Leadership in the public sector: A meta‐analysis of styles, outcomes, contexts, and methods
Published date | 01 November 2022 |
Author | Leonie Backhaus,Rick Vogel |
Date | 01 November 2022 |
DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13516 |
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Leadership in the public sector: A meta-analysis of styles,
outcomes, contexts, and methods
Leonie Backhaus | Rick Vogel
Faculty of Business, Economics and Social
Sciences, Department of Socioeconomics, Chair
of Public Management, Universität Hamburg,
Hamburg, Germany
Correspondence
Leonie Backhaus, Faculty of Business, Economics
and Social Sciences, Department of
Socioeconomics, Chair of Public Management,
Universität Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 9, 20146
Hamburg, Germany.
Email: leonie.backhaus@uni-hamburg.de
Abstract
Leadership has attracted growing attention among scholars and practitioners in
public administration. With the rising availability of study results, however, it
becomes increasingly difficult to keep track under which conditions leadership
does or does not make a difference in the public sector. This study provides a
meta-analysis of administrative leadership and various correlates that research has
theorized as outcomes of leadership. The results of a multi-level random-effects
meta-analysis based on 486 effect sizes from 151 studies show that correlations
are stronger for the achievement of beneficial than for the prevention of detrimen-
tal outcomes, as well as for group- and organization-related than for employee-
related outcomes. Moderation analyses reveal that leadership style, administrative
tradition, administrative subfield, and methodological factors explain heterogene-
ity in effect sizes.
Evidence for Practice
•Leadership in the public sector is positively and largely consistently related to
beneficial outcomes, such as performance, and negatively associated with detri-
mental outcomes, such as turnover.
•Within the range of the analyzed leadership styles, it is not particularly important
how public leaders lead —as long as they do lead. Laissez-faire leadership is
confirmed to be a largely ineffective style of leadership. Leaders should be simi-
larly cautious with the exercise of controlling forms of leadership.
•The broad range of leadership styles helps HR practitioners to adjust leadership
trainings to the available talents and given settings. Public leaders may feel
encouraged that there are many ways to become effective leaders.
•Administrative tradition matters, as the leadership-outcome relationship is less strong
in some continental European as well as East Asian traditions than in the Anglo-
American tradition. For example, this applies to transformational leadership.
INTRODUCTION
Leadership is among the core concepts in public adminis-
tration (PA) scholarship (Chapman et al., 2016; Crosby &
Bryson, 2018; Ospina, 2017; Van Wart, 2003,2013a). Two
decades ago, research onleadership in the public sectorwas
at a nascent but still limited stage, severely lagging behind
general leadership studies. Van Wart (2003), in his review of
the then available literature, arrived at the conclusion that
“the needs are great and the research opportunities are
manifold”(p. 225). Since then, PA scholars have frequently
echoed this call and seized the opportunities for leadership
research (Chapman et al., 2016; Van Wart, 2013a;Vogel&
Masal, 2015). The number of available studies has grown con-
siderably, forming a flourishing stream in PA scholarship.
The growing availability and diversity of studies, however,
does not make it easier to answer one of the core questions
of leadership: “To what degree does leadership make a differ-
ence?”(Van Wart, 2003,p.221).Althoughscholarsandpracti-
tioners would largely agree that leadership is an important
Received: 18 June 2021 Revised: 11 April 2022 Accepted: 26 April 2022
DOI: 10.1111/puar.13516
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
© 2022 The Authors. Public Administration Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Public Administration.
986 Public Admin Rev. 2022;82:986–1003.
wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar
phenomenon that can make a difference in public organiza-
tions, there is little clarity beyond this general consent. The
polyphony begins with different conceptualizations of leader-
ship characteristics and behaviors. A majority of scholars has
focused on transformational leadership (Chapman et al., 2016),
but many more leadership styles have recently been exam-
ined. Some scholars have voiced concerns about the adop-
tion of generic leadership styles and have begun to develop
leadership constructs that account for the specificities of pub-
lic leadership (Fernandez et al., 2010;Tummers&Knies,2016;
Vogel et al., 2020). There is thus a plethora of leadership
styles, and it is unclear if there are differences in the differ-
ence they potentially make.
Conceptual diversity does not only characterize leader-
ship as an independent variable, but also the outcomes of
leadership, that is, the dependent variables in the leader-
ship equation. Consistent with an understanding of
leadership as a process of influencing others (Yukl &
Gardner, 2020), many scholars have examined how leader-
ship influences the attitudes, motivations, and behaviors of
followers, such as job satisfaction (e.g., Park & Rainey, 2008),
work engagement (e.g., Ancarani et al., 2020), or individual
performance (e.g., Hassan, Park, & Raadschelders, 2019).
However, the outcomes differ strongly in kind and may
relate, for instance, to employees (such as work engagement;
Tummers & Knies, 2013), groups (such as team climate;
Kroll & Vogel, 2014), or the organization (such as organiza-
tional performance; Jacobsen & Andersen, 2015). Further-
more, leadership may not only be effective in bringing about
beneficial outcomes but also in preventing detrimental out-
comes, such as turnover intentions (e.g., Park & Rainey, 2008).
It is unclear, however, if leadership makes the same differ-
ence across outcomes of different kinds and valence.
With the growth of leadership studies in PA, more
insights from various subfields of the public sector and
from different national sites have become available. While
this diversity is both needed and welcomed, it also raises
the question whether leadership is effective in different
contexts to similar extents (e.g., Slyke et al., 2006). For
example, leadership has been studied in subfields of the
public sector as diverse as the federal government
(e.g., Caillier, 2014), education (e.g., Bauwens et al., 2019),
and the military (e.g., Hattke et al., 2018). The emergence
and effectiveness of leadership may be contingent on the
distinct professional cultures in each of these subfields.
Leadership may also co-vary with national and adminis-
trative traditions and cultures (House et al., 2004; Painter
& Peters, 2010). Administrative systems are likely to be
characterized by different configurations of “substitutes
for leadership”(Kerr & Jermier, 1978), which may enhance
or neutralize the effects of leadership. In short, the extent
to which insights from leadership studies can be general-
ized and transferred across different administrative sub-
fields and systems remains an open issue. It is therefore
fair to say that scholarship has not yet fully accounted for
the context in which leadership occurs (e.g., Ospina, 2017;
Van Wart, 2013a; Vogel & Masal, 2015).
Considerable variation occurs not only in the what and
where of studying leadership in the public sector, but also in
the how. Leadership scholars can choose from a large pool of
research instruments and designs when they decide how to
gather data and how to arrange the analysis. Among the
decisions with which researchers frequently struggle is whom
to ask for leadership ratings, which data sources to combine,
and when to measure the variables. Such decisions may have
important consequences for the results that will be obtained
and for the claims that can be made. In the broader PA com-
munity, there is increasing awareness of these issues, most
evidently reflected in discussions about common method
bias (George & Pandey, 2017; Jakobsen & Jensen, 2015;
Meier & O’Toole, 2013). How methodological factors interfere
with the association between leadership and outcomes, how-
ever, has not yet been assessed on a broad scale.
To conclude, readers of PA journals face a growing
body of leadership research but are increasingly left puz-
zled with what they can learn from single studies and pass
on to practitioners, given the variety of styles, outcomes,
contexts, and methods in this scholarship. The present
study aims to synthesize previous findings in an up-t o-date
and integrative review of quantitative leadership research
in the public sector. The focus is on administrative leader-
ship, that is, the leadership of non-elected leaders in public
sector settings, rather than on political or community lead-
ership (Van Wart, 2013a). To what extent is administrative
leadership related to outcomes of different kinds and valence?
How do leadership styles as well a s administrative traditions
and subfields moderate these relationships? Which role do
methodological factors, such as rating methods, data sources,
and research designs, play in explaining variance in the
leadership-outcome relationship?
To address these questions, this article presents a meta-
analysis of the relationship between administrative leader-
ship and various correlates that previous scholarship has
conceptualized as outcomes of leadership. The study builds
on 151 studies (N=2,819,591) published in PA journals
since 2000 and conducts a multi-leve l random-effects
meta-analysis with moderator analyses. The detailed find-
ings improve the development of theory and research and
inform administrative practice. Scholars learn about under-
researched phenomena and important contingencies of
leadership in the public sector, thus being provided with
guidance in setting the agenda for future research and
moving the field forward. Practitioners can conclude which
leadership styles are worth developing and where to pay
attention when transferring these styles from one context
to another.
LEADERSHIP IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR: STYLES,
OUTCOMES, CONTEXTS, AND METHODS
This section develops the conceptual framework for the
meta-analysis along the four lines introduced above, each
addressing an important question that needs to be
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW 987
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