What is Public about Public Leadership? Exploring Implicit Public Leadership Theories

Abstract

Abstract While scholarship on public leadership has recently gained momentum in public administration, it is unclear how researchers should account for the “public” in public leadership. We shed new light on this issue by introducing the approach of Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs) to the field of public administration. This socio-cognitive approach suggests that people’s everyday, rather than scholarly, theories about the characteristics of leaders provide important explanations of how they respond to leadership situations. We investigate whether people hold Implicit Public Leadership Theories (IPLTs) and explore how these images of public leaders contrast with generic ILTs. We extract these taxonomies from data gathered in a survey experiment in Germany (N = 1,072). Results show that IPLTs have overlaps with generic ILTs but are unique in terms of rule abidance and innovation-orientation. In contrast, charismatic aspects of leadership only figure in generic ILTs. The structure of ILTs, both generic and public, is surprisingly stable across the subsamples of public and non-public employees. We discuss how the findings may assist public management scholars in the development of explicit theories of public leadership and derive a research agenda based on a socio-cognitive approach.