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.

中文翻译：

---

什么是公共领导力的公共？探索内隐的公共领导理论

摘要

尽管有关公共领导力的奖学金最近在公共管理领域得到了发展，但尚不清楚研究人员应如何解释公共领导力中的“公共”。通过将内隐领导理论（ILT）引入公共管理领域，我们为这个问题提供了新的思路。这种社会认知方法表明，人们关于领导者特征的日常理论，而不是学术性理论，为人们如何应对领导情况提供了重要的解释。我们调查人们是否持有内隐式公共领导理论（IPLT），并探讨这些公共领导者形象与普通ILT的对比。我们从德国的一项调查实验中收集的数据中提取了这些分类法（N= 1,072）。结果表明，IPLT与通用ILT有重叠之处，但在遵守规则和创新导向方面却是独一无二的。相反，一般ILT中仅体现领导的魅力。普通和公共ILT的结构在公共和非公共雇员子样本中都非常稳定。我们讨论这些发现如何帮助公共管理学者发展明确的公共领导理论，并基于社会认知方法得出研究议程。