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The purpose of this paper is to determine the differing ways in which nonprofit charter and traditional public school board members define the concept of accountability in the school or schools they oversee. The findings speak to the governing consequences of shifting oversight of public education from democratically elected bodies to unelected nonprofit governing boards.

The authors use originally collected survey data from democratically elected school board members and nonprofit charter school board members in Minnesota to test for differences in how these two populations view accountability. Open-ended survey questions are coded according to a previously used accountability typology.

The authors find that charter school board members are more likely than traditional public school board members to define accountability through high stakes testing as opposed to staff professionalization and bureaucratic systems.

The results speak to the link between board governance structure and accountability in the public education sector, providing new understanding on the way in which non-elected charter school board members view their accountability function.

This article was written to encourage scholars to not forget to include the power of hierarchy in their studies of leadership in public sector organizations. Contemporary theories of leadership too often assume that hierarchy will wither away once the leader imposes his or her will on the organization, an assumption that does not seem to work in reality given the bureaucratic nature of public organizations. Instead it is argued that we can learn about public sector leadership needs by remembering the power of hierarchy and what it demands in terms of leadership from different levels in the organization. The article concludes with speculation as to how future research on leadership might be directed with hierarchy in mind.

This study aims to use the original data collected from school board members representing nonprofit charter schools in the state of Minnesota to examine the relationship between the distribution of board-executive governance responsibilities and the performance of organizations operating as part of a New Public Management style macro-governance reform.

A combination of survey data collected from Minnesota charter school board members and hard performance data were utilized in two OLS regression models to predict the link between organizational governance and school performance.

The authors find that boards can improve hard measures of organizational performance by shifting responsibility of day-to-day operations closer to the executive, and public advocacy duties closer to the board. The results build on the existing literatures on school board governance and board-executive relations. Overall, the findings suggest the existence of an ideal balance between board-executive governance responsibilities in key functional areas on charter school boards.

Though a healthy literature exists regarding the value of charter schools, very few studies have actually explored the way in which these organizations are governed. This study is the first to link charter board governance responsibilities to performance.

While many, with good reason, have come to view the demoralizing side of modern public bureaucracies with skepticism, many have gone so far as to use these as a basis for developing cynical conceptions of organizational behavior. This article takes exception to such extreme views. Here, using the role of the organizational leader as a focal point, a more optismistic perspective is identified. From this perspective, the authors apprehend significant differences in the performance of public organizations. The authors make their case for the efficacy of this, which they call the transformational leadership perspective, and explain how, much more so than sceptical perspectives, transformational leadership prepares public organizations for the challenges they must face in the upcoming millenium.

Burn‐out is a costly and distressing phenomenon, which damages both individuals and organizations. Employees feel undervalued and frustrated, the quality of their work deteriorates, and ultimately they may leave the organization. If companies could recognize the signs and causes of burn‐out, it might be possible to intervene to prevent it. Recent research has identified some factors which might be involved and offers some practical steps to prevent the loss of valuable staff through burn‐out.

Superintendents’ agency in the US is shaped by governance systems within education systems. These Education Governance Systems have been in a state of flux and experienced turbulence for twenty years. The professional challenge this research addresses is how do 14 credentialed educational professional African American women superintendents with doctorates and track records of school improvement, navigate the turbulence to empower families, and Empower Young Societal Innovators for Equity, Renewal (EYSIER), Social Mobility, and Peace.

This chapter identifies three aspects of a theory of knowledge to action to emerge from the empirical evidence presented. First, African American women superintendents need to know how to access policy and legislation, how to stay up to date with policy and need to be empowered to challenge policy. Policy has the back of African American women fighting institutionalised racism. Second, African American women superintendents need role models, and mentors with wisdom who can create proactive and mobilising networks across the state and the nation to advocate for and to support the teachers’ and leaders’ professional learning to be the best teachers, leaders and superintendents they can be. Finally, the African American women superintendents who have been self-selecting, or identified as potential future superintendents by current superintendents and schoolboards, need to be part of succession planning that transcends the short elected lives of district school boards. Newly incumbent African American women superintendents need to be empowered by Education Governance Systems to enable them to deliver on their manifestos and track records of outstanding school improvement with the impact strategies they were employed to implement. The impact strategies include promoting high-quality home–school engagement and ensuring all students learn how to learn, are culturally sensitive, ask good questions and solve problems as Young Societal Innovators for Equity and Renewal. The chapter recommends a network of African American women superintendents implements this theory of knowledge to action and that their work is documented, and if successful in optimising students’ learning, and outcomes, disseminated to build capacity for EYSIER.

The purpose of this research was to determine the extent to which American school board members faced electoral competition, as well as the factors influencing the likelihood of competition.

The authors utilized original national survey data of American school board members linked with school district demographic data obtained from the National Center for Education Statistics. Several hypotheses were tested using three state-level fixed-effects logistic regression models predicting electoral competition.

The authors found that 39.6% of American school board members reported not having an opponent in their most recent election. School board members serving larger urban school districts with higher percentages of special needs students and racial minorities were more likely to have faced electoral competition.

The authors highlighted potential flaws in the traditional model of local democratic governance and helped expand understanding of the dissatisfaction theory of American democracy and continuous participation theory. The authors concluded with several suggestions on how the results can be used to inform future local governance reforms that increase electoral competition and/or create more effective governance models.

This article makes the case that for leaders to be effective they also need to be credible. Credibility is achieved by practicing leader behaviors focusing on vision, trust, modeling the way, risk taking, and rewarding others. Leaders who possess high credibility are able to more successfully adapt to environmental change, because employees throughout the hierarchy will accept change mandates as legitimate. Leadership credibility is associated with the transformational model of leadership, and this article suggests that public managers would be advantaged by practicing this particular leadership strategy.

The authors surveyed city administrators in the six-county Chicago region to test an innovation management capacity process model. Innovation management capacity is conceptualized as the function of council-staff functionality, managerial leadership capacity, and staff team management. The empirical results from 220 city administrators in 53 cities support the hypothesis that the number of municipal innovations is positively correlated with innovation management capacity, controlling for structural, socioeconomic, and demographic variables. However, this study does not find a statistical relationship between innovation effectiveness and innovation management capacity. The authors posit two possible explanations for these results and propose an alternative innovation management capacity process model for testing in future research.

This book aimed to conceptualise a construction workforce management model suitable for effectively managing workers in construction organisations. To this end, this chapter presents the conceptualised model, which consists of seven workforce management practices with their respective measurement variables. Drawing from existing theories, models, and practices, the chapter concludes that a construction organisation that will attain its strategic objectives in the current fourth industrial revolution era must be willing to promote effective recruitment and selection, compensation and benefits, performance management and appraisal, employee involvement and empowerment, training and development, as well as improving workers emotional intelligence and handling external environment pressure. These practices can promote proactiveness, participation, and improved skills and can lead to effective commitment, better quality, and flexibility within the organisation.