Public sector leadership: New perspectives for research and practice

In this paper, we aim to portray the state of the art in public sector leadership in order to recommend directions for research and training practice. To this end, we review the scattered strands of literature on public sector leadership (PSL) and classify them in a single framework. The results of the study suggest that public sector leadership is emerging as a distinctive and autonomous domain in public administration/public management studies, although the debate is still underdeveloped compared to business administration studies. Leadership skills truly do matter in improving the performance of public sector organizations, and it is highly likely that the optimum leadership style is an integrated one: Public sector leaders should behave mainly as transformational leaders, moderately leveraging transactional relationships with their followers and heavily leveraging the importance of preserving integrity and ethics in the fulfillment of tasks.