Abstract

There is increasing recognition that leaders exercising political astuteness are more effective at work. Understanding how political astuteness skills are acquired is valuable in all sectors and is particularly important in the case of public sector managers, for whom formal and informal politics is an integral part of their context. This article addresses the theory and empirical research gap on leadership development for political skills, by reporting on a mixed methods study of mainly senior managers from the UK, Australia and New Zealand, with a survey of 1012 and 42 interviews. We find that the sources of political astuteness development perceived as most valuable tended to be unplanned and experiential more than formal, and the paper deploys a political skills acquisition framework to explore and explain these findings.

摘要

人们越来越认识到，运用政治机敏的领导人在工作中更有效。了解如何获得政治机敏技能对所有部门都很有价值，对于公共部门管理人员来说尤其重要，对他们来说，正式和非正式的政治是他们环境中不可或缺的一部分。本文通过报告对主要来自英国、澳大利亚和新西兰的高级管理人员的混合方法研究以及对 1012 和 42 次访谈的调查，解决了政治技能领导力发展的理论和实证研究差距。我们发现，被认为最有价值的政治智慧发展的来源往往是计划外和经验性的，而不是正式的，本文部署了一个政治技能获取框架来探索和解释这些发现。