Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, 5th Edition

CHAPTER ELEVEN

LEADERSHIP, MANAGERIAL ROLES, AND ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

All of the preceding chapters discuss topics that pose challenges for leaders at all levels in public organizations, and the framework presented in Chapter One implies the crucial role of leadership. As earlier chapters have discussed, some perspectives on organizations question whether leaders truly wield important influences or whether they are actually under the control of more powerful circumstances that determine the course of events. Recent research on leaders in private firms tends to find that there are weak relationships between leader behaviors and objective performance measures such as sales and profit margins, or at least that the effects of leadership are highly ...