Montgomery Van Wart

Public‐Sector Leadership Theory: An Assessment

This article reviews the mainstream leadership literature and its perennial debates and compares it to the public-sector (administrative) leadership literature. The mainstream leadership literature fully articulated the transformational models in the 1980s and began the serious work of integrating transactional and transformational types of leadership into comprehensive models in the 1990s. Many have considered this to be a major advance over the field’s previous fragmentation and excessively narrow focus. This integration has not been reflected in the public-sector literature, in which the normative debates about what leaders should do has received most of the attention in the last decade. Although many types of leadership in the public sector have been discussed extensively, such as leadership by those in policy positions and working in community settings, administrative leadership within organizations has received scant attention and would benefit from a research agenda linking explicit and well-articulated models with concrete data in publicsector settings.

The Evolving Role of the Public Sector in Managing Catastrophic Disasters: Lessons Learned

This article focuses on the emerging role of the public sector in dealing with catastrophic disasters. An empirical analysis of the 9/11 response operations provides a detailed case study with an eye to its implications for not only emergency management practice but public policy as well. The “horde of hurricanes” inundating Florida in 2004 provides a brief example of a “routine” disaster for comparative purposes. The argument is made that the response to the extreme event of 9/11 provides clear evidence of (a) the different standards expected of the public sector in the 21st century and (b) the fundamental difference in kind between routine disasters and catastrophic disasters. The article states that the public increasingly expects better public sector leadership before, during, and after catastrophic disasters than has been seen in the past. High standards of responsiveness and the ubiquitous media compel public leaders to coordinate resources effectively.

The Sources of Ethical Decision Making for Individuals in the Public Sector

What was the value in changing ASPAs Code of Ethics? Until recently, the Code of Ethics of the American Society for Public Administration symbolized the confusion in the field rather than its insights. The fine content of the former code was lost in numerous, unequal categories and discursive language. The new code has five principles or decision-making sources upon which public administrators should draw. This article demonstrates how the five sources are prominently discussed in the literature and arc useful for practitioners. Even more, the new code should provide an authoritative framework for the field. At an elementary level, the code prohibits egregiously unethical behavior. At a more sophisticated level, the code recognizes that the really tough administrative decisions occur when two or more of the legitimate decision-making sources compete. Thus the code is far more than a list of legalistic prohibitions. It is a powerful tool for decision analysis on the one hand and an aspirational call for excellence in the profession on the other. The American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) recently streamlined and substantially revised its Code of Ethics so that it would be more useful for practitioners and better reflect the literature on public sector ethics. The new code collapses 12 categories of unequal importance into 5 overarching principles. In this article I provide the intellectual and scholarly background used in the selection of those five organizing principles. Historical Background of ASPAs Code of Ethics ASPA adopted a loose set of ethical principles in 1981. In 1984, ASPA approved a formal Code of Ethics which was expanded the next year to include implementation guidelines. When published in small type, the Code and Implementation Guidelines were two full pages. In 1993, ASPAs leadership encouraged the Professional Ethics Committee to revise the Code of Ethics. Although no specific charge was given, the following complaints were noted by the committee: 1. The highlighted principles did not distinguish between overarching principles and subordinate concepts and were too numerous to remember easily. 2. Despite good content, the code rambled and had inconsistent styles. 3. Because of the weak organization, it was difficult to find a specific point without reading the document from the beginning. The Professional Ethics Committee drew heavily on the previous 1985 code in its revision but decided to (1) use broader categories that would be recognizable to the scholarly community and memorable for the practitioner community; (2) consolidate the code into a dense, one-page document; and (3) number and display principles and points for ease of use. A subcommittee redrafted the code in the spring of 1994, then the full committee edited it, and a preliminary draft was shared with the National Council. In the fall, a draft was published in PA Times with a request for comments. After revising it based on the comments received, the revised Code of Ethics was unanimously adopted at the 1994 December meeting. Problems in Identifying Sources of Decision Making Which Are the Key Sources or Roles? One of the most commonly agreed-upon notions in the field is that administrators have numerous roles, or value sets, which are sources for the decisions they make. For example, an administrator may concentrate quite appropriately on legal issues at one point, organizational issues at another, and personal interests at still another. Although there is widespread agreement that these roles and their concomitant value sets exist, that agreement quickly dissipates when one tries to identify and name which roles or value sets are crucial for public administrators. Researchers have divided up an administrators major roles in many ways. Some researchers are famous for specializing in a single area, even though their views are broad, such as Rohrs (1989) concentration on regime values (law and legal tradition) and Fredericksons (1990) attention to social equity (public interest), but many researchers have consciously divided the roles to cover all the major decision-making bases. …

Making Matters Worse An Anatomy of Leadership Failures in Managing Catastrophic Events

Catastrophic disasters require additional leadership capabilities because extreme events overwhelm local capabilities and damage emergency response systems themselves. Therefore, leaders at all levels must adapt and rebuild the response system, even while they are addressing the pressing needs of the disaster itself. Leaders can minimize or maximize the effects of the trigger event(s) by their actions and competence in dealing with this especially difficult set of overlapping and, frequently, even inconsistent tasks. This case studies the effects of the Katrina—Rita hurricanes on New Orleans and systematically examines how poor leadership—lacking a series of critical competencies required in extreme conditions—can maximize catastrophic events.

Crisis Management Competencies

Abstract This article seeks to clarify what competencies are needed in the response phase of true crises, and to make important distinctions among related but distinct concepts which are often blurred. That is, to what extent is crisis management, in which there is some degree of systems failure, related to emergency management, change management, and transformational leadership? How are these distinctions illustrated at a competency level? The findings indicate that senior emergency managers in administrative leadership positions do not abandon emergency management practices, but rather adapt them selectively. Change management is important, but it must be targeted and time sensitive. Crises are no time to reorganize adequately operating response systems, much less try to implement wholesale organizational changes. Finally, while some of the commonly associated features of transformational leadership do apply, such as self-confidence and decisiveness, others are conspicuously deemphasized, such as the need for achievement. Fifteen competencies were identified from a field of thirty-seven as the key characteristics or behaviors of effective leaders during crises. This research reinforces our understanding that different circumstances call for different competencies. Identifying specific contexts by environmental demands or industry peculiarities, and then studying the differences will advance the normal science of leadership immensely.

Sustainability Leadership in a Local Government Context: The Administrator's Role in the Process

Sustainability in a local context involves not only environmental practices such as energy conservation, but also policy efforts to involve communities, develop organizational capacity, and encourage widespread adoption. Sustainability leadership is the promotion of an array of practices, over time, by a broad array of actors including council members, citizens, state legislators, and others—that is, the type of social change leadership defined by Van Wart in Dynamics of Leadership. However, the key role of public administrators in local sustainability has largely been ignored in the literature. Using a national database from U. S. cities, this study provides an organizational-change explanation of the important subroles of administrators in local sustainability. It finds that administrators can have a substantial function in sustainability leadership by engaging citizens, enhancing technical expertise, mobilizing financial resources, and developing managerial execution capacity for sustainability. Effective administrators help overcome dispersed public perspectives, organizational constraints, and technical challenges in local sustainability, which can result in better organizational performance of sustainability policies.

Economic Development and Public Enterprise: The Case of Rural Iowa’s Telecommunications Utilities

This article examines the creation of public enterprises as a form of economic development for rural American communities. These public enterprises have a beneficial economic development role to play when there is a private sector failure to deliver high-quality, low-cost services in critical economic areas. The study examines Iowa’s advanced telecommunications services in rural areas. Some rural areas perceive themselves to be well served by the private sector, but others perceive themselves to be woefully underserved. When rural Iowa communities believed themselves to be deprived of market-based services, they created public enterprise telecommunications utilities. Factors necessary for high-quality public enterprise telecommunication system success (as well as those leading to failure) are discussed. Also discussed are trends showing the importance of the new public enterprise telecommunications utilities.

Codes of Ethics as Living Documents: The Case of the American Society for Public Administration

Abstract This article provides a framework for creating or revising a code of ethics. It discusses the classical notions of codes of ethics, conduct, and regulations, primarily based on level of abstraction. It also examines the two major issues in constructing codes as well as a series of technical challenges. This is a case study of the formal review process of ASPA’s 1994 code of ethics in 2001–2003. The history of this process is discussed, using an analytical framework. The conclusion emphasizes the virtues of having such a debate and the types of parameters necessary to maximize the value of dialogue.

Integrating ICT adoption issues into (e-)leadership theory

While e-government and e-administration have been much researched, e-leadership has not.Traditionally, e-leadership has been defined as ICT-mediated communication only.E-leadership should include ICT adoption competence for both personal and enterprise use.Technology adoption models can be usefully adapted for leadership theory building. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are having a profound effect in society and organizations. However, the literature on ICT adoptionfrom selection to implementationhas not been well integrated into leadership theory. This is particularly true in terms of adoption. Leaders must adopt ICTs not only for their own competencean antecedent condition for what is considered e-leadership, but choose, recommend, and support implementation of ICTs for their organizations/units to use. Leaders are also expected to become effective in dealing and navigating the challenges of leading within the digital space. At this moment, there are two pertinent literatures: the technology adoption literature and the enterprise resource planning literaturewhich can be considered an important special case of leadership change management literatureand which could provide the theoretical basis for developing a unified theoretical perspective on e-leadership. This article provides a framework and propositions to connect these literatures by focusing on the effects of individual leader characteristics on the ICT adoption process from both a personal and enterprise-wide perspective. Study limitations and future research opportunities are outlined.

Introduction: Understanding the Role and Context of Senior Civil Servant Training

The training of all civil servants, including senior civil servants, is very important today, but it was not always so (Yergin and Stanislaw 1998). As recently as the eighteenth century, government was a relatively small endeavor in the “night-watchman” state model which focused on national defense, modest public safety, and justice. Since the administrative state was both relatively small and unsophisticated, the training of senior servants was not particularly important since they were simply culled from the gentry. In the nineteenth century, advanced democracies bolstered their services, adding public education, modest infrastructure, postal service, national monetary systems, and minimal services in cities. In was then that efforts were made to bolster merit principles to increase competence and reduce gross political spoils.