Entrepreneurial Brokers in Disaster Response Network in Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines

Abstract

Entrepreneurial brokers play a major role in governance networks in a disaster response setting. By identifying patterns of interactions between members in a network of embedded ties, we can explore the strategic use of brokers to mobilize an effective coordination system in the case of the 2013 Philippines disaster. Empirical data were gathered from reported interactions beginning 2 days after Typhoon Haiyan for the following 4 weeks. This paper concludes with practical-based recommendations for international and local agencies to enhance their organizational competencies to serve as entrepreneurial brokers in emergency management.     

Agreeing to disagree? Explaining self–other disagreement on leadership behaviour

ABSTRACT

Leadership research tends to treat differences among ratings of the same leaders as measurement error. Our study makes such varying perceptions of leadership behaviour its main phenomenon of investigation. We conceptualize divergent leadership ratings based on the difference between managers’ self-ratings and team members’ assessments of leadership behaviour. Using data from three German public organizations on 51 teams and 190 leader–follower dyads, we find that divergent leadership ratings are a function of managers’ motivation, their use of managerial reflection routines, and team members’ personality. The findings point to the importance of using multisource feedback and developing managers’ self- and other-awareness.     

Differences in leadership behaviour and influence between public and private organizations in Greece

This paper aims at comparing certain managerial aspects which seem to affect and account for the differences in organizational performance between public and private organizations in Greece.

By presenting empirical evidence concerning leadership behaviour and influence in both types of organizations, it becomes apparent that leadership quality is not necessarily the problem in public organizations. A number of leadership substitutes and neutralizers such as bureaucratic controls, external political influence and the limited positive reward power which leaders seem to possess have to be removed in order to enhance the role of leadership in public sector organizations.     

Explaining the Reactions of Swiss Municipalities to The ‘Amalgamation Wave’: At the crossroad of institutional,economic and political pressures

Abstract

Public sector organizations are simultaneously subject to three types of environmental pressure: institutional, economic and political. How do these pressures influence the strategic behaviour of public organizations when confronted with efficiency-oriented reforms? We focus on the strategic behaviour of Swiss municipalities facing the amalgamation wave: a reform characterized by a strong economic rationale. Results confirm that the success of reforms depends not only on its matching with economic underpinnings. It is also necessary to take the political leadership and the responsibility of reform implementation.     

The Emerging Role of Higher Education in Educating and Assessing Future Leaders for Disaster Relief

As the frequency and intensity of disasters throughout the world increase, so do the demands for humanitarian relief and the need for effective disaster‐based leadership training. Numerous organizations are poised to act in response to disasters that necessitate a significant amount of leadership and logistics support. Although there are many entities often involved in disaster relief, the symposium outlines the emerging role higher education can play in improving response outcomes, not only by providing “boots on the ground” but also by developing skilled disaster relief leaders in both curricular and cocurricular venues. Institutions of higher education provide experiential learning opportunities offering critical service for immediate disaster relief while developing the skills of future leaders. During these experiences, students develop disaster‐based leadership and logistics acumen. Similarly, programmatic assessment is critical in measuring student leadership growth during the experiential learning process of providing disaster relief. The education and assessment of these trainings provides an important dimension of disaster leadership as it examines the leaders in action and fosters a commitment to adequately prepare them to lead in a time of disaster. A qualitative approach is recommended for assessing experiential leadership learning to better inform teaching and to cultivate future disaster leadership that meets ongoing global needs.     

Human Resource Management Practices and Trust in Public Organizations

Abstract

Trust has been acknowledged as a valuable managerial resource within organizations. Working as a lubricant of organizational functioning, trust reduces opportunistic behaviours while it increases voluntary compliance to organizational norms and rules as well as enhancing individual and organizational performance. Considering the importance of trust, it is worthwhile to explore what factors may help build trust within organizations. This research investigates whether perceptions of several human resource management (HRM) practices are associated with trust in government organizations. According to social exchange theory, HRM practices signal management's commitment to employees which in turn leads to greater trust in the organization. Using data from an employee survey conducted for the Georgia Department of Transportation in 2007, this research tests how employee perceptions of HRM practices are related to trust in three distinct levels of management in a large department of state government: trust in department leadership, trust in one's leadership team, and trust in one's supervisor. Binary logit analyses suggest that perceptions of HRM practices focusing on autonomy, compensation, communication, performance appraisal, and career development are associated with trust in public organizations. According to the result, those practices present variation in their leverage on trust in leadership at different levels.     

Natural Disaster Preparedness in the Private Sector: A Model to Refrain from Isolation

Executive leadership operating in isolation may be a subliminal issue that has an impact upon how resources are allocated for preparing organizations to react to a sudden natural disaster. Two forms of isolation that are of particular interest are upper executive aloofness from management and an indifference to groups external to daily operations. Executive leadership may need to expand its attention to establishing a more inclusive strategy by engaging employees at all levels directly as well as those in leadership positions in organizations in both the public and nonprofit sectors.     

Hybrid Collaborative Arrangements: The welfare administration in Norway – between hierarchy and network

Abstract

This paper uses a survey to analyse how administrative executives perceive coordination following the reform of the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration. Applying a structural and cultural perspective, it examines the relationship between coordination mechanisms, cultural features and perceived coordination quality. The executives identify strongly with finding joint solutions and getting public organizations to work together. Coordination by hierarchy and networks co-exist, but the hierarchical dimension dominates. Vertical coordination is regarded as quite good, while horizontal coordination is seen as rather poor. The relationship between coordination mechanisms, cultural features and coordination quality are rather ambiguous and loose, however.     

Public Management and Network Specificity: Effects of colleges’ ties with professional organizations on graduates’ labour market success and satisfaction

Abstract

Research on managerial networking in the public sector reports positive effects of network activity on performance. However, little is known about which network relations influence different aspects of performance. We argue that for specific organizational goals, organizations should direct their networking activities towards specific types of organizations. We explore how different types of network relations of Dutch colleges for nursing studies affect the performance of these colleges. We analyse the effect of ties with professional organizations on: (1) graduates’ program satisfaction, (2) graduates’ wages and (3) graduates’ employment (n = 1,484 graduates). Multilevel analyses show that colleges’ ties with professional organizations positively affect graduates’ wages and employment.     

Public–Private Partnerships in Health Services Delivery

Abstract

In this article, we conceptualize public–private partnerships (PPPs) from a network organizations perspective, and apply interorganizational relations (IOR) to study fifteen PPPs in a district health system in the state of Rajasthan in India. We find that the Government occupies a dominant position in the network because of the centrality of its functions, authority and control over resources and information. There is greater reliance on formal mechanisms of co-ordination. For effective network governance, it is imperative to reduce the power asymmetry, develop horizontal co-ordination, trust and social capital, and enhance public managers’ capacity for effectively managing interorganizational relationships.     

Organizational Ambidexterity at the Local Government Level: The effects of managerial focus

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore how managerial focus influences organizational ambidexterity in different organizational forms at the local government level. An entrepreneurial, leadership, or stakeholder managerial focus will each find reflection in the simultaneous pursuit of exploration and exploitation of resources, and the influence will differ with the organizational form, i.e. whether a local government administration (LGA), or a local government corporation (LGC). Hypotheses are tested on Swedish public organizations operating in the waste management and water and sewerage industries. The findings indicate that LGCs have higher levels of organizational ambidexterity, and that the determinants differ from those in LGAs.     

The Direct and Mediating Effects of Transactional and Transformational Leadership: A Comparative Approach

SUMMARY

The purpose of this study is to test a comprehensive model of relationships between transactional and transformational leadership trust in organizations, organizational justice, intention to leave and organizational citizenship behavior. The data were collected from 179 middle and direct levels managers in 17 private Egyptian organizations. The data were analyzed using regression analysis and structural equations analysis. The latter analysis provides the potential of examining the complex model as a whole. The focus of the analysis was on the direct and mediating effects of the leadership variables. The study results showed that transformational leadership has an influence over the outcome variables above and beyond the influence of the contextual variables. The implications, limitations and the future research directions were discussed.     

Ambidextrous leadership,paradox and contingency: evidence from Angola

Abstract

The study departs from two assumptions. First, it considers that organizations, their leaders and the HRM function are inherently paradoxical and that, in that sense, dealing with paradox is a necessary component of the leadership process which requires ambidexterity capabilities. Second, it explores whether the paradoxes of leadership may manifest differently in different contexts. We explore the emergence of paradox in the leadership of Angolan organizations. Angola is an economy transitioning from a centrally planned to a market mode, and this makes it a rich site for understanding the specificities of ambidextrous paradoxical processes in an under-researched, ‘rest of the world’, context. The findings of our inductive study led to the emergence of four interrelated paradoxes and highlight the importance of ambidextrous paradoxical work as a HRM contingency.     

Leadership for Collaboration

Abstract

‘Leadership’ and ‘collaboration’ are integral to twenty-first century governance and management but, despite a growing literature, understanding about leadership for collaboration is hampered by a lack of specificity and nuance in theory and empirical research. This article responds to these limitations by working within an interpretive framework and employing Q-method to uncover different interpretations of leadership for collaboration operant among public managers in Wales. The article uses the concept of situated agency to explain why public managers offer diverse interpretations of leadership for collaboration despite working within the same governance framework, and to identify challenges to public managers in determining appropriate leadership for collaboration.     

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.     

Absorptive Capacity in a Non-Market Environment

Abstract

Improved performance by public sector organizations is a political imperative in numerous countries. There are particular challenges in turnaround of poorly performing organizations. Theoretical explanations of the performance trajectories of public organizations, and especially the causes of failure, highlight the importance of knowledge processes, often from an organizational learning perspective. Absorptive capacity provides an alternative way of theorizing the relationships between organizational performance and knowledge processes, derived from the resource-based view of the firm and the broader concept of dynamic capabilities. The article reviews the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological implications of applying absorptive capacity to the performance of public organizations. It concludes that the approach has value and presents a number of propositions to be tested through empirical study, alongside some more general challenges for researchers who wish to study the concept further. The high political salience of public organizations' performance, and the costs of failure, mandates a major research effort on these issues.     

Responses to public sector reform policy

Abstract

The article compares the ways in which different public sector organizations respond to similar federal government demands for public sector reform. The empirical basis of the article is a comparison of public sector reform in three agencies managing road systems in three Australian states. There are two constants in the research; namely, the nature of the responsibilities of the agencies with respect to the road network, and the demands of federal government policy for road reform throughout Australia. Yet within the ambit of these two constants, there is a distinctive contrast in the way the agencies have approached and implemented both policy and reforms. The article uses Hood's framework for viable organizational design options for variables relating to grid and group as an explanatory model for the results obtained from the research. Furthermore, it examines the utility of Hood's four styles of public sector organizations in order to explain different change outcomes in the three agencies studied.     

A diagnosis of leadership effectiveness in the Irish public sector

Abstract

As Ireland has followed other countries in modernizing its public sector according to the principles of ‘new public management’ (without introducing market mechanisms on the same scale as its Anglo-Saxon counterparts), the capacity of its public managers to supply the leadership required to drive this programme forward has been identified as a crucial factor affecting its sustainability. A broadly representative sample of Irish public managers has been surveyed using the Leadership Effectiveness Analysis diagnostic instrument to identify those behaviours that need to be developed since they are infrequently used or can moderate the liabilities associated with frequently used behaviours. The findings of this study are interpreted within the context of a broader literature that debates the distinctiveness, significance and malleability of organizational leadership, in general, and the possibility of achieving a balance between different and, at times, conflicting public leadership behaviours, in particular.     

Public Service Leaders as ‘Change Agents’ – for Whom?

Abstract

This article examines how far senior staff in English educational and health service organizations view themselves as leaders who are ‘change agents’ for government-driven reform and independent change agendas. The contribution of external leadership development provision to shaping these self-perceptions is explored. Special attention is paid to national leadership development bodies with different degrees of formal association with government. Whatever this relationship, such provision and other development support apparently reinforced a strong sense of personal agency (choice of action) associated with being a leader, empowering senior staff to adopt a modestly mediatory stance towards both reform and leadership development provision.     

Reforming public services: does service logic have anything to offer?

ABSTRACT

This article discusses what service management and the logic of service (SL) can offer to public service management. There are no real inbuilt differences between public and private service organizations and no reasons why public service organizations (PSOs) would be less efficient and less service-focussed and oriented towards service users than private service organizations. Good service management rather than privatization is required to make a PSO more efficient and effectively outward-oriented. Service-focussed value creation management and how service logic can be applied by PSOs to enable them to transform to outward-focussed service organizations are discussed. A change framework is presented.