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Public service failures need to be recovered to sustain citizen satisfaction with public services. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of charismatic leadership in leveraging public service recovery performance (PSRP) as well as a moderated mediation mechanism underlying such an effect.

Public employees and their managers from local governments were recruited to provide the data for this research. Data analysis was conducted through structural equation modeling.

From the research results, charismatic leadership demonstrated the positive association with PSRP via public service motivation (PSM) as a mediator. Besides, serving culture was also found to play a moderating role to strengthen the positive links between charismatic leadership and PSRP as well as PSM.

The research model adds further insights into charismatic leadership and service recovery knowledge through the relationship between these two concepts as well as a moderated mediation mechanism underpinning this relationship.

This article describes how effective public service leaders are choosing to lead in exceptionally challenging circumstances. It outlines the current crucible of demand for excellent services and significant cost reduction and radical organisational change. At its core, it shows how some public service leaders are making great progress by making five key choices ‐ demonstrating bold, engaging and collaborative leadership; majoring on the transformational not transactional elements of change; not letting the inevitable uncertainties get in the way of intense engagement of their people; making tough calls on priorities; and steering their leadership teams and broader leadership communities towards genuine collaboration and connectedness.The article also identifies six leadership frames that public service leaders are drawing on: confidence; safe uncertainty(Mason, 1983); employee engagement; trustworthy leadership; collective, mutually supportive leadership; and appreciative, transformational choices.

Australia is one of the Anglophone countries that readily adapted to a public management approach. Reforms since the 1980s have shown remarkable breadth, longevity and significance. The reforms acknowledge failure of existing approaches and the need to address management deficiencies, fiscal stress and increased complexity. This chapter discusses four cases, reflecting leadership from core agencies as well as executives. Financial management reform was initially led by Finance, and then a broader agenda was pursued through a senior management committee under the Department of the Prime. However, devolution of responsibilities from central agencies did not appear to make managers more accountable. Finance was weakened by devolution and unable to exercise appropriate leadership, and agencies did not integrate performance management reform with internal planning processes. By contrast, a one-stop shopping service for welfare was successful, although later folded in the Department of Human Services. DPMC also launched reform process in the 2010s, although not a priority of the prime minister, some recommendations, such as leadership development and talent management, were implemented that increased public service capacity. The case of Australia shows that in spite of variable political support and leadership by central agencies, a relatively stable environment (governments serving multiple terms) allowed implementation to proceed in the mid-term, including incentives to ensure responsiveness at department levels.

The public administration literature on representative bureaucracy identifies several advantages from having a diverse public service workforce, but it has not explicitly focused on leadership. For its part, the public sector leadership literature has largely ignored the issue of gender. The purpose of this paper is to rectify these limitations by advancing the argument that having a representative bureaucracy is fundamentally a leadership issue. Moreover, it assesses the extent to which representativeness has been achieved in the Canadian federal public service.

The paper begins with a discussion of the importance of a representative bureaucracy for democratic governance. In the next section, the case is made that representativeness is fundamentally intertwined with the concept of administrative leadership. Then, the article provides an interpretive case study analysis of the federal public service in Canada, which is the global leader in terms of women's representation in public service leadership positions.

The initial breakthrough for gender representation in the Canadian federal public service was 1995. From that point onward, the proportion of women in the core public administration exceeded workforce availability. However, women continued to be modestly under-represented among the senior leadership cadre throughout the early 2000s. The watershed moment for gender representation in the federal public service was 2011 when the number of women in the executive group exceeded workforce availability for the first time. Significant progress toward greater representativeness in the other target groups has also been made but ongoing vigilance is required.

The study only determines the passive representation of women in the Public Service of Canada and is not able to comment on the extent to which women are substantively represented in federal policy outcomes.

The paper traces the Canadian federal government's progress toward achieving gender representation over time, while commenting on the extent to which the public service reflects broader diversity. In doing so, it explicitly links representation to leadership, which the existing literature fails to do, by arguing that effective administrative leadership is contingent upon having a diverse public service. Moreover, it highlights the importance of gender for public sector leadership, which hitherto has been neglected.

This paper introduces the findings of an unusual international endeavour that combines action research with leadership development for 40 senior officials from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. The four nation Leadership Across Borders programme, co‐delivered by the governments' business schools of each country, set out to explore and understand some of the most significant facets of public service ranging from citizen engagement to whole‐of‐government complexity, and from the economic downturn to crisis management. Over the 10 months of the programme, the senior group engaged with heads of the public service, leading academics, delivery experts, leaders of civic society and scores of street level service users. This paper highlights the critical importance of understanding complexity and the role of ‘systems thinking’ in dealing with modern problems. But it also points to a new order of innovation required of leaders if they are to bring value to problems such as deprivation and global financial crises, and if they are to successfully bring about citizen‐centred services in increasingly complex societies.

When public employees demonstrate ambidexterity in serving customers, through efficiently providing customers with current public services as well as exploring ways to create more, new public service solutions for customers, they may activate customers’ co-creating value with the public organization. The purpose of this research is to examine the role of public employees’ individual ambidexterity in promoting customer value co-creation. This research also seeks to investigate the levers behind individual ambidexterity, including ambidextrous leadership as an antecedent and public service motivation (PSM) as an enhancer for the leadership effect.

Public employees from public legal service agencies and customer companies they had served have been invited to participate and provide data for this research. The data collated have been analyzed using multilevel structural equation modeling approach.

Ambidextrous leadership was positively associated with frontline public employees’ individual ambidexterity. This positive association was enhanced by PSM among frontline public employees. In turn, frontline public employees’ individual ambidexterity demonstrated a positive link with customer value co-creation through the mediation mechanisms of customer–employee identification and customer–organization identification.

This research extends and marks the convergence between ambidexterity and customer value co-creation research streams.

This chapter examines the role and importance of leadership in public management reform through the experience of Hong Kong. It aims to identify the gap between leadership in public organizations and public management reform in both theory and research and to make recommendations on how the gap can be bridged, particularly under the Asian context. It is a major irony that while both leadership and public management reform have a common concern of fostering positive change in public organizations, these two streams of research are separated, incompatible, and even conflicting. While leadership study is influenced by disciplines such as the psychology and emphasizes a multifaceted approach, most public management reforms are based on the New Public Management (NPM) model which is economics-oriented and structure-driven. Through studying the role of leadership in the public management reform in Hong Kong, it is argued the hollowing-out of leadership in reform is often one of the leading causes for the failure to achieve the expected outcomes. This chapter will elaborate its argument in the following sequence. First, it will review the generic literature on leadership to highlight the importance and relevancy of leadership for public organizations. Second, it will point out the leadership crisis in public management reform caused by the dominance of the NPM model. Finally, it will discuss the negative impact of the hollowing-out of leadership on public management reform and how this problem should be tackled.

Recent criticism of the UK's public sector has rekindled the debate about public service leadership in comparison with the private sector, particularly in the context of the financial austerity we face for years ahead. This article first reviews recent research on leadership and compares the public and private sectors, finding both commonalities and differences. The article then considers the kind of leadership required of public service leaders in the present economic climate and to handle crises and emergencies. The place of individual leadership and collective leadership and consensus is discussed, with a suggestion that charismatic individual leadership may play a more important role in the public sector than it typically has done in less turbulent times in the past. The public sector is becoming more like the private sector in this respect. The article ends with key implications of the analysis for leadership in practice.

This study aims mainly to examine the mediating role of public service motivation (PSM) in the relationship between servant leadership and employee performance in the context of Ethiopian public sector organization employees.

A survey design has been used, where all the 154 employees from seven public sector organizations participated. A confirmatory factor analysis employed on the 149 valid responses further validated the hypothesized model.

The study supported the significant relationship between servant leadership, public service motivation and job performance. Moreover, it exhibited a complete mediating effect of public service motivation, on the relationship between servant leadership and an employee's job performance.

The successful mediation of PSM into servant leadership and job performance indicates that the new government must focus on empowering colleagues to have a say in the department-level policy formulation process.

The novelty of this study stems from the fact that it is a rare study that investigates the relationship between PSM and servant leadership and job performance in Africa, particularly in Ethiopia, where a regime change in 2018 triggered a flurry of reforms to the public sector work culture.

The purpose of this paper is to advance critical theoretical insights into the idea of “relational bureaucratic leadership” and its implications for public administration in developing countries (DCs). In doing so, the paper sets out new agendas for public service governance in DCs that recognizes the changing nature and emerging complexities of both the public service and society.

This is an exploratory study which synthesises literature in management, human resources, leadership studies and public administration, to understand the limitations of mainstream approaches to bureaucratic leadership in DCs, particularly SSA, with a view of identifying alternative practices.

Findings from this paper suggest that public service governance in DCs are embedded in complex dynamics between power relations, complexity and social norms, and bureaucratic leaders should, therefore, focus on building relationships as a means of deepening trust and enhancing cooperation among critical actors. The case for a shift in focus to “relationality” reflects changes in the broader global political economy, including emerging wicked and multi-faceted policy problems that require heterodox and context-sensitive responses from governments and greater collaboration among key stakeholders.

The analysis of the limitations of traditional approaches to public service governance in this essay reveals the importance of a shift from a preoccupation with conventional organizational forms and functions, to place greater emphasis on social networks and relationships, as a way of improving leadership efficiency in the public services of DCs.