Leadership in the public sector

K S Welivita

The public sector is often adversely compared with the private sector. Leadership is at the heart of organizational effectiveness and employee engagement. The public and private sectors have traditionally been regarded as very different. In recent years, however, they appear to have been culturally closer to each other. However, there are significant differences as well as similarities in leadership and leadership development in public and private sectors.

Effective leadership helps our nation through times of peril. It makes a business organization successful. The effective leadership of parents enables to children to grow healthy and become productive adults. Leadership is crucial in implementing decisions successfully. A good leader can make a success of weak business plan, but that a poor leader can ruin even the best plan.

Effective leadership is integral to organizational effectiveness. Effective leaders create positive organizational cultures, strengthen motivation, clarify mission and organizational objectives, and steer organizations to more productive and high performing outcomes. Recent evidence of the importance of leadership and its absences or limited presence in some public organizations is plentiful. Without leadership, organizations move too slowly, stagnate, and loss their way.

Constructive suggestions

Effective leadership is one key element in the success of a group and virtually anyone can learn to be an effective leader. Leaders are made, not born. In most organizations, we find managers not leaders. It is very rare to find effective leaders in the public organizations. Good group leaders make an effort to learn and practice skills so they can: listen openly to others: offer and accept constructive suggestions: give clear directions: set and meet deadlines: give formal and informal presentations: help members identify and solve problems: set an example of desired behaviour: show appreciation of others’ contributions: show understanding: encourage members to exchange ideas: handle conflict: guide the group in goal setting and decision making: delegate responsibilities: ask questions of the group to prompt responses: create a productive atmosphere.

Effective leaders will identify productive areas of confusion and uncertainty that exist in society, will demonstrate that they do not have all the answers but are willing to learn, and will be able to “act differently, think differently, and seek inspiration from different sources” than leader of past.

Good leaders develop through a never ending process of self study, education, training, and experience. Leadership is a process by which one person influences the thoughts, attitudes, and behaviours of others. Leaders are not only responsible exhibiting ethical behaviour rather they are responsible for generating ethical climate in the organization.

Democratic accountability

Effective leadership is also based on sustainable and continuous development. Sustainable communities and businesses depend on the principles of sustainable development being applied by committed people on a continuing basis. Real progress towards sustainable development depends on the willingness of the people at every level to both give and accept effective leaders.

The concern for finding and keeping effective leaders is a priority not only for the public sector but for the private sector as well. Exercising leadership in public sector organizations, however, is different from leading private organizations. One of the most significant is the bifurcated administrative model created by placing elected and appointed officials, as well as senior leaders from the career bureaucracy at the top level of many public organizations. Split leadership, combined with democratic accountability, oversight procedures and intense media attention, creates an environment for public sector leaders that is constrained in many complex ways.

There are also common dilemmas. One of these is 'growing' verses 'buying' leaders. Organizations often look outside for the incorporation of new ideas, relevant leadership experience, and fresh approaches:- they seek to 'buy' leaders. In contrast, a growing leaders’ perspective involves developing the skills and range of experience of organization's employees over time, promoting individuals to positions of ever increasing responsibility and skills, and eventually to leadership positions.

Leadership development activities in all sectors demonstrate one fundamental point:

There is not a 'best way' to develop leaders that is applicable to all organizational settings. There are of course trends. Recent trends in the private sector include 360 degree feedback from supervisors, peers, and subordinates: distance learning programmes, off-site training programmes, and temporary rotational work assignments. Most of these are found in public sector activities as well, with no clear pattern of performance.

Team-oriented style

Leader attraction, development and retention efforts are changing in public and private sectors. Heroic, charismatic, solitary leadership, although still important for some organizations and for some kinds of organizational action, is being replaced by a more team-oriented style and perspective. Although advocated for some time in theory and popular leadership literature, the reality of creating team-based leadership in a still hierarchical and rigid organization is a challenging one.

Entrepreneurial leadership models are also beginning to mark the public sector. Entrepreneurial leaders have a strong motivation to 'make the difference' and work to do so with determination and optimism. These individuals look for opportunities to forge their own direction, despite strong central organizational control. Forging their own way impels these individuals to connect with broader political and social trends.

Traditional leadership theories focused mainly on rational process. But theories of transformational and charismatic leadership emphasize emotions and values and imply that leader and followers raise one another to higher levels of morality and motivation. Transformational leaders have been described as broadening and elevating the interest of followers, generating awareness and acceptance among followers, and motivating followers to go beyond self interest for the good of the groups. Transformational leadership has been contrasted with transactional behaviour, in which co-operation is obtained by establishing exchange of rewards. Transactional leaders motivate subordinates to perform as expected.

Charismatic leadership in the public sector is perceived in terms of vision, risk taking, challenge and encouragement and determination. But charismatic leadership overall is not strongly related to consequential motivation and not significantly related to operating performance. However, motivation was found to be predicted by risk taking, challenge and encouragement by the leader, which engaged higher self-esteem in subordinates. Risk taking, however, may be discouraged or avoided in the public sector.

Multiple goals

Baldwin (1987) noted three major differences between public and private sector organizations: (a) private sector goals are less ambiguous than those in the public sector because they can be evaluated in terms of economic outcomes and because public sector leaders have to pursue multiple goals simultaneously: (b) there is more leadership turnover in public than in private organizations, not only because of the limitations on time in office but also because administrative upheavals of ten lead to officials’ resigning voluntarily: and (c) public employees enjoy greater job security because of the existence of extensive grievance procedures.

Other differences that have been explored between the two sectors suggest that public sector organizations, tend to focus more on seniority in their reward systems; have less flexibility in their reward systems; have to comply with the civil service system; have more specialized and invariant job designs; and have stricter reporting relationships, higher level accountability, more rules, more regulations, more constraints, weaker linkages between political leaders and career level leaders, and an absence of market incentives.

Managers in the private sector demonstrated higher levels of competence of conceptualization, oral presentations, concern for impact, diagnostic use of concepts, efficiency orientation and proactively. The public sector managers more concern for relationships than their private sector counterparts.

Changing agendas

In the public sector, in contrast to the private sector, rewards were not distributed on the basis of performance, and fewer policies existed that promoted efficiency. Career level leaders in the public sector do not have control over rewards, and goals are determined by political leaders, rules, and regulations. This takes away leader discretion, make it more difficult to direct and motivate employees, and leads to frustration with the system.

Whereas both public and private sectors are subject to various regulations, in the public sector these regulations tend to be more pervasive and prescriptive. Because public sector managers have to deal with frequently changing agendas and unstable coalitions, managing conflict and getting people to work together becomes a critical skill. Rules also provide public managers with power because they can let subordinates break the rules as rewards or enforce the rules as punishment. Effective leaders understand that up to one extent only punishment can be tool of behaviour correction. After one limit, punishment tends to increase employee dissatisfaction.

Political leaders

Career-level leaders in the public sector must minimize discontinuity but they must also maintain both flexibility and adaptability to emergent strategies and other exogenous influences in an environment where political leaders and agendas change so frequently.

In addition, given the volatility of the political environment, career-level leaders need to work hard at influencing their leaders to influence policy directives and demands.

Leaders in the private sector also must show flexibility and adaptability in handling market forces and need to know how to obtain the necessary financial and non-financial resources from their bosses so they can produce. Leaders in both sectors, then, need to show adaptability and exert upward influence, albeit for different reasons.

The public sector needs to get serious about leadership. Leadership acquisition and development requires a thoughtful strategy, careful candidate selection, appropriate reward, attentive mentoring, and an ongoing and sustained commitment from potential leaders and their respective organizations. Developing and sustaining effective leaders for government organizations of the 21st century is clearly fundamental.

The writer is the Deputy General Manager (Internal Audit), Employees Trust Fund Board