Leading for a purpose - Managerial leadership and strategic performance in public organisations

Abstract

Public sector organisations exist to achieve outcomes that will benefit the society or community they serve.1 The extent to which they succeed in this can be termed their strategic performance. Many factors influence the performance of public sector organisations in this respect. In particular, the operating environment, political leadership, and internal managerial leadership can all affect their strategic performance. Of particular interest is the way the operating environment (and especially its political leadership dimension) interacts with strategic leadership efforts by executives to affect strategic performance in public organisations. Understanding this interaction better should help to improve the strategic performance of public organisations. This paper is based on a research project, undertaken as part of the Master of Public Management degree at Victoria University of Wellington, which explored perceptions of strategic leadership issues in New Zealand local government organisations. The project involved a review of the literature on leadership in organisations and managing and leading public organisations, and a piece of primary research. Strategic leadership in public organisations is about leading an organisation so that it can contribute effectively to the realisation of beneficial outcomes for the community it serves. This has to be done in an environment where the outcomes to be pursued and the broad strategy for pursuing them are determined by a politically elected or appointed body. The research was concerned with a specific instance, the New Zealand local authority. The political body in this case is the elected council responsible for a region or municipality, and the organisation (also, confusingly, usually referred to as ‘the council’) is the council’s chief executive and employees. The research explored leadership and goal and strategy formulation with a small group of executives from local government organisations, in the context of the environments in which they operate. Research participants, who were drawn from three council organisations, answered questions in an interview process on their understanding of various factors influencing strategic leadership efforts in their organisations. From this exploration, some tentative conclusions about relationships between political leadership, strategic leadership efforts by executives and strategic performance can be drawn, with the proviso that the sample is small, and the data consists of participants’ perceptions and opinions rather than hard evidence.