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Leadership can cultivate shared understandings of goals within organizations. Transformational leaders engage in vision-sharing, whereas transactional leaders apply contingent rewards and sanctions. To set the stage for better performing organizations, public managers could lead in ways to improve the communication that flows internally in public organizations, defined as the internal communication performance. Previous studies have linked transformational leadership with internal communication performance in public organizations, but no studies have considered the broader array of leadership strategies and their combination. The purpose of this study is to assess the strength of the relationship between different forms of leadership (transformational and transactional) and internal communication.

The study is based on a balanced panel dataset of 751 employees.

The analysis corroborates the existing findings of a relationship between transformational and internal communication, and it identifies a relationship between transactional leadership through verbal rewards and internal communication.

In so doing, the study brings new insights to our understanding of how leaders in public organizations can improve the internal communication in their organizations, which has been linked to, among others, how employees themselves perceive the red tape and performance within public organizations.

Neutrality has traditionally been considered a key trait of the civil service in Western democracies. The conception of the neutral bureaucracy is closely linked to the notion of the prominent politics–administration dichotomy of the two spheres of politics and administration, as advocated by Max Weber (1980) and Woodrow Wilson (1887). According to conventional wisdom, the firm and encompassing implementation of the merit principle realises the idea of a neutral bureaucracy. In that respect, neutrality and merit-based recruitments are often considered the opposite of politicisation. Conventionally, a neutral bureaucracy is considered to assure competence and immunity against opportunistic ideas brought in by volatile, sometimes erratic political leadership. Because elected politicians come and go with elections, they cannot ensure that political decisions are carried out based on the ‘best’ available knowledge. In that sense, bureaucrats are conceived as neutral, obedient servants that subordinate their behaviour to the will of political masters, to the law and the common good. However, there is no strict politics–administration dichotomy in contemporary politico-administrative systems. Empirical findings from the late 1970s onwards demonstrated that bureaucrats are by no means as neutral and ‘apolitical’ as assumed, but rather remarkably involved in political processes. This chapter discusses the literature on neutral competence and presents an empirical analysis of Danish and British civil servants’ accounts of neutrality. This chapter concludes by suggesting the concept of competent neutrality and discussing implications for our understanding of bureaucratic neutrality.

Based on the assumption that the identity and self-understanding of an academic discipline determines how it conceptualizes different domains of social reality, including how it imports and/or exports concepts from or to other disciplines, this chapter presents some of the findings of a major ongoing comparative and cross-disciplinary study of how five key concepts within the combined fields of crisis management and reputation management are applied in three different disciplinary contexts. In this chapter, however, the focus is on just one of these concepts: the concept of reputation.