Public Leadership: A review of the literature and framework for future research

Abstract

This study analyses and reviews the literature on public leadership with a novel combination of bibliometric methods. We detect four generic approaches to public leadership (i.e. a functionalist, a behavioural, a biographical and a reformist approach) which differ with regard to their philosophy of science (i.e. objective vs subjective) and level of analysis (i.e. micro-level vs multi-level). From our findings, we derive four directions for future research which involve shifting the focus from the aspect of 'leadership' to the element of 'public', from simplicity to complexity, from universalism to cultural relativism and from public leadership to public followership.

Local Government Capacity in Australia

“…Leadership has been studied and conceptualised in terms of its strategic and performance implications, transformational characteristics (impacting on organisations and people in a changing environment), in terms of ongoing discussion on public sector reforms, and with respect to the political dimension of public leadership (Vogel and Masal 2014). A key issue in local government leadership is the relationship between political and administrative leaders, in particular the relationship between the Mayor, as leader of the elected council, and the General Manager of the local public service (Martin and Aulich 2012).…”

Are transformational and transactional types of leadership compatible? A two‐wave study of employee motivation

“…Transformational leadership is one of the most influential paradigms in the current generic leadership literature (Judge and Piccolo ), and reviews demonstrate that it has also become dominant in the public management literature (Van Wart ; Vogel and Masal ). Recently, however, the conceptualizations and measures of transformational leadership have been criticized, among other things, for conflating multiple concepts and for confounding the measurement of transformational leadership with its effects (van Knippenberg and Sitkin 2013).…”

“…Yet, little empirical work has focused on the extent to which transformational and transactional types of leadership should be implemented in combination, and whether it is a problem that they build on different motivational logics. As pointed out by Vogel and Masal (), leadership research in public administration has paid little attention to the interaction between different leadership types. As public managers often exercise different types of leadership simultaneously (Van Wart ), studying their effects separately may convey an incomplete or even incorrect picture.…”

Does transformational leadership stimulate user orientation? Evidence from a field experiment

“…Scholars of (public) management have long alluded to the importance of transformational leadership behaviours (see, for example, review by Vogel and Masal ). Such studies emphasize its potential to ‘activate the higher‐order needs of their employees and encourage them to transcend their own self‐interest for the sake of the organization and its clientele’ (Wright et al , p. 207).…”