Perceived managerial and leadership effectiveness within the Canadian public sector

Abstract

This study responds primarily to numerous calls for specific public management and public administration-related research to better understand public leadership currently performed in an increasingly complex and ambiguous world. It also responds to calls in the human resource development (HRD) literature for more qualitative managerial behavior research. The inquiry explores perceptions of what behaviorally distinguishes effective managers from ineffective managers, as expressed by managers and nonmanagerial employees within a Canadian public utility company. It reaches for generalization by comparing the results against findings from equivalent qualitative managerial behavior studies carried out in three subareas of the British public sector. Using the critical incident technique (CIT), concrete examples (critical incidents [CIs]) of observed managerial behavior were collected from managers and nonmanagerial staff. The CIs (n = 530) were subjected to open and axial coding to identify a smaller number of discrete behavioral categories (BSs). Selective coding of the identified BSs (n = 99) resulted in 16 positive (effective) and 12 negative (ineffective) behavioral criteria (BCs) being deduced. Over 92% of the Canadian BSs are convergent in meaning with over 81% of the compared British BSs. Consequently, they are likely to be generalizable to other subareas of the Canadian public sector. The 8% of nonconvergent Canadian BSs and their respective underpinning CIs contain no content that could be construed as being context-specific to the

An Illustration of Teaching and Assessment Practices of the “Conceptual Framework” as a Threshold Concept

“…Originally designed as a quantitative observation-based technique by Flanagan (1954), the critical incident technique was subsequently adapted as a qualitative technique for gathering and analysing interview data (Chell 2004). The critical incident technique has also been used to provide structure to the collection of data, with an alternative method of data analysis being applied, such as content analysis (Ellinger & Cseh 2007), grounded theory (Hamlin & Whitford 2020), or thematic analysis (Ruiz, Hamlin, & Esparza Martinez 2014). The qualitative version of the critical incident technique provides one approach to exploring the unfolding of events and behaviours related to the occurrence of the critical incident.…”

Public Leadership Meta-skills

“…The scholarly discussion around the appropriate and necessary forms of leadership development in the public sector has in recent times focused on behaviorally distinguishing effective managers from ineffective managers and on establishing holistic competency models (e.g., Hamlin and Whitford 2020;Skorková 2016;Larat 2016). It is well known that there are a number of policy issues that can no longer be addressed alone either by sector or nation-state, thus heightening the need for new kinds of dynamic and transformative capabilities able both to adapt and shape the environment (e.g., Kattel and Mazzucato 2018;Teece 2018;Bourgon 2017;Burischa and Wohlgemuth 2016;Meredith et al 2016;Mau 2015).…”

Integrative model of the leader competences

“…The search for a competency taxonomy is found in other researchers who establish a set of generic behaviors and competences associated with leadership and management (Hamlin, 2002;House et al, 2002;Yukl et al, 2002). With globalization, the theme of diversity has been the object of study by many researchers.…”

“…The search for a competency taxonomy is found in other researchers who establish a set of generic behaviors and competences associated with leadership and management (Hamlin, 2002; House et al , 2002; Tubbs and Schulz, 2006; Yukl et al , 2002).…”