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This article seeks to provide a comprehensive model of leadership applicable to managers in the public sector. Although it is based on the leadership literature, the format is intended for practitioners and teachers; that is, although it uses a highly detailed specification of leadership elements, it purposely oversimplifies causal relationships. Leaders first assess their organization and the environment (8 elements are identified) as well as look at the constraints that they may face (4 elements). From this information they set goals including deciding on the level of focus and the degree of change emphasis. Leaders bring to the concrete leadership situation a number of traits (10 elements) and overarching skills such as communication capability (4 elements). The totality of leaders' actions are perceived as styles based on key factors such as decisional input, which are more or less appropriate based on the situation. Leaders may or may not have a broad range of styles at which they excel. Finally, the model identifies concrete management behaviors that leaders typically engage in-with more or less success based on their styles, traits, and skills. These behaviors are categorized as largely being task-oriented, people-oriented, or organization oriented (21 elements). Ultimately, leaders evaluate their organizations' and their own performance, and the cycle begins again. The model's strength is the detailed articulation of leadership elements (50 including goal setting and leader evaluation).

Even though e-leadership was broadly defined in 2001 (Avolio et al.), there has been surprisingly little progress (Avolio et al., 2014). In order to make a better progress, the authors recommend dividing the field into four quadrants to facilitate the research focus. It can be divided by e-leadership phases (the adoption of technology phase vs the quality of use of technology phase), as well as the purposes (e-leadership as virtual communication vs e-leadership as management of organizational structures). The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This study provides a model of e-leadership as communication adoption at the individual level (ECAM_i). Structural equation modeling was used to test a previously published model by Van Wart et al. (2017a). The model included select traits and skills (as antecedent conditions), awareness of ICTs, evaluation of ICTs, willingness to expend effort in learning about ICTs, intention to use ICTs, and facilitating conditions.

The overall model demonstrates a good fit. It can be concluded that the ECAM_i represents a valid model for understanding e-leaders’ technological adoption. It is also found that while all select skills and traits are significant – energy, responsibility and analytical skills stand above the others.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this represents the first effort to operationalize e-leadership.

Municipal wireless networks (MWN) strive to provide broader access to the internet with some form of governmental support, usually from a city. They have generated considerable interest this decade with hundreds being launched, and recently have garnered notoriety with the withdrawal of providers like EarthLink, MetroFi, and Kite from the MWN market leaving a number of large cities like Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Portland, OR, scrambling with half completed systems, and many other cities scuttling ambitious plans to “carpet” their jurisdictions. This paper discusses the rationale for providing a public service in general; the specific arguments used for and against municipalities developing MWNs; and the various most common business models. We then briefly review the Philadelphia case and contrast it with the case of Riverside, CA, which employs a different business model. We conclude by reviewing the generalizations that can be made about the policies surrounding MWNs at this point in their evolution.

This article investigates the leadership style of Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of Aotearoa New Zealand. It uses the model of Social Change Leadership (SCL) to evaluate her approach to leadership as well as some notable successes and failures of her premiership.

The article adopts a grounded theory approach in which five increasingly refined research iterations were conducted to detect and articulate patterns of significance (Strauss and Corbin, 1997). Ultimately, the team selected 19 leadership examples to be cross referenced with the SCL model.

The article finds that in terms of leadership style Ardern corresponds closely to the SCL framework. The 19 examples show clusters of behavior that clearly denote a SCL constellation in terms of her approach. It also finds, however, that in terms of performance goals there is a less clear picture with less coherence to the framework. These findings in turn point to an interesting potential tension in the SCL model that has hitherto not been acknowledged.

The article is the first of its kind to apply SCL to a major global political leader. It is the first structured, academic assessment of Ardern's leadership. It adds a theoretical contribution to ongoing discussions on the efficacy and utility of the SCL framework.

The ethics of recent productivity improvement strategies requires an open and inclusive dialogue among diverse stakeholders, as well as customer-based accountability. By contrast, the expertise of managers in the past tended to drive a public productivity improvement process that involved little dialogue and customer-based accountability. This article examines fundamental values in productivity improvement and relates these to increased dialogue and cusomer-based accountability.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the relationship between administrative entrepreneurship and bureaucratic (administrative) leadership in government bureaucracies.

This topic is empirically examined in the context of India’s district administration. A within-case analysis is conducted of a District Collector’s efforts to initiate change using a case study research methodology. Data from elite interviews, analyzed in NVivo 11, are used to draw descriptive inferences that are tested against a set of conditions using the process tracing technique.

The District Collector in the study aspired to be a transformational leader by demonstrating administrative entrepreneurship, but in reality due to the formal organizational structures, the style of bureaucratic leadership functioning is transactional.

This study contributes to furthering public leadership theory as it opens up the classic question: what type of leadership is expected out of administrative leaders in government bureaucracies? This is a critical issue given that District Collectors are responsible for the welfare of one-sixth of the world’s population.

District Collectors need to get comfortable with the duality inherent in their position – that their organizational structures allow them to be both administratively entrepreneurial and rigid – and learn the art of navigating these complex structures. Public sector training academies for career civil servants need to engage with the subject of administrative entrepreneurship and leadership.

This is the first study, to the best of knowledge, to develop an analytical typology that can be used as a diagnostic tool for administrative leaders to holistically assess their leadership style.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the leadership roles the Ethiopian civil service managers preferably embody in their setting. As such, contextually preferred roles were identified and briefly contrasted with the leadership literature. It also outlined the directions for the future research agenda.

Q-methodology, an approach reasonably like “grounded-theory” was used. It is suited to embrace life as lived by the actors themselves. In this specific case, Q-methodology allows the managers to conceptualize their definitions or preferences of leadership roles. The data were obtained from 51 managers working in the federal civil service organizations covering a broad range of public policy and service fields.

Based on the Q-sorts of 51 managers, the authors found three distinct yet interrelated archetypes of role preferences, which the authors labeled as the change agents, affective leaders and result-oriented realists. The study, however, demonstrates that although the ostensible echoes of each of these perspectives were professed, there were overlooked functions that are needed to be performed for full practice of each.

Understanding the contextually preferred leadership roles, if considered in designing the management training and development programs, could prove productive. It also informs the staff recruitment and promotion activities of the civil service organizations.

Conceptualizations of public leadership roles are abound in the literature. As they mostly emerged in a Western context, their applicability to other settings is questionable. Studying the subject in the context of Ethiopia, this paper contributes to the growing body of African literature on administrative leadership and informs the practice as well as the scholarship in this area.