Understanding Public Leadership - Paul 't Hart and Lars Tummers

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Contents ix x xi xii

List of Figures List of Tables List of Boxes Preface to the Second Edition

1 Introducing Public Leadership 1 Public leadership: pivotal and tricky 1 Definitions 3 Studying causes and consequences 7 Studying leaders 11 Studying relationships 15 Studying institutions 17 Studying contexts and contingencies 17 Setting the stage 20 2 Varieties of Public Leadership Combatting air pollution in China Political, administrative and civic leadership Exercising public leadership: the strategic triangle A public leadership toolkit

21 21 22 26 35

3 Leadership as Relational Work Follow the leader?

Leadership as relationship Followers and followership The ebbs and flows of leadership authority

42 42 43 47 52

4 Leading with Others Tackling obesity together Shared leadership Modes of governing and leadership styles Leadership for collaborative governance

60 60 62 68 72

5 Leading in Time The time maketh the leader?

Grasping time in politics and government Leading in political time Leading in organizational time

82 82 84 91 95

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6 Leading Change Ghent university wants out of the rat race Coping with change Forging change by leading from the front Reconsidering change leadership

99 99 101 107 113

7 Leading in Crises The heat of crisis Crises: realities and perceptions Challenges of crisis leadership Preparing for the inevitable

118 118 119 124 136

8 Evaluating Public Leadership From hero to villain and back Challenges of evaluation Evaluation criteria: the assessment triangle Complications and challenges A proposal

138 138 141 144 149 154

Appendix: Ten ‘Must-Reads’ on Public Leadership Bibliography Index

157 160 184

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1 Introducing Public Leadership PUBLIC LEADERSHIP: PIVOTAL AND TRICKY Every group or society needs to be governed if it is to survive and its members are to thrive. And every system of government requires what we have come to think of as ‘leadership’, at least from time to time, for protection, direction, order, inspiration, challenge, transformation. Institutional rules, procedures and routines alone are never enough to tackle the conflicts, changes, surprises, opportunities and challenges that groups and communities encounter. Judging when and how to design, protect, supplement or change governance institutions and creating momentum to act upon those judgements are key functions of public leadership.

In most governance systems there are designated roles – high offices in politics, government agencies and professional spheres – that come with a warrant for their bearers to exercise such leadership. But these offices also come with constraints – institutional, professional, ethical – on the ways in which leadership can be exercised. Societies need the creative force that is leadership, but we should also be acutely aware of the risks of channelling too much power, authority and public adulation towards only a few people.

From the time of the ancient Greeks to the present day, many observers of public leadership have chosen to portray it as an art. Leadership, this view holds, cannot be captured in scientific generalizations based on cool, detached observation (Wren 2006). And, by inference, it cannot be taught in the cerebral environment of an academic classroom or executive seminar. Max Weber (1970: 115) was right on the mark when he suggested that the challenge of leadership is to forge warm passion and cool judgement together in one and the same soul – and that in practice this condemns those aspiring to leadership to a life of tough judgement calls between the passion that fires them up, the feeling of personal responsibility that drives them on, and a sense of proportion that is necessary to exercise good judgement.

Leadership as conceived by some of its most authoritative scholars involves a large component of practical wisdom: insight that can only be obtained effectively through direct personal experience and sustained reflection. The vital intangibles of leadership – empathy, intuition, creativity, courage, morality and judgement – are largely beyond the grasp of systematic inquiry, let alone comprehensive explanation and evidence-based prescription. Understanding leadership comes from living it: being led, living with and advising leaders, doing one’s own leading. Some understanding of leadership may be gained from vicarious learning: from digesting the experiences of other leaders. Hence the old-established and steady appetite for 1

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(auto-)biographies of CEOs and politicians, and the more contemporary market for ‘live encounters’ with high-profile leaders during seminars and conferences. And if we cannot gain access to ‘the real thing’, we are still willing to pay buckets of money for the next best thing: books and seminars by the exclusive circle of leadership ‘gurus’ who do manage to observe and interrogate up close the great and the good.

Defying this entrenched view, a ‘science of leadership’ sprang up from the latter half of the twentieth century. Thousands of academics now make a living treating leadership as they would any other subject in the realm of human affairs – as an object of study, which can be picked apart and reassembled via systematic inquiry (whether of the classical ‘scientific’ or more interpretive kind), filling journals, handbooks, conference programmes and lecture halls. Many among them make inroads into the real world of public leadership as consultants and advisers, often very well paid. Surely all this would not persist if the kind of knowledge they offered was useless in solving at least some of the puzzles that leaders face and leadership poses?

It is this kind of leadership that we now see echoed in widespread attempts to erect a leadership profession. The language of leadership has pervaded the job descriptions, training and performance management systems of public servants, even at junior management levels. Many public service commissions or equivalent bodies have embarked on developing integrated leadership frameworks in which set bundles of leadership skills are linked to the successful performance of different leadership roles, usually indicated simply by general hierarchical rank rather than specific job characteristics.

People wanting to move up the professional hierarchy must jump through the hoops thus constructed: they must attend set courses, adhere to a set of shared values, write structured job applications and be subjected to standardized tests.

When they manage to get all the boxes ticked, they are ushered into a fraternity rather like a Masonic Lodge. Uniformity is nurtured and celebrated through rewards packages. Leadership education is ubiquitous. Everyone attends meetings where leadership gurus perform. The aim is not to impart knowledge, but rather to solidify a shared notion of professionalism. The means for such sharing are the latest nostrums, models and metaphors. The audience is captive, and willingly so, though one might – like leadership scholar Barbara Kellerman (2012) – wonder for how much longer.

Clearly, when taken to extremes, each set of assumptions about ‘understanding leadership’ leads to preposterous results: the mystification of idiosyncratic ‘charisma’ in a nearly evidence-free environment versus the imposition of a quasi-­ scientific ‘one size fits all’. Both privilege one form of leadership knowledge over the other. Both generate their own quacks and true believers, who both do very well out of the transaction – but with dubious results as far as quality and particularly diversity in leadership are concerned.

This book shies away from these extremes. By its very nature as a text designed to convey ‘what we know about leadership’ to a range of students and public sector professionals it embodies the second approach more than it does the first. But

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we recognize that there is only so much ‘understanding’ of the subtle, complex and often paradoxical process of public leadership that academics and other observers can distil and transmit.

DEFINITIONS The terms ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ are incredibly popular. Consulting Google in February 2019 we got more than 1.6 billion hits for the search term ‘leader’ and more than 1.2 billion for ‘leadership’. People pay hefty fees to attend seminars by ‘leadership gurus’, whose books are stacked up high in airport bookshops worldwide. They feed aspiring leaders concepts, stories, maxims and prescriptions.

Their work is designed to empower and inspire. In the stories they tell, the roles are clear: there is one leader who knows, questions, analyses, decides, talks, acts, and inspires their staff, supporters and stakeholders to follow them. As we will see, in reality and especially in the public sphere things are a lot more complex. In most polities, political power is never concentrated in a few hands, in most public organizations much leadership work is performed regardless of their formal structures, and citizens groups and social movements tend to have quite diffuse and not seldom fractious collective leadership structures.

Public leaders are people who exercise considerable influence over the way in which communities deal with issues. Such public leaders are often found in high places – holders of public offices: presidents, mayors, ministers, agency heads, members of constitutional courts, police commissioners. Their office accords them certain formal powers as well as the capacity to mobilize attention and resources.

By virtue of their positions they are authorized to make strategic decisions. They can initiate policies, change the strategy of the organization, strengthen alliances with important stakeholders, make resources available for large new projects, change the rules for decision-making, focus the agenda of their system on particular issues and get them to disregard others.

But there are also public leaders that are not in formal positions of authority.

Public leadership can be exercised by people who do not hold a political office or a senior position in a government organization. These ‘informal leaders’ can be found across public organizations, in civil society groups, in the media, in academia, in the online world. The sources of their ability to influence others vary.

They may boast a record of many years of public service, be highly passionate about a particular public issue or possess deep knowledge about an issue. Some are famous, and thus attract a lot of public attention to the causes they pursue.

Some are simply highly extraverted, highly energetic and enjoy being with others (Figure 1.1).

How can we tell when public leadership is being exercised? Many scholars have tried to define leadership, but a single dominant definition has never come to pass. In fact there are hundreds, as we show in Box 1.1. Bennis (1989: 259) observed that ‘the concept of leadership eludes us or turns up in another form to taunt us again with its slipperiness and complexity. So we have invented an

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Figure 1.1 Varieties of public leadership Two public leaders are shown above (Malala Yousafzai and Angela Merkel). What makes them so? What are the sources of their influence?

Source: Yousafzai: Russell Watkins/Department for International Development; Merkel: Getty Images/Feng Li

endless proliferation of terms to deal with it … and still the concept is not sufficiently defined.’ Leadership theorist Fred Fiedler likewise noted that ‘there are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are leadership theories – and there are as many theories of leadership as there are psychologists working in the field’ (1967: 1). In other words, leadership is a ‘magic’ or ‘golden’ concept, one that inspires scholars and practitioners and that everyone is for. But it also vague, meaning everything and nothing at the same time (Pollitt and Hupe 2011; Pressman and Wildavsky 1984).

Box 1.1 Leadership’s definitional bonanza Many scholars have tried to define leadership. Here is a number of classic and relevant – but also quite diverse – definitions of leadership.

‘Exercising leadership is trading in hope.’

Ascribed to Napoleon Bonaparte, who by any standard was a gifted practitioner of leadership, this notion suggests that the key function of leadership is to imbue followers and constituencies with a sense of direction and a sense of optimism and empowerment about their ability to make progress, even in difficult circumstances.

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‘Leadership is an interpersonal relation in which others comply because they want to, not because they have to.’

Echoing Napoleon, sociologist Robert Merton (1969: 2615) highlights that leadership is a form of persuasion that drives on psychic rewards and positive interventions, such as inspiring speeches, bonuses and recognition. A leadership relationship therefore differs from an authority relationship.

‘Leadership is the ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organizations of which they are members.’

In a large project systematically studying leadership in 61 nations, Robert House and colleagues (2002: 5) look especially at the individual within organizations. Leadership is also defined by its outcomes, but given its positive slant it is difficult to integrate ‘bad’ leadership in this definition.

‘Leadership is a process of attributing causation to individual social actors.’

In an influential article in the Academy of Management Review, Jeffrey Pfeffer (1977: 104) suggests that it is often problematic to pinpoint whether leadership truly moves others or has societal effects. It is more interesting to study leaders as symbols and when and why people attribute something to leadership. Whereas it is hard to establish with certainty whether a particular policy success or organizational failure is truly the fault of the leader, it is more valuable and feasible to analyse how different constituencies hold their leaders accountable for successes and failures.

‘Leadership is a formal or informal contextually rooted and goal-influencing process that occurs between a leader and a follower, group of followers, or institutions.’

Gleaned from a recent overview book by Antonakis and Day (2017: 6), this definition emphasizes that leadership is rooted in a particularly context, and manifests itself in group and/or institutional settings.

‘Leadership is about disappointing people at a rate they can stand.’

Where Napoleon creates an understanding of leadership as leading from the front, showing the way and inspiring people to follow, Harvard scholar Ronald Heifetz argues that heroic conceptions of leadership breed ‘inappropriate dependencies’ on all-knowing, all-powerful authority figures. This is particularly so in complex situations where no single person can be expected to have all the answers and progress can only be made by the system as a whole stepping up and learning. Leaders can prompt this to happen by asking hard questions and keeping people focused on the issues, but purposefully not articulate a vision and set direction.

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Box 1.1 demonstrates just how versatile – or, if one wants to be less kind, how opaque – the phenomenon of leadership and our ways of understanding it really are (see also Bass and Stogdill 1990). Yukl (2012) studied the various definitions used by scholars and noted that many conceptualize leadership as a process whereby intentional influence is exercised over other people to guide, structure and facilitate some common purpose or endeavour. We will place ourselves in this tradition and broadly conceive of public leadership as a process of influencing people to think or act differently concerning public issues from what they would otherwise have done. Hence effective leaders are able to move others – for good, as when Martin Luther King inspired around 250,000 people of all colours and creeds to walk with him during the Freedom March, as well as for bad – think of Hitler’s mesmerizing of the crowds at massive rallies in the late 1930s.

As far as leadership in (public) organizations is concerned it is furthermore important to distinguish between the work of leadership and the work of management. According to Barnard (1938) leadership is a strategic activity focused on determining the direction of the organization. Management is operational: it involves developing a structure of rules, penalties and rewards that ensures that the organization can continue to work well. Likewise, for Kotter (1996) ‘management’ encompasses all activities that ensure that an organization continues to perform in its current form: hiring and firing, measuring performance, analysing budgets, maintaining relations with the press, conducting performance interviews with staff, attending network meetings and so on. In this vein, public management aims to bring a degree of order, consistency and rationality to the administration of public programmes and the delivery of public services. Kotter then goes on to say that ‘leadership’ is about dealing with change and its implications for the future of policies, programmes and systems. Such changes are manifold. The world is confronted with abrupt as well as creeping technological, demographic, economic, strategic-military, regulatory and sociocultural changes that put pressure on existing public policies and institutions. Discerning them and working out what they might mean and how existing systems should adapt to them or be transformed by them is extraordinarily challenging work.

Note that the Kotterian distinction between leadership and management does not amount to saying that every leader is, or should be, an agent of change. The work of public leadership is subtler than that. Exercising public leadership can be about the preservation as much as it can be about the transformation of public institutions, policies, programmes, organizations and networks. Making such a definitional distinction does not mean that when your job title is ‘manager’ you cannot exercise leadership. ‘Managers’ are required to undertake leadership work from time; and the reflection, direction and dynamism that leadership can bring to a group or system amounts to nothing if there is not also a degree of ‘management’ to make sure that the system pursues its goals in an orderly fashion. For example, the success of the African National Congress (ANC) in breaking the spine of apartheid was not just due to Mandela’s front-stage charismatic and moral leadership; it was also due to the careful back-stage management of the resistance work and the delicate relationships, finances and logistics involved by people such as Oliver Tambo, Thabo Mbeki and Walter Sisulu.

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We know that when senior public servants describe one of their colleagues as ‘a good manager, but not a leader’ this is not even faint praise and this colleague’s chances of promotion are dead. However, we think this reflects an underappreciation of the immense value-creating role of sound management practices. It is important not to downgrade the significance of good management in almost every human endeavour. While an under-led organization may over time atrophy and become irrelevant (if not die), an under-managed organization is tantamount to chaos, confusion, waste and quite possibly corruption. Management and leadership are the yin and yang of human projects: fundamentally different but complementary. None can do without the other. In this book we happen to focus on understanding how public leadership is exercised, but not at the price of sanctifying it above all other roles and skill sets that are necessary for conducting the public’s business.

Now that we have defined and demarcated our object of interest in this book – public leadership – it is time to situate the study of leadership as it has evolved over the decades and centuries. In the remainder of this chapter we will briefly highlight some key analytical perspectives on ‘understanding public leadership’ and salute the research traditions to which they have given rise.

STUDYING CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES Leadership is most often portrayed as a cause of certain societal or organizational outcomes: through leadership processes, things happen. But in leadership studies, many scholars also look at leadership as a consequence: things happen that affect leaders’ power, credibility and behaviour. This is shown in Figure 1.2 and discussed below.

Topics for leadership as a cause

Topics for leadership as a consequence

→ Are leadership strategies effective in all situations or context-dependent?

→ What personality characteristics determine who becomes a leader? → How can we be less biased when selecting our leaders? → What makes leaders take very risky decisions? → How are leaders socialized? → Which appearances, behaviour and personality traits of aspiring politicians are valued by the public?

Leadership & leaders

→ What are positive and negative effects of narcissistic leaders? → Do value-laden speeches lead to more engagement? → Are politically-savvy ­administrative leaders more effective? → Does distributed leadership result in more equality?

Figure 1.2 Studying leadership and leaders as a consequence or cause

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When understanding public leadership as a cause, we want to explore how leadership works, when it is or is not impactful and why this is the case. Leadership in this perspective is a dynamic factor in a community, breathing life into public organizations, governments or social networks as they struggle to come to terms with an array of changes. In this view, leadership is about injecting ideas and ambitions into public governance; and it is about grasping realities and recognizing their transformative potential. In the Academic Insight box, leadership scholar Lotte Bøgh Andersen shows how leadership can indeed have such transformative potential, although it is certainly not easy to train people to be better leaders.

Academic Insight: Leadership training, motivation and performance

By Lotte Bøgh Andersen Professor at Aarhus University and Director of the Crown Prince Frederik Center for Public Leadership, Denmark Both decision-makers and researchers often argue that leadership is fundamentally important for improving public sector performance, but much of the scientific literature on leadership and performance has severe endogeneity problems. Using a field experiment with 672 Danish public and private managers and their 20,000 employees, the Leadership and Performance (LEAP) project investigated how leadership training can affect leadership and ultimately employee motivation and organizational performance.

Three types of leadership training were randomly assigned to the managers (and thus their organizations), while one out of four participating managers was randomized to be part of the control group. The focus was on transactional leadership based on exchange of material and verbal rewards for effort and transformational leadership based on articulation, sharing and maintaining the organizational vision. The leaders in the three treatment groups learned to use one of the two ‘pure’ leadership strategies or the combination of transformational and transactional leadership. By experimentally inducing changes in leadership behaviour, it was possible to analyse effects on motivation and performance.

One of the key findings is that public sector managers were better able to learn transformational leadership, compared to private sector leaders, from organizations with similar tasks. We compared public and private schools, public and private day-care facilities and financial organizations with different ownership (tax and banks). Out of the initial 672 leaders, 506 remained in the project for the full duration, including three rounds of employee and leader questionnaires and (for some organizations) two interview rounds.

These data were combined with administrative data, for example on sickness (Continued )

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absence, turnover and performance. The first survey took place before the training, the second after the training and the third survey was sent one year after that. Importantly, the employees with leaders in the treatment groups saw their leaders as more active after the leadership training compared to employees with leaders in the control group. The leaders in the control group were actually seen as using significantly less transformational and transactional leadership after only one year of leadership training.

The experiment shows that the leadership training can really change the leadership behaviour of the leaders who participate in the training. Especially when employee and organizational values are congruent, this can have a positive effect on employee motivation. This was demonstrated, for example, in public service motivation, intrinsic motivation and work engagement.

When the span of control is not too wide, leadership can also affect organizational performance. The effect does, however, depend on how we conceptualize performance. Key distinctions concern who the stakeholders behind a given performance criterion are and whether performance is inherently subjective (e.g., user satisfaction or employee perceived performance) or more objective (e.g., student test results). All three types of leadership training affected some types of organizational performance, for example average student scores in national tests, and the effects of leadership training programmes were (unsurprisingly) greatest when the managers participated in all the leadership training sessions. The effect was also bigger for managers who initially (according to their employees) had a low score on the leadership behaviours.

An element in the discussion of whether leadership training is worthwhile is leadership identity, that is, the extent to which an individual views himself or herself as a leader. Public managers with leadership education have a more central leadership identity, while other public managers tend to let their occupational identity dominate. This is especially relevant in highly professionalized fields. The LEAP project finds a positive relationship between leadership identity and transformational leadership, and this finding exemplifies how the findings from the project have already been used in national policymaking. The Danish Leadership and Management Commission delivered its report in June 2018. Many of its recommendations are based on findings from the LEAP project, for instance concerning leadership training, transformational leadership, leadership identity and value creation for citizens and society. The empirical data collected by the commission was also used for further analysis of some of the questions raised in the wake of the LEAP project, illustrating how research and practice can benefit each other.

For more information on the LEAP project, see www.leap-project.dk.

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In this perspective, leaders are often conceived of as ‘event-makers’: people who were able to gather so much momentum for the hopes and ambitions they held out to their followers that the course of history was affected conspicuously by their presence. Call them pied pipers, call them visionaries, call them entrepreneurs, call them reformers: leaders are seen to be both reading and moving their followers’ minds, and inducing them collectively to go on journeys they would otherwise never have contemplated, let alone taken.

Accordingly, many accounts of leadership focus on how what leaders do affects the systems in which they operate. Understanding leadership as a cause of, for example, breakthrough public policies, the occurrence and the resolution of crises, public sector reforms, the rise and fall of social movements, the performance and reputation of public agencies and public service providers, political revolts and regime changes, is and will always remain important. Though much of social life is governed by shared traditions, rules and practices, there are always ‘events’ and dynamics within and around social systems that defy existing sensemaking scripts, value sets and institutional arrangements. Grasping that, diagnosing it and making a persuasive case for preserving, abandoning or adapting those scripts, values and routines is a leadership task. Study every epochal change, epic conflict or major innovation and you will find leadership at work – though more often than not in a form of distributed leadership rather than the single ‘heroic’ activist that might get all the public credit for it. Understanding the effects of leadership raises important questions, including ‘Can leadership strategies be copied and transplanted successfully in other countries and contexts?’, ‘How do particular people or groups matter?’, ‘What kinds of characteristics and skills make them matter?’

The other main point of departure for understanding public leadership is to take it as the puzzle itself rather than as a potential explanation for other puzzles. In this perspective, we ask questions about how certain people reach senior public office; why some people holding such office choose to undertake leadership work whereas others do not; why some people succeed in performing public leadership even without occupying such high offices; and how and why leadership roles and careers come to an end. In short: leadership not as a cause but as a consequence. In academic jargon: here we take leadership itself as the ‘dependent variable’ – that which is to be explained – and examine a range of other factors and variables that impact it.

For example, if we agree that people in the highest public offices of the land are at least potentially pivotal public leaders, we might want to know what sorts of people come to hold these offices and, by implication, what sorts of people do not.

How do people make it to the top in political parties, social movements and public bureaucracies? What leader selection mechanisms apply in these spheres? What if the rules of the leadership selection game are biased in favour of people from certain social or professional backgrounds? What happens to leadership aspirants on their path to the top – how are they socialized, what debts do they incur – and how does all this affect their scope for exercising leadership? We may also want to know about the offices themselves: What are the responsibilities, expectations and resources attached to them? What likely implications do they have for the scope

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of their occupant’s authority and support among those they lead? And how have these evolved over time?

Obtaining knowledge about who gets to lead, how and why can teach us much, not only about the nature of these individual leaders but also about the values and power realities of the communities and institutions in which they operate.

STUDYING LEADERS Who or what do we study when seeking to understand public leadership: the people we commonly call leaders or the process we call leadership? For many scholars and practitioners, understanding public leaders comes down to studying the characteristics, beliefs and deeds of people said to be playing pivotal roles in public life.

These are, first and foremost, senior politicians: heads of government, cabinet ministers, senior legislators and key party officials. In this category we should also include key advisers to these senior politicians, who generally remain behind the scenes but are often highly influential.

Less evident to outside observers, but all too obvious to those who know how government really works, are senior public officials. This category includes top executives within the departments that advise ministers and prepare and administer policies and programmes, as well as the heads and senior ranks of administrative organizations whose job it is to implement policy and deliver public services on the ground. While their institutional role and professional ethos is to be public servants and managers, there is little dispute that the upper echelons of the bureaucracy are often vitally important in shaping what governments do, and when and how they do it, in view of the ever-changing public agendas and dynamic social, economic and technological contexts. Likewise, but clearly distinct from public administrators, senior members of the judiciary are sometimes thought of as public leaders. Their statutory independence and pivotal role in interpreting the law and adjudicating conflict provide them with a platform for shaping public policies, norms and debates.

Finally, and as noted earlier in the chapter, many public leaders do not hold any formal public office at all. The world of non-government organizations is vast, varied and vital in its own right. Certainly, democracies nurture a large and active civil society, and value its contributions to the political process, however critical of the government of the day some civic organizations and their leaders might be.

Standout individuals at the helm of trade unions, churches, social movements, mass media, community organizations and even business corporations are widely thought of as important public leaders. They do not have the power of office but may well have the power of numbers (supporters, viewers, money), ideas, access, moral authority or popular support to shape public problem-solving in pivotal ways.

Whether it is exercised in political, administrative or civic settings, it matters who leads. Comparisons of different leaders in highly similar circumstances show how their personal beliefs and styles impact on the lives of citizens. During

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the late 1990s, Nelson Mandela and Robert Mugabe headed governments in the neighbouring countries of South Africa and Zimbabwe, but they took these countries in very different directions. Mandela embodied reconciliation, and sought to weave broad political coalitions, but Mugabe whipped up and exploited racial tensions. Mandela sought to institutionalize democratic norms and practices; Mugabe purposefully eroded them. Mandela stepped down voluntarily, and made way for a democratically elected successor, while Mugabe sought to extend his rule indefinitely and waged war on the democratic opposition, before reluctantly accepting a power-sharing deal, which he subsequently sought to manipulate to consolidate his power. Counterfactual questions about the roles of leaders at critical historical junctures make one ponder the point. What would have happened to the course of the United States if Hillary Clinton rather than Donald Trump had won the 2016 US presidential election? What if UK prime minister David Cameron had stared down sections of his party who insisted that the idea of holding a referendum on exiting the European Union be central to the Conservatives’ 2015 election manifesto?

The behaviour of people holding high public office has been, and will be, observed incessantly by leadership scholars. ‘Reading’ leaders’ behaviour is seen as the key to understanding what motivates them, and a predictor of what impacts they might have. Peers, advisers, subordinates, opponents and other stakeholders all watch how they allocate their attention, make decisions, relate to people, deal with pressure, conflict and criticism, and perform in public situations. They do so for good reasons. Like all of us, leaders are creatures of habit. In the course of their personal and professional lives they develop distinctive styles of thought and action. This allows others to make educated guesses about what they may be feeling and how they will act when a new situation comes along. The more intimate one’s knowledge about a leader’s personal style, the more accurate those educated guesses are likely to be.

Why do individuals holding identical or very similar leadership roles display such widely different styles? The answer almost has to be: because of the people they are. But what is it about certain people that makes them end up on top? Are leaders smarter than ordinary people, and are successful leaders even smarter than those that are not? Are they fitter? Do they have greater self-confidence?

Are they morally superior? In contemporary democratic societies few will answer these questions instinctively in the affirmative – if only because the evidence to the contrary seems to abound wherever we cast our glance. A sign on US president Harry Truman’s Oval Office desk read ‘The buck stops here’. He practised what he preached, committing the United States to the use of two nuclear bombs within a week – and later proudly claimed that he never lost any sleep over doing so. Some leaders revel in being at the helm. They do what they can to make sure that every big decision crosses their desk. They feel confident in analysing complex problems, working through the risks and uncertainties and probing the vested interests and unstated assumptions of the experts, advisers and colleagues attempting to push them into (or away from) particular courses of action.

Yet the opposite also occurs. Quite a few American presidents suffered from low self-esteem rather than the reverse (Greenstein 2002: 8). Some, like Calvin

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Coolidge, were clinically depressed (McDermott 2008: 34). Some leaders loathe having to make decisions, particularly risky ones that for which no one at lower levels dares to take responsibility. Some political leaders may feel overwhelmed by the very complexity of the issues and of the processes of governing. Echoing all of the above, US president Warren Harding (quoted in George 1974: 187) once confided to a friend how stressful he found his role: John, I can’t make a thing out of this tax problem. I listen to one side and they seem right, and then God! I talk to the other side and they seem just as right, and there I am where I started … I know somewhere there is an economist who knows the truth, but hell, I don’t know where to find him and haven’t got the sense to know him and trust him when I find him. God, what a job.

Even if we assume that in the balance between actors and contexts it is the former who matter most, there is plenty of space for debate about what precisely it is about those particular actors that matters for their leadership. Harding’s distant successor Ronald Reagan is an interesting case in point. He had no great desire to know things before he acted and was dismissed as a second-rate mind by many, and in his second term the effects of his advanced age and the onset of Alzheimer’s disease became more evident (McDermott 2008: 28, 31). He nevertheless eventually became one of the twentieth century’s most highly rated US presidents, mainly because his charisma (see, for instance, his use of humour – Meyer 1990), compensated for what may have been a modest IQ (intelligence quotient). Consider the contrast between Reagan and intellectually more gifted but emotionally complex individuals such as Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. They consistently rank much lower than Reagan, mainly because they failed to control their darker impulses while in office. James Buchanan, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford were widely seen as both bright and morally upright, but all three ended up in the dustbin of presidential history. Two of the United States’ most revered presidents – Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) and John F. Kennedy (JFK) – were effectively cripples, and the latter, holding office in the television rather than the radio age, took irresponsibly high doses of heavy medication to hide that fact from the public (McDermott 2008; Owen 2008).

One of many such personal factors that has been paid a lot of attention by leadership researchers is motivation. The assertion is that the reasons why people seek leadership positions and roles matter for how (and how well) they lead.

A good example of the way political scientists have tried to ‘read’ leaders through motivational analysis is the work of David Winter (2002) who studied the speech acts (speeches, interviews, letters, writings, etc.) of a great number of US presidents and other political leaders. He and his colleagues coded the contents in terms of the indications they contained for the presence of three types of fundamental human motives they had drawn from their reading of the literature: the drives for achievement, affiliation and power. They then illustrated how the presence or absence of these motivational drives related to particular leadership actions and outcomes. Table 1.1 clarifies what the three motivational drives entail, and to what sorts of leadership behaviour they are likely to give rise.

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Understanding Public Leadership Table 1.1 Motives for aspiring to leadership roles and exercising leadership

Motivation

Drive for achievement Drive for affiliation

Leader prioritizes:

Achieving excellence, winning in competitive situations, delivering unique accomplishments

‘Keeping things together’: establishing and maintaining friendly relations among people

Drive for power Having control over or being able to influence others by strong, forceful actions, and gaining prestige in the process of doing so

Leader engages in:

Moderate risk-taking, using information to modify performance

Co-operative, when feeling confident and safe; defensive and cold when vulnerable or criticized

Ranging from proactive, nurturing, inspirational behaviour to profligate, impulsive behaviour

Basic strategic posture of leader:

Co-operative and ‘rational’

Co-operative when safe; defensive and hostile when under threat

Exploitative, aggressive

Leader values advice from:

Technical experts

Friends and other liked sources

People who know the political game

Source: Adapted from Winter (2002)

Psychologists also examine the relationship between personality and leadership.

Personality traits are habitual patterns of behaviour, thought and emotion, that is, they are similar across situations. For instance, some people are naturally less stressed than others, regardless of the situation. States, as opposed to traits, are changeable, such as feeling pleased after a major accomplishment. In leadership studies, trait theory assumes that leadership partly depends upon the personal qualities of the leader. This is based on the ‘great man’ perspective, which sees the shaping of history via exceptional individuals, such as Winston Churchill or Steve Jobs. In early twentieth-century studies, traits such as dominance and intelligence were held to be predictive of who becomes a leader and who is effective in performing leadership roles. Trait theory faced a severe crisis in the middle of the twentieth century when studies began to show that context mattered as much if not more for leader behaviour as personality (Stogdill 1948).

More recently trait theory has made a comeback: new methods and metaanalyses consistently show that personality and intelligence are still quite impactful (Lord et al. 1986; Judge and Bono 2000). Particularly the so-called ‘Big Five’ personality characteristics and new measures of intelligence are quite predictive of leader emergence (leadership as consequence) and leader effectiveness (leadership as cause). Table 1.2 illustrates this. Being open to new experiences, being outgoing and having high intelligence are positively related to both leader emergence and leader effectiveness. If you want to take your own test of the Big Five characteristics or IQ, you can find many online, such as www.truity.com/test/big-five-personality-test.

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Table 1.2 Big Five (plus one) personality characteristics, intelligence and leadership Personality characteristics

Explanation

Becoming a leader (emergence)

Being an good leader (effectiveness)

1. Neuroticism

The degree to which someone is quickly stressed, angered and anxious

0

0

2. Extraversion

The tendency to be of high energy, positive and social

+

+

3. Openness to experience

The degree to which a person likes new activities, is curious and creative

+

+

4. Agreeableness

The tendency of someone to be cooperative and helpful

–

0

5. Conscientiousness

The degree to which someone is a planner, delivers on time and is reliable

+

0

6. Intelligence

The ability to use information as knowledge which can be used to adapt behaviours

+

+

Legend: + = significant positive effect; – = significant negative effect; 0 = no effect.

Source: Adapted with permission from Judge et al. (2002: 773) and Judge et al. (2004: 542)

STUDYING RELATIONSHIPS The leader-centric form of leadership analysis has proved to be immensely popular. So much so, however, that it has crowded out the relational view of leadership as the distinct and crucial work of getting groups to engage with change.

In his monumental study Leadership, Burns (1978: 1–2) was scathing about this trend: If we know all too much about our leaders, we know far too little about leadership. We fail to grasp the essence of leadership that is relevant to the modern age and hence we cannot even agree on the standards by which to measure, recruit, and reject it.

In the decades since Burns made these comments, the balance has been somewhat redressed. There is now a firm body of thought and research that chooses to understand public leadership as an interactive process between those we call leaders, the people that choose (or feel forced) to be led by them and the environment in which these relationships take place. This take on leadership analysis sets up a different agenda. It adds the idea that ‘who is being led matters’ and it becomes essential to grasp the relational qualities of leadership.

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In democracies, individual leaders are never free agents. The warrant to lead is conditional, and leadership roles and resources are dispersed. Even in the intimate setting of the cabinet, few if any prime ministers get their way all of the time.

They know that, if pushed too far for too long, their cabinet and parliamentary colleagues have ways of undermining their leadership (Weller 2007; Strangio et al.

2013). Public leadership analysis can thus never be confined only to the attributes of leaders. To understand leadership is to grasp when, how and why particular groups of people come to view and accept some individuals or small groups of people to perform leadership work.

This put the focus on at least two things other than the personal properties of leaders. First, the states of mind, needs, emotions and identities of the nonleaders – in other words the ‘followers’, ‘constituents’, indeed the ‘group(s)’ who are being led. Who are the ‘we’ that leaders appeal to, implicitly and explicitly?

What is it that is sought in leaders? What services are leaders performing for the groups they seek to exercise leadership on behalf of? Second, the focus moves towards the nature, sources and limits of leaders’ authority claims in relation to their constituencies. What psychological contract exists between leaders and followers, and what licence to operate can leaders derive from it? How can leaders persuade groups to pay attention to their voices and abide by their decisions?

What, in fact, are different kinds of groups willing to tolerate from leaders? And how do groups elect, authorize and remove leaders? Leadership is a two-way street.

In its most radical form, the focus on leadership rather than leaders entails a follower-centric perspective, in which leaders are primarily a product of the identities, needs, desires and fears of the groups that put, and keep, them in place. But it is more productive to think of leadership as a genuinely interactive process, which also includes scope for the ambitions, skills and resources of leaders in appealing to or modifying the social identities of their followers when gaining or using their positions. Likewise, Burns’ famous distinction between transactional (based around leader-initiated exchange relationships between leaders and followers) and transformational (a mutual engagement between leader and followers in which a fusing of their purposes leads to higher levels of motivation and morality) leadership epitomizes the interactive approach to conceptualizing leadership (Burns 1978: 19–20).

Leadership becomes possible because non-leaders select people they identify with and trust, or whose authority claims they respect. Each of these levers for leadership is conditional and temporary in all but the most spellbinding cases of charismatic leadership (and ‘blind’ followership). Leaders have to build and maintain their leadership capital carefully, but the very process of leading – rather than just office-holding – implies a willingness to spend that capital. Leaders cannot please all of the people all of the time; they have to persuade non-leaders to confront unpleasant realities, make trade-off choices and embrace some values while repudiating others. Moreover, leaders hardly ever succeed in accomplishing all they promise, so they rarely meet all their followers’ hopes.

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STUDYING INSTITUTIONS Public office-holders moreover do not have a monopoly on the exercise of public leadership: people and groups outside the formal leadership stratum can espouse ideas for tackling governance challenges, gather support for them and so challenge or complement the leadership of public office-holders. Public leadership is thus part of their job description for some, but a calling, a duty, an opportunity or a coincidence for many others. Its exercise is necessary, but also dangerous. It can elevate and motivate their constituents, but it can also drag them down.

The main challenge is how the pivotal but fickle function that is leadership can be harnessed yet also constrained within the overall framework of democratic governance. The sheer number and variety of offices and platforms for exercising public leadership in liberal democracies have produced governance systems that are both complex and opaque. How do the various spheres of public leadership – political, administrative and civic – intersect, reinforce and/or conflict with one another? How can the ‘creative tension’ between them best be captured in the design of institutional arrangements and of the relationships between these different spheres? One thing is certain: we gain little from limiting our understanding of public leadership to the traits, skills and deeds of the limited number of individual office-holders at the heart of executive government who tend to get all the media attention. Holding office and being in the spotlights do not in and of themselves amount to exercising leadership. In open societies, public leadership work can be, and needs to be, performed by many actors, both inside and outside government.

The design of public institutions – legislative, executive, administrative, regulatory, judicial – reflects these considerations. When designing the rules of the game by which these institutions are to operate, one of the key questions is always how much authority, autonomy and accountability should be accorded to their senior office-holders. In democratic public institutions and governance systems, multiple leadership offices and roles tend to exist in parallel – leadership opportunities are thus not centralized but distributed (Kane et al. 2009). Office-holders are induced to act in concert – to consult, to negotiate, to reach agreement – and thus exercise what has come to be called ‘shared’, ‘collaborative’, ‘team’ or ‘tandem’ leadership (Pearce and Conger 2003; Hartley and Manzie 2014; Strangio et al. 2014; Ospina 2017).

STUDYING CONTEXTS AND CONTINGENCIES Clearly, who leads, who follows and in which institutional setting leadership is exercised all matter a great deal. But where, when and on what leadership is being exercised matters just as much. This leads us into questions of agency and structure.

Do we take leaders to be relatively autonomous actors who are able to make their own luck, and whose main sources of influence derive from their personal make-up and behaviour? If we do, studying their personalities and actions in depth makes

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all the sense in the world. Or do we see them as frail humans afloat on a sea of forces greater than themselves that set the stage for their emergence, performance and demise? In this case, it makes at least as much sense to study the properties of the context in which leaders have to operate.

In facing this question, the study of leadership is no different from that of any other social phenomenon. The so-called agency–structure duality lies at the very heart of the social sciences, as does the closely related duality between ideas and reality: Is human behaviour shaped by objective physical and social realities, or by socially constructed, and therefore contingent and contestable, interpretations of these realities? Academics have long debated this, and the most sensible position on it lies somewhere in the middle ground. Who governs does not matter always and all of the time. Economic and political conditions may highly constrain the range of policies leaders may pursue – but they never fully determine them.

The sensible position, therefore, is to assume that ‘it depends’, and not get caught in exclusively agent-centred, ideational or structure-centred, material accounts of leadership. As Nye (2007) argued, good leadership is also about being ‘smart’: seeking and exploiting a thorough understanding of the context in which the group finds itself. If we want to understand leadership, we must also grasp how and why (mis)alignments between leader and context occur.

In other words, what ‘understanding public leadership’ entails in both analytical and practical terms can vary greatly across contexts and situations. Greenstein (1969) long ago summed up when it makes sense to take an actor-centred approach to explaining public policies or decisions. This is when, in the given situation: (i) there was a non-trivial degree of freedom for actors – including A to choose various alternative courses of action with respect to X or Y; (ii) A had the formal and/or the informal power resources vis-à-vis all other potentially relevant actors (B–n) to make a pivotal, potentially decisive contribution to the handling of X or the course of Y; (iii) A had the intention of doing so; (iv) A had the personal strength and skills to use his/her power resources effectively with regard to X or within Y (Greenstein 1969).

The extent to which these conditions are met varies greatly from issue to issue, and context to context. In many cases, it will simply not make sense to pay much attention to the personal characteristics of a particular leader, because the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the leader was either not motivated or not powerful enough to make a difference. So this leads to the general proposition that leadercentred explanations of public policy choices and the behaviour of public organizations are most likely to hold sway in the case of: (1) leaders with a reputation for having and wielding a great deal of power and influence; (2) issues of strong personal interest or strategic importance to leaders; and (3) issues that cannot easily be handled by institutional routines of policy preparation and collective decision-making (e.g., unprecedented, acute, highly risky and/or contentious issues such as ‘crises’). The extent to which such general propositions and contingency rules can capture the complex public leadership equation should not be overstated.

We need a more finely grained analysis to explore how particular types of contexts

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and situations produce distinctive biotopes for particular forms of leadership. An example of the role of context and the effects on leadership is given in Box 1.2.

Box 1.2 Leadership effectiveness and context: The story of General Eric Shinseki In his analysis of Eric Shinseki – who served both as a chief of staff of the US Army and as a head of the plagued Department of Veteran Affairs – Montgomery van Wart (2015) shows the importance of context for effective leadership.

Eric Shinseki was a former four-star general, chief of staff of the US Army from 1998 to 2003. He radically and quite successfully reorganized the army.

It moved from large, heavily equipped divisions, to a set-up composed of smaller brigades that could move independently, and in which some would be lightly armoured for strategic deployment as needed. Shinseki was seen as a great transformational leader, being able to radically change a very large organization. He acquired a reputation as a person of great integrity and one rooted in a deep knowledge and understanding of military culture.

Based on his exemplary track record, Barack Obama asked Shinseki to transform the Department of Veterans Affairs. The department had been struggling for years and Obama wanted to see that it took care of more veterans and increased the speed of access, as waiting times were very long.

Shinseki looked like the ideal candidate. He started out well, conducting agency-wide reviews and drawing up a plan for improvement. Employee morale increased in the wake of his arrival on the job. The honeymoon period did not last, however. Cracks appeared. Shinseki made a number of errors in navigating a terrain – a civilian department of state – that he had little experience of. For instance, he did not focus strongly on issues of pay and training, even though these are critical levers in the largely medical agency that was Veteran Affairs. His leadership style – characterized by a focus on hierarchy, rules and obedience – had fitted the army well, but was not particularly welcomed by the employees in the department.

The Department of Veterans Affairs did not fare well under his stewardship. Employees felt increasingly ignored by the executive leadership team.

The department even became embroiled in a scandal in 2014. This ‘Veterans Health Administration scandal’ highlighted negligence in the treatment of military veterans. The Veteran Affairs hospitals had not met the target of getting appointments for patients within 14 days. In some hospitals, the staff even falsified appointment records to appear to meet the 14-day target. Based on this, Shinseki was used in the media as a way for Republicans to attack Barack Obama’s presidency. Although his own integrity was not questioned, that of other leaders in the Department of Veteran Affairs was. In this way, he became the object of political games. Shinseki himself noted that ‘I was too trusting of some [Veteran Affairs leaders] and I accepted as accurate reports that I now know to have been misleading with regard to patient wait times.’

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SETTING THE STAGE What have we learned so far? We hope the reader will take away at least four things from this chapter. First, that although it has been studied continuously for many centuries and across many cultures, and continues to be much talked about in media, politics and on the Internet, many different ways of conceptualizing leadership continue to coexist. Our particular interest in this book is with public leadership, in other words leadership challenges, processes and effects in the realms of issues of public concern, the political sphere, public policymaking, and the work of public organizations and networks.

Second, that exercising leadership is not necessarily linked to holding a senior position in a political or organizational hierarchy. Different people – both formally designated authority figures and individuals who lack such a formal position of authority but nevertheless perform the work of leadership (such as social movement entrepreneurs or celebrity activists) and whose efforts are given credence by members of the relevant group or community constituents – can exercise leadership.

Third, that leadership can be studied in various ways. Students can focus on the ‘leader’ aspect (such as personality of the leader, studying who becomes a leader) and the ‘leadership’ aspect (such as the way people lead and what effects this has on followers and others). Leaders and leadership can be studied as either the cause or the consequence of other things. Studying leaders and leadership as causes analyses the effects of leader behaviours and leadership interventions on the attitudes, decisions and actions of constituents, as well as on a range of other possible phenomena, such as policy decisions, organizational change, the management of conflict, the reputation of an organization and the outcomes of elections. Studying leaders and leadership as consequences reverses the analytical order. Here we want to explain why certain people reach leadership positions, how the esteem in which they are held by different constituencies varies and evolves over time, why leaders behave in the way that they do and why they succeed or fail in their attempts to influence people and events.

Fourth, that at any given time leadership is the product of an intricate mix of leader characteristics (e.g., intelligence, experience, motivational drivers), leader behaviours (decision-making patterns, interpersonal styles, communicative performances), the states of mind and behaviours of group members and other constituents, contextual (economic and political circumstances, demographic shifts, diffusion of technology) and institutional (rules of appointment, formal powers, accountability regimes) factors, and of the particular situation at hand (the issue(s) involved, the historical moment). All of these matter for leadership emergence and impact, and it is for students and practitioners of public leadership to work out what combinations of these contributing factors can account for leadership successes and failures.

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Index In this index f indicates figure and t indicates table.

A Absolute performance, assessing, 151–153 Academic Insight contextual intelligence, public leadership, 74–76 leadership training, motivation, and performance, 8–9 Academy of Management Review, 5 Accepted leadership accountable leadership v., 154 assessing for, 146–147 smart leadership v., 154 Accountability age of, 102t assessing leadership for, 147–148 crisis leadership and, 134 Accountable leadership accepted leadership v., 154 smart leadership v., 154 Achievement, motivational drive for, 14t Acute crisis, 120t Adaptive leadership, 115 ‘Administrative conservatorship’, 30 Administrative leadership, 23 civic leaders and, 24–25 leading down, 32 leading out, 33 practitioner insight, 30–31 three types of, 71–72 vectors of influence, 34t Advocacy, leading out, 33–34 Affiliation, motivational drive for, 14t African National Congress (ANC), 6 Agency-structure duality, 18 Agent-centered leadership, 18 Agreeableness, 15t Aid, coordinating/aligning in crises, 133–134 Air pollution, China, 21–22 Ajzen, I., 112–113 Amichai-Hamburger, Y., 109–110 Anderson, L. B., 8–9

Ansell, C., 73f Anthropocene, age of, 103t Antonakis, J., 5, 40–41, 157 Arena leadership, 64f, 67–68 Arguments, creating momentum for change, 110t Aristotle, 109 Articulation leadership, 92 Assessing performance comparative analysis, 151–153 evaluation design, five-step approach to, 154–155; see also Evaluating leadership Assessment centres, 143 Assessment types/processes, evaluating leadership, 143–144 Attention, allocating city managers, 36–37 pubic leaders, 35–38 Audience, followers as, 51–52 Augustine, 83 Austerity, age of, 103t Authority followers and, 48–49 gaining/earning/holding on to, 52–56 leader–follower relationship and, 44 losing, 55–56 standing, attempts to gain, 53–54 Authority postures charismatic, 45 hierarchies and, 46 legal-rational, 45 modernization and change, 45 tradition-based, 44 Authorization leaders, 52–56 Authorizing environment, 26, 28 Autonomy, why people follow and, 48–49 B Bargainers, followers as, 51 Barnard, C., 6

184

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Copyrighted material – 9781352007459 Index Bartels, K. P., 74 Batty, Rosie, 25–26 Bauman, Z., 102t Beer, M., 108 Behaviour change and, 112 personality traits, 14 public leaders, 12 theory of planned, 112–113 Bennis, W. G., 3 Bennister, M., 43 Betrand, M., 141 Biermann, F., 103t ‘Big Five’ personality characteristics, 14, 15t Bion, A., 44 Blame management, crisis leadership and, 134 Blij, de, H., 103t Body language, 41 Bouckaert, G., 103t Bovens, M., 102t Brain trust leadership, 64f, 65–66 Brändström, A., 129–131 Brown, A., 117, 157 Bryson, J., 72 Burns, J. M., 15, 16, 45, 51, 108 C Callahan, R. F., 74–76 Carli, L., 157–158 Carroll, Lewis, 101 Castells, M., 102t Causation crises and, 123–124 leadership and, 5 Cause, topics for leadership as a, 7, 8 Chaleff, I., 50 Challenge, courage to, 50 Change crisis induced, 136 of leadership, performance improvement hypothesis, 142–143 time and, 84–85 Change, leading arguments, creating momentum for change, 110t consistent policy, inconsistent v. political value of, 104–105 defining change, 101 example, 99–100 Kotter v. Heifetz, 116t

185

Kotter/Lewin models, 109t Lewin model of, 107–108 macro trends/governance challenges, 102t–103t PEST model, 105, 106f planned behaviour theory and, 112–113 as political activity, 100 practitioner insight, 111–112 realities of reform, 116–117f systematic, process of, 117; see also Reform leadership Characteristics, leader, 20 Charisma, 13 components of, 41 followers and, 47 leadership, persuasion and, 40–41 Charismatic authority, 45 China, air pollution, leadership and, 21–22 Churches, 11 City managers, allocating attention, 36–37 Ciulla, J., 43 Civic leadership celebrities and, 24 defining roles, 23 moral, example, 25–26 relationships, political/administrative elites, 24–25 vectors of influence, 34t Collaboration process, 73f–74 issues, framing/defining, 76–77 process work, create/sustain dialogues, 79 seduction, to joint problem-solving, 77–79; see also Collective public leadership Collaborative governance, 72–76 Collectively performed public leadership, 63 Collective public leadership arena, 67–68 brain trust, 65–66 challenges of, 81 collaborative process, 73f–74 consolidation work, momentum and, 79–80 contextual intelligence, 74–76 groupthink and, 66–67 new leadership, collaborative governance, 72–76 shared leadership, 62–64 tandem, 64–65 types of, 64f who can exercise?, 80–81; see also Collaboration process

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Index

Comeback leaders, 56f, 59 Commitment, conveying/eliciting, 38–39 Common sense hypothesis, leadership change, 142 Comparative analysis, assessing performance, 151–153 Compensation, performance and, 141 Complementarity, tandem leadership, 65 Compliance, following and, 48 Confidence, 12, 41 Conformity-minded subordinates, 55 Conger, J., 63 Conscientiousness, 15t Consequence, topics for leadership as a, 7, 10 Consistent policies, inconsistent v. political value, 104–105 Consolidating leadership, 97 Consolidation leadership, 93 Consolidation work institutionalizing momentum, 79–80 stimulating collaboration, 77f Constraints, institutional, 75 Contexts administrative leadership, 30–31 effective leadership and, 19 of leadership, 17–19 stability and, PEST model, 105, 106f when/how, 83 Contextual intelligence environmental scanning, 75 inward/outward studies, 76 skills, 75 Contextual skill capacities, 75 Contingencies, of leadership, 17–19 Contrarians, 95 Cooperation, prehistory of, 73f Co-ordination, crises aid efforts, 133–134 Courage, follower engagement needs, 50–51 ‘Creative destruction’, 142–143 Creeping crises, 119–120t Crisis leadership accountability/blame management, 134 causality, enabling factors of, 123–124 change, crisis induced, 136 community values/vital systems, 120 co-ordinating/aligning efforts, aid and, 133–134 decision-making, 132 defined, 119 denial of, 122 disinformation, managing, 128

example, 118–119, 129–131 exploiting crises, 131 framing, public perceptions and, 131 in high-reliability organizations, 127–128 management of/response to, 124 meaning-making, 128–131 post-crisis learning, 135–136 preparation/prevention, 136–137 sensemaking, stress/responses, 126–127 situational/institutional responses to, 125t–126 as strategic opportunity, 123 as threat, 123 types of, 119–120t uncertainty and, 121 urgency and, 121 Curtis, J., 111–112 Cyclical time, 85, 88f, 89 D Day, D., 5, 157 Decision-making crises and, 132 risk and, 13 De-institutionalization, 96 Democracy, leaders in, 16 Denial, crises and, 122; see also Crisis leadership Design evaluation/assessment, 154–155 institutional, 73f Dialogues, create/sustain, 79 Dice Man, The (Rinehart), 86 Disinformation, managing in crisis, 128 Dissenting voices, courage and, 51 Distributed leadership, 17 Downward influence, 63f Dual management systems, 44 E Eagly, A., 157–158 Effective leadership, context and, 19 Elections, change and, 104–105 Emotional arguments, 110t Empowerment, age of, 102t Entrepreneur leader, time types and, 88f Environmental scanning, 75 European Union, 12 Evaluating leadership accepted v. accountable leadership, 154 accepted v. smart leadership, 154

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Copyrighted material – 9781352007459 Index adapting criteria for, 149–150 assessment triangle, 145f change leader, improve performance hypothesis, 142–143 comparative analysis, absolute/relative, 151–153 criteria for, 144–145 ex ante evaluation, 143 ex durante evaluation, 144 ex post evaluation, 144 five-step approach to design exercises for, 154–155 Guiliani/Nixon, 138–140 Machiavellian trade-off, smart v. accountable, 153 outcomes, leaders affect, 149 pay discretion, politicians and, 141–142 performance/compensation, 141 prudence, 145–146, 148t public leadership assessment map, 148t scope/focus of, 150–151 support, assessing for, 145, 146–147, 148t trustworthiness, assessing for, 145, 147–148, 148t; see also Assessing performance; Performance Evaluation design, five-step approach, 154–155 Event-makers, 10 Ex ante evaluation, 143, 147 Ex durante evaluation, 144, 147 Exercising leadership authority and, 54 getting things done by, 43 holding office as, 17, 20 hope, as trading in, 4–5 pushing people around, getting things done v., 42–43 roles, motives for aspiring to leadership and, 14t teaching reality as tool for, 39 time and, 85, 91 Ex post evaluations, 144, 147 Extraversion, 15t F Face-to-face dialogue, 52 Facilitative leadership see Collaborative leadership Fading-giant leaders, 56f, 58–59

187

Fame, celebrities’ civic leadership, 24 Fiedler, Fred, 4 Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics (Ignatieff), 158–159 Fire-fighting leadership, 97–98 First follower, 43 Fluidity, age of, 102t Follower-centric perspective, 16 Followers first, 43 personal properties of, 16 Followers/followerships, relational perspective, 47–52 audience, social drama and, 51–52 bargainers, 51 characteristics, 49–50 courage, engagement needs and, 50–51 Milgram experiments and, 48 why people follow, 48 Followership characteristics implementers, 49–50 individualists, 50 partners, 50 recourses, 50 Ford, Gerald, 13 Formal assessment centres, 143 Formal organizations, leadership and, 95 Forssbaeck, J., 102t Fox, S., 109 Framing crises, four types, 131 Framing issues, 76–77 Frederickson, G., 41, 158 G Gailmard, S., 30 Gash, A., 73f Gender, civil service and, 105–106, 107f ‘Getting things done’, by exercising leadership, 42–43 Gleick, J., 102t Glidewell, J., 98 Glocalisation, age of, 103t Goal-influencing process, leadership as, 5 Goetz, K. H., 90 Government philosophies, leadership roles and, 69–72 Governments, senior public officials, role, 11 ‘Great man’ perspective, 14 Greenstein, F. I., 18 Groupthink, 66–67 Guiliani, R., 138–140

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Index

H Hamilton, V., 48–49 Hargrove, E. C., 98 Haslam, A., 46, 158 Heifetz, R., 5, 46, 114, 116t, 158 Heifetz v. Kotter change model, 116t Helms, L., 57 Hero-leader, 114 Hidden crisis, moral leadership and, 25–26 Hierarchical leaders, lateral influence between, 63f High-reliability organizations (HROs), crisis management in, 127–128 History of illusion, 85 Hope, leadership and, 4 Hope narratives, 54 Horizontal governance, 72–73 House, R., 5 Humour, 13 ‘Hybrid’ roles, 44 I Ideational leadership, 18 Identification, following and, 48 Identity entrepreneurship, 29, 45–46 Ignatieff, M., 53–54, 158–159 Immediacy, age of, 102t Implementers, 49–50 Individualists, 50 Influence courage to exercise, 50 shared leadership and, 63f strategic leadership and, 26 Informal assessment centres, 143–144 Innovation leadership, 93–94 Institutional crises, 119–120t, 125t, 136–137 Institutional design, 73f Institutional types, 95–96 Intelligence, 15t; see also Contextual intelligence Interaction, follower-leader relationship and, 49 Interdependency, tandem leadership, 65 Internalization, following and, 48 J Janis, Irving, 66–67 Jensen, U. T., 52 Jones, B. F., 149 Journal of Women and Policing, 139

K Kanter, R. M., 108 Kellerman, B., 2 Kelman, H., 48–49 Keohane, N. O., 159 Kickert, W. J., 103t Kirby, J., 149 Kotter, J., 6, 100, 108, 109t, 114, 116t Kotterian model of change, 113–116t L Language of leadership, 2 Lateral appointments, 58 Lateral influence, 63f Leader-centric form, 15 Leader–follower relationship, characteristics, 44 Leader(s) authorization, 52–56 characteristics, 20 event-makers, 10 five types, 56f followers and, 16 motivational drives, 14t personality, leadership and, 14 personal properties of, 16 presidents, comparing, 13 time, attention allocation and, 35 traits of, 46 Leadership administrative, 23 authority postures, 44–45 bad, why people follow, 48–49 Big Five personality traits, 15t Bonaparte on, 4 civic, 23 consequence or cause, 7, 10 context/contingencies, 17–19 definitions, 3, 4–5, 100 as dependent variable, 10 follower-centric perspective, 16 gender and, 105–106, 107f Heifetz on, 5 history/opinions on meaning of, 1–2 House on, 5 identity entrepreneurship, 45–46 language of, 2 leader-centric form, 15 leader–follower, characterizations, 44 management v., 6–7 Merton on, 5

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Copyrighted material – 9781352007459 Index motivational drives, 14t organizational definitions, 6 Pfeffer on, 5 political, 23 public leaders, 3 as relationship, 43–47 science of, 2 styles, 12 theorists, 4 training, motivation, and performance, 8–9 trait theory and, 14 without authority, 46–47 Leadership (Burns), 15 Leadership (Guiliani), 138 Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation (Selznick), 159 Leadership Capital Index tool, 56f, 57 Leadership literature Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics (Ignatieff), 158–159 Leadership of Public Bureaucracies: The Administrator as Conservator (Terry), 159 Leadership Without Easy Answers (Heifetz), 158 Myth of the Strong Leader, The: Political Leadership in the Modern Age (Brown), 157 Nature of Leadership, The (Antonakis & Day), 157 New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Influence and Power (Haslam, Reicher, & Platow), 158 ‘Public leadership as gardening’ (Frederickson & Matkin), 158 Thinking About Leadership (Keohane), 159 Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders (Eagly & Carli), 157–158 Leadership of Public Bureaucracies: The Administrator as Conservator (Terry), 159 Leadership styles articulation, 92 consolidation, 93, 97 fire-fighting, 97–98 government philosophies and, 69–72 institution-building, 96 pre-emptive, 94–95 reconstruction, 92–93 reform, 97 time types and, 88f

189

Leadership Without Easy Answers (Heifetz), 158 Leading down, 27f, 32 defined, 26 vectors of influence, 34t Leading in time see Time, leading in Leading out, 27f administrative leadership, 33 advocacy, 33–34 defined, 26 vectors of influence, 34t Leading up, 27f authorizing environment and, 28–30 defined, 26 vectors of influence, 34t LEAP project, 9 Learning lessons, crisis management, 135–136 Legal-rational authority, 45 Legitimacy, 27f ‘Legitimate value judges’, 147 Lesson-drawing, learning from crises, 135–136 Lewin, K., 107–108, 109t Limitations, recognize, 75 Lindblom, C. E., 145 Linear time, 84–85, 88–89, 88f Linos, E., 112 ‘Liquid modernity’, 28 Literature, leadership see Leadership literature Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans (Plutarch), 83 Low self-esteem, 12–13 M Machiavelli, N., 47–48, 52, 53, 100, 158–159 Machiavellian trade-off, smart v. accountable leadership, 153 Macro trends, governance challenges and, 102t–103t Malmendier, U., 141 Management, leadership v., 6–7; see also Leadership entries Managers, city, allocating attention, 36–37; see also Leader(s) Marris, P., 116 Matkin, D., 41, 158 Meaning-making, persuasive crisis narratives, 128–131

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Index

Meier, K. J., 97 Merton, R., 5 Metaphors, 41 Meteoric leaders, 56f, 57–58 Me Too (#MeToo) movement, public leadership challenge, 86–87 Milgram, S., 48 Mintzberg, H., 35 Misfit leaders, 56f, 58 Modernization, legal–rational authority and, 45 Momentum, rhetorical strategies for creating change, 110t ‘Monitorial’ democracies, 148 Moore, M., 26 Moral action, courage to take, 51 Moral capital, celebrities’ civic leadership, 24 Morality, 13 Moral leadership, example, 25–26 Moral relationship, leadership as, 43 Motivation academic insight, 8–9 fundamental human motives, 13 Motivational drivers, leadership, 13, 14t Moving, Lewin model, 108 Mulgan, R., 102t Mullainathan, S., 141 Myth of the Strong Leader, The: Political Leadership in the Modern Age (Brown), 157 N Narratives of hope, 54 Nature of Leadership, The (Antonakis & Day), 157 Networks, age of, 102t Neuroticism, 15t Neustadt, R., 80 New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Influence and Power (Haslam, Reicher, & Platow), 158 New Public Governance, 70f, 71–72 New Public Management, 70f, 71–72 Nixon, C., 138–140 Nohria, N., 108 Non-government organizations (NGOs) civic leadership, 23 leadership roles, 11 leading down, 32 leading out, 33 public leadership and, 22

Non-verbal gestures, 41 Normative arguments, 110t Nye, J., 18, 75 O Office-holders, 17 Old Public Administration, 70f, 71–72 Olken, B. A., 149 Ontological status of time, 89 Openness to experience, 15t Operational capacity, 27f Operational indicators, assessment map, 148t Organizational change, Lewin model, 107–108 Organizational performance, leadership change hypothesis and, 142–143 Organizational rule-breaking, 49 Organizational time, leading in, 95–98 consolidating leadership, 97 fire-fighting, 97–98 institutional types, 95–96 institution-building, 96 reform leadership, 97 Organizations high-reliability, crisis management in, 127–128 leadership definitions on, 6 leading down, 32 Organized capacity, 26 O’Toole, J., 63 O’Toole, L., 97 Outcomes assessing leadership, 148t collaborative process, 73f leaders affect?, 149 leadership and, 5 Oxelheim, L., 102t P Padilla, A., 49 Participation, constraints, 73f Partners, 50 Patience, timing and, 41 Patty, J. W., 30 Pay discretion, politicians and, 141–142 Pearce, C. L., 63 Performance, 8–9 assessing, 143–144 comparative analysis, absolute/relative, 151–153

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Copyrighted material – 9781352007459 Index compensation and, 141 leadership change, hypothesis, 142–143; see also Evaluating leadership Personal factors, 13 Personality traits, leadership and, 14 Persuasion arguments, art of crafting, 40–41 crisis narratives and, 128–131 leadership as, 5 power of, 32 PEST model, 105, 106f Pfeffer, J., 5 Physical disabilities, 13 Pioneer leader, time type and, 88f Pisano, M., 75 Planned behaviour, theory of, 112–113 Plato, 83 Platown, M., 158 Plutarch, 83 Policy consistent v. inconsistent, 104–105 leading up, and effective, 30 Policymaking, 30 Political leadership civic leaders and, 24–25 leading up, 28–30 rhetoric, persuasive arguments, 40–41 roles, 22–23 timing/patience, 41 vectors of influence for, 34t Political time, leading in, 91–95 articulation leadership, 92 consolidation, 93 innovation, 93–94 pre-emptive, 94–95 reconstruction leadership, 92–93 Politicians, pay discretion and, 141–142 Pollitt, C., 103t Poole, M. S., 101 Popular sovereignty, 146–147 Power exercising collaborative leadership and, 80–81 motivational drive for, 14t rhetoric and, 40–41 Power-resource-knowledge asymmetries, 73f Practitioner insight administrative leadership, 30–31 change, beauty and pain of leading, 111–112 crisis, leadership in times of, 129–131

191

Predictability, randomness and, 86 Pre-emptive leadership, 94–95 Preparation, crisis, 136–137 Presidents, comparing, 13 Prevention, crisis, 136–137 Primary Colors (Anonymous), 38 Prince, The (Machiavelli), 53, 158–159 Principal-agent theory, 29, 146–147 Private sector, 22 Problem-solving process crises and, 124 facilitating joint, 77–79 Process work, stimulating collaboration, 77f, 79 Promises, delivering on, 55 Prospective evaluation, 143 Provocation, teaching reality and, 39 Prudence, assessing leadership for, 145–146, 148t Psychological determinism, 49 Public entrepreneur, 87 Public feedback, political performance and, 146 Public institutions, 17 Public leaders, 3 behaviour of, 12 confidence/low self-esteem, 12–13 stress and, 13 styles of, 12 Public leadership air pollution, China and, 21–22 attention, allocating, 35–38 commitment, conveying/eliciting, 38–39 contextual intelligence in, 74–76 critical vectors of, 27f defining, 20 #METOO as challenge of, 86–87 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 22 office holders, 17 roles, government/non-government, 12 scope of, 21–22 senior public officials, 11 teaching reality, art of provocation, 39 varieties of, 4 ‘Public leadership as gardening’ (Frederickson & Matkin), 158 Public management, 6 Public managers, 26

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Index

Public policy making brain trusts and, 65–66 horizontal governance and, 72–73 scenario, obesity, 60–61; see also Collective public leadership Public value, 26 ‘Public value creation’, 26 Public value propositions, 26, 27f Q Quigley, T. J., 149 Quoidbach, J., 85 R Randomness, time and, 85–86, 88f Rational arguments, 110t Recourses, followers, 50 Reform leadership, 97; see also Change, leading defined, 101 realities of, 116–117f Refreezing, Lewin model, 108 Reicher, S., 46, 158 Relational perspective, followers/ followerships, 47–52 Relationship(s) followers/followerships, 47–52 leadership as, 43–47 Relative performance, assessing, 151–153 Research, leadership literature see Leadership literature Responsibility, courage to assume, 50 Rhetoric, crafting persuasive arguments, 40–41 Rhetorical strategies, momentum for change and, 110t ‘Rhetoric of reaction’, 94 Rhodes, R., 64, 70 Richard, P. J., 149 Rinehart, Luke, 86 Risk, decision making and, 13 Ritual scapegoating hypothesis, leadership change, 143 Rivals, purging, 54–55 Rock-solid leaders, 56–57 Rousseau, J.-J., 146 Ruckelhaus, W., 90 Rule-breaking, organizational, 49 Ryde, R., 102t

S Sanctuary leadership, 64f, 66 Schwab, K., 103t Science, 85 Science, of leadership, 2 Seduction, stimulating collaboration, 77–79, 77f Selznick, P., 95, 96, 159 Senior public officials, 11, 29 Sensemaking, crisis response, 126–127 Serve, courage to, 50 Shared leadership, 62–64 defined, 63 influencing process, 63f; see also Collective public leadership Shared social identity, 46 Shared understanding, 73f Shinseki, E., 19 Short-termism, 90 Sisulu, W., 6 Situational crises, 119–120t, 125t, 136–137 Skowronek, S., 94, 95, 96, 152 Slaughter, A. M., 102t Smart leadership accountable leadership v., 153 assessing for prudence, 145–146 Social identity leadership and, 45–46 political leaders and, 29 shared, 46 Social movements, 11 Social-problem solving, 70–71 ‘Soft power’, leadership charisma, 40–41 Sovereignty, popular, 146–147 Speeches, rhetoric and, 40 Stakeholders, identifying, 76–77 Standing, attempts to gain, 53–54 Strategic leadership influence, three directions of, 26 public value creation and, 26 Strategic opportunity, crises as, 123 ‘Strategic triangle’, public value creation, 26 Stress, 13 Structure-centred leadership, 18 Studying leadership, 20 Summative evaluations, 144 Support, assessing leadership for, 145, 146–147, 148t

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Copyrighted material – 9781352007459 Index T Tactician leader, time type and, 88f Tajfel, H., 45–46 Tandem leadership, 64–65 Tate, G., 141 Teaching reality, art of provocation, 39 Technological turbulence, age of, 103t Terry, L., 30, 159 Theory planned behavior, 112–113 principal-agent, 29 trait, 14 Thinking About Leadership (Keohane), 159 Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders (Eagly & Carli), 157–158 Through the Looking Glass (Carroll), 101 Time, leading in cyclical, 85, 89 example, 82–83 history and, 83–84 linear, 88–89 linear, change and, 84–85 manipulating, 90–91 ontological status of time, 89 organizational, 95–98 political time, 91–95 predictability, 86 randomness, 85–86 short-termism, 90 taking/making time, 89–90 type of time, leadership implications and, 88f Time horizon, 88 Time-making, 89–90 Time-taking, 89 Timing, patience, 41 Trade-offs, leadership, 153–154 Trade unions, 11 Tradition-based authority, 44 Training, academic insight, 8–9

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Traits, leaders, 46 Trait theory, 14 Transactional leadership, 16 Transformational leadership, 8–9, 16 Transforming Public Leadership for the 21st Century, 158 Transparency, age of, 102t Trust, crises and, 123 Trust building, 73f, 74 Trustworthiness, assessing leadership for, 145, 147–148, 148t Tyranny, preventing, 147–148 U Uhr, J., 40 Uncertainty, crises and, 121 Unfreezing, Lewin model, 108 Uniformity, 2 Upward influence, 63f Urgency, crises and, 121 V Values, community crises and, 120 Van der Wal, Z., 102t Van de Ven, A. H., 101 Van Engen, N. A., 104 Venus, M., 115 Vicious cycle hypothesis, leadership change, 142–143 W Weber, M., 1, 44, 45, 146 Winter, D., 13, 14t Wisdom, 146; see also Prudence, assessing leadership for Wolfers, J., 141–142 World Bank, 21 Y Yukl, G., 6

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