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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]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the HR function to have a positive impact on performance and thus strategically add value to the organization, it has been suggested to redefine its traditional operational role. However, to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between these HR roles and performance, their alignment with the organizational strategy should not be ignored. In this paper, we therefore focus not only on whether the operational and strategic HR roles are linked to performance, but also on the extent to which their alignment with the applied organizational strategy actually matters for performance. We carried out a survey study among 336 respondents either holding an HR function or being responsible for HR-related tasks in various organizations. We found a positive effect of the strategic role on performance, and also how it might substitute a lack of innovation strategy. Further, we found an alignment effect between a cost strategy and the operational HR role in relation to organizational performance. We discuss these findings based on the literature and provide some practical recommendations for further developing the role of HR. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study assesses the relationship between prosocial motivation and commitment to change among youth care professionals. We draw on person–environment fit theory to propose that this relationship is conditional on employees’ perceived meaningfulness of the change for society and clients. Our results confirm the expected positive relationship between prosocial motivation and commitment to change. Our analysis suggests that the moderating relationship between prosocial motivation, client meaningfulness and commitment to change should be understood as a substitutive relationship: both prosocial motivation and client meaningfulness are sufficient conditions, but the presence of both is not a necessary condition for commitment to change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

Teamwork plays a vital role in today's business environment, which is characterized by continual change and an increased demand for satisfaction by stakeholders. Teams can be understood as the basic units of an organization, as they are able to deliver improved business performance as well as improved quality of working life. This paper shows the importance of balancing the implementation and development of teamwork in organizations (that is, the "soft" issues) with the improvement of "hard" performance. Based on a longitudinal study involving more than 160 teams at Volvo Trucks in Sweden, the concept of performability is introduced to understand work teams, where this concept has, in fact, been applied at various organizations within the private sector as well as in the public sector throughout Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]