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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.

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.

This paper aims to look into employee perceptions of politics and fairness in a work setting where a new merit pay system had recently been implemented.

The results are based on employee survey responses from three governmental organizations (n=367) that had implemented analogous merit pay systems.

Hierarchical moderated regression results indicated that perceptions of politics and fairness distinctively and interactively predicted whether the pay system was perceived effective in achieving its objectives. The results suggest that some forms of politics in performance appraisals (e.g. compression) might be perceived less detrimental than others (e.g. favoritism). In a high politics environment, the pay system effectiveness varied as a function of the level of distributive justice. Voice in the pay system development only mattered in a situation where there was a low level of organizational politics.

One of the main limitations of this study is its reliance on cross‐sectional data. Future research should complement employee perceptions about pay system effectiveness with objective data from the organizations studied. Research on the effect of contextual factors, such as national culture on the motives, in and reactions to, organizational politics, is desired.

The result suggests that the adopted merit pay systems were not ineffective or detrimental per se, but that the effectiveness varied as a function of the established political and fairness climates at different levels of the organization.

This study contributes to the discussion on what are the conditions under which politics and fairness are antithetical, and when they are interactively associated with outcomes.