Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, 6th Edition

CHAPTER ELEVENLEADERSHIP, MANAGERIAL ROLES, AND ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

All of the preceding chapters discuss topics that pose challenges for leaders at all levels in public organizations, and the framework presented in Chapter One implies the crucial role of leadership. As earlier chapters have discussed, some perspectives on organizations question whether leaders truly wield important influences or whether they are actually under the control of more powerful circumstances that determine the course of events. Recent research on leaders in private firms tends to find that there are weak relationships between leader behaviors and objective performance measures such as sales and profit margins, or at least that the effects of leadership are highly contingent on other factors (Klein and Kim, 1998; Waldman, Ramirez, House, and Puranam, 2001). Studies of leaders in the public sector, however, have recently been attributing a lot of influence to leader behaviors (such as Brudney, Hebert, and Wright, 1999; Hennessey, 1998; Kim, 2002; Thompson, 2000; Fernandez, Cho, and Perry, 2010), and this chapter later returns to the question of whether leaders in the public sector make much difference, given the shared power, politics, oversight, and other factors that can limit their impact in government. Whether or not leaders shape the destinies of their organizations and stride like titans over the rest of us, anyone who has served in an organization knows how much leaders can mean, or fail ...