Pedagogic implications of anxiety and loss of agency in public services managers and leaders

Abstract

Purpose -The purpose of the paper is to report on the results of an inquiry into the possible reasons why many public service managers and leaders across six European countries report a loss of personal agency and suggests a possible pedagogic response to this. Design/methodology/approach -The nature of agency is explored with reference to theory, and the methodology for the study -heuristic action inquiry -is outlined. The paper argues that spaces within postgraduate education are needed to facilitate managers' critical reflection and working with anxiety, and the article goes on to outline how public services leadership programmes can seek to achieve this. Findings -The paper suggests that programmes need to work both with the cognitive and affective domains, and to find ways of exploring within the curriculum how managers may begin more to see their roles as potentially key actors in the policy-making process rather than as passive recipients of policy imperatives received from above. The loss of agency experienced by public servants in several European countries suggests that MPA programmes and the like need to work with students' anxieties in a contained way. Originality/value -Some trends within contemporary public services that lie behind anxiety and loss of agency are identified, including high emphasis on performance targets, centrally driven change, financial stringency, loss of professional and organisation identities, a perpetuation of a "private is best" governmental ideology, and contradictory accountability structures.

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“…According to Jaques (1955), the founder of SDT, conflict should be confronted head‐on: ‘effective social change is likely to require analysis of the common anxieties and unconscious collusions underlying the social defences determining phantasy social relationships’ (cited in Menzies‐Lyth 1988, p. 78). Ahmad and Broussine (2008, p. 348) make the same point, arguing that ‘if an organization is open to confronting challenges and threats openly, and where emotion‐laden questions are discussed openly … the social defence systems are more mature and able to function effectively’. In this light, the shallow consensus discussed above not only defers the challenge of joining‐up it may compound it, acting as a crisis deferral mechanism but allowing tensions to accumulate.…”

“…This is particularly so given the concomitant top‐down pressure on public managers to deliver rapidly improving and ever‐more efficient public services. Ahmad and Broussine (2008) document the anxiety experienced by public managers about the perceived loss of personal agency caused by these pressures. It is easy to see, therefore, that in partnerships where political conflict is taboo, the maintenance of a shallow, abstract consensus might form a defence against similar anxieties (Long 2006, p. 281).…”

Job Satisfaction and Gender in the APS: Who’d Want to be a Male?

“…Ahmad and Broussine (2008) argue that a major contributor to the low satisfaction in public sector managers and leaders is the loss of agency caused by externally driven targets, structural change, financial stringencies, ambiguous accountability structures, and ideologies which now place private sector procedures above the traditional public service ethos. They argue that public service employees have insufficient role clarity and authority, and that governance processes provide insufficient structure.…”

The emotional turn in higher education: a psychoanalytic contribution

“…An alternative pedagogy was introduced grounded in an experiential learning approach (Kolb 1984) to enable a process of constructing knowledge through students working in groups to research, prepare, deliver and evaluate peer learning sessions. The pedagogic intention was to provide the opportunities for learners to bring together the tacit and explicit features of knowledge via conversation and reflection (Kayes 2002;Baker, Jensen, and Kolb 2005;Ahmad and Broussine 2008), and assist in the development of 'metacognitive' learning skills via this process of sense-making (Cameron, Dutton, and Quinn 2003;Barnett and Coate 2005).…”