections to these approaches and concludes with a future research agenda for further expanding our leadership thinking, research and practice. MAD statement Leadership, inherently being multi-level, requires us to understand, study and practice its multi-level nature more profoundly. Moving beyond leader-centric theories to consider leadership both as formal and informal, distributed and shared across organizations and societies, will help us to address the complexities and dynamics of societal challenges. By providing a spectrum for multi-level leadership, we do not make a plea for introducing yet another leadership style. Rather, we aim to broaden our perspective by providing new angles that can be studied in more depth to support leadership to achieve what we actually collectively strive for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose and test a theoretical framework concerning the relationship between transformational leadership behaviour and affective commitment to change in a public sector context. We apply change management theory to explain how direct supervisors contribute to processes of organizational change, thereby increasing affective commitment to change among employees. While the change leadership literature emphasizes the role of executive managers during change, we conclude that the transformational leadership behaviour of direct supervisors is an important contribution to the successful implementation of change. Furthermore, the results show how the specific context of public organizations determines the transformational leadership behaviour of direct supervisors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation of public management reform may entail radical change for public sector organizations, as it implies changes in the values of the organization. Although such organizational changes are widespread and prevalent in the public sector, the processes through which such changes take place are largely overlooked in the public management literature. By means of an embedded, comparative case study, the authors analyse both planned and emergent processes of change. Their analysis indicates that changes come about through careful reinterpretation and reframing of organizational commitments, rather than replacement of the old by the new values. Moreover, there are important differences in the leadership activities in planned and emergent processes of organizational change. They highlight the need for an increased understanding of the role of leadership in emergent processes of change. In order to successfully change public organizations, they find that the approach to change and corresponding leadership activities should be congruent with the content of the desired organizational change. Managers must dare to go beyond talking the talk and start walking the walk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a review of the recent literature on change management in public organizations and sets out to explore the extent to which this literature has responded to earlier critiques regarding the lack of (public) contextual factors. The review includes 133 articles published on this topic in the period from 2000 to 2010. The articles are analysed based on the themes of the context, content, process, outcome, and leadership of change. We identified whether the articles referred to different orders of change, as well as their methods and theory employed. Our findings concentrate on the lack of detail on change processes and outcomes and the gap between the common theories used to study change. We propose an agenda for the study of change management in public organizations that focuses on its complex nature by building theoretical bridges and performing more in-depth empirical and comparative studies on change processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]