PubLe - Public Leadership: Conditioning Factors, Manifestations, and Consequences in Public Administration

Administrative reforms, digitization, funding shortages, and the growing demands of citizens pose great challenges to public administration. At the same time, public leadership is becoming increasingly relevant both as a topic of academic investigation and an administrative practice. Despite this, public leadership has been little researched. Investigations to date have largely made use of generic leadership methods and concepts originating from the private sector which, due to structural and behavior-related differences, cannot be transferred one-to-one to the public sector.

At international level, the academic discussion focuses on the question of whether there is a specific type of leadership in public administration and what its distinguishing features are. In parallel, it is interesting to consider the effects public leadership has at the individual, group, and organizational level. To date there have been no German studies addressing these issues in the German context. Our research questions are thus as follows:

1. Is there a specific type of leadership in public administration (public leadership) both worldwide and more specifically in Germany, and what distinguishes it from other types of leadership?
2. What effects do the various dimensions of public leadership have at individual, group, and organizational levels?
3. What factors influence the deployment, form, and effect of public leadership?

To answer these questions, we will carry out a large-scale quantitative longitudinal study in an administration of one of the federal states in Germany. This will enable us to test and validate innovative approaches to public leadership for the first time ever in Germany. Thanks to our research design, we can match up information provided by superiors to that given by their direct subordinates, observe changes over a period of time, and reveal causal linkages between public leadership and factors relevant to public administration, such as performance, citizen orientation, or job satisfaction.

In doing so, we address current blind spots in research and emerging methodological demands, deepen our knowledge of public leadership in Germany, and derive the practical implications for leaders and leadership development.