Public Sector Leadership For The 21st Century

This is the first report to examine key leadership issues across OECD Member countries, including the strategies and practices governments are adopting, and the lessons from country experiences so far.

The forces of globalization are shifting our world, including the public sector, away from hierarchy and command and control toward one of collaboration and networks. The way public leadership is thought about and practiced must be, and is being, transformed. This volume in the "Transformational Trends in Governance & Democracy" series explores what the shift looks like and also offers guidance on what it should look like. Specifically, the book focuses on the role of "career leaders" - those in public service - who are agents of change not only in their own organizations, but also in their communities and policy domains. These leaders work in network settings, making connections and collaborating to create public value and advance the common good. Featuring the insights of an authoritative group of contributors, the volume offers a mix of scholarship, from philosophical discussions to conceptual models to empirical studies that, taken together, will help inform the transformation of public leadership that is already underway.

A truly international examination of public sector leadership, this book explores the ways leaders of developed nations are addressing current challenges. The overriding question explored by the authors is how public leadership across the globe addresses new challenges (such as security, financial, demographic), new expectations of leaders, and what public sector leadership means in the new era. The book allows the reader to view a large number of situations across the globe to better understand the relation between context and leadership. It integrates the two fields of leadership and public administration, providing a wide-ranging and complementary empirical context to the topic. Transcending state-centered perspectives, the authors include new developments in governance and public private sector collaboration while retaining a focus on the public values involved. The chapters address public sector leadership issues in a wide array of nations, integrating international perspectives with a globally diverse authorship. Several chapters address issues of collaboration across sectors, changing roles in the New Public Management paradigm, and corresponding new visions of leadership. Several of the chapters are explicitly comparative, including a study of mental health leadership training topics in eight nations, central banking in Europe, and efficiency studies in Britain, Denmark, and Norway. The chapters can be used as thought-provoking case studies as part of a supplemental text, and are accompanied by substantial bibliographies. Scholars, students, and practitioners in leadership, public policy and administration, and organization studies will find this volume a useful reference.

Truly global in scope and ambition, the 21st Century Public Manager addresses key trends, challenges, and opportunities facing public managers across contexts and regimes. This accessible textbook aims to inspire public managers in rethinking their roles, skills, and values as they enter a VUCA world-one characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. It is written for aspiring and current public managers in graduate schools and executive education programs.

This book combines academic wisdom and practitioners’ insights to critically examine the challenges faced by civil service systems in the 21st Century. Moreover, the book evaluates what types of civil servants are needed to tackle critical issues such as rapidly ageing populations, increased urbanisation, environmental degradation, swift technological advancement, and globalisation of the market place in the social and economic realm of the 21st Century. Its topics range from civil service development in post-Soviet countries indicating that peer-to-peer learning is the way forward, to civil service reforms in China, Japan, and Korea in their quest to satisfy their citizens demands and expectations in the 21st Century. Other topics span across regional analyses by focusing on current dominant trends and challenges confronting administrative and civil service systems, vis-à-vis technology, innovation and “big data”, and their disruptive effects on society and government. This book will be of interest to both academics and practitioners, and would-be builders of the 21st Century world.

The forces of globalization are shifting our world away from hierarchy and command and control toward one of collaboration and networks. This volume explores what the shift looks like and also offers guidance on what it should look like. It focuses on the role of "career leaders" - those in public service - who are agents of change.

The demands associated with good governance and good public management are at an all-time high. Yet the discipline of Canadian public administration is in flux, and the time is ripe for an open and frank analysis of its state and possibilities. Canadian Public Administration in the 21st Century brings together emerging voices in Canadian public administration to consider current and future prospects in the discipline. A new wave of scholars has brought new energy, ambition, and perspectives to the field. In this book they take stock and build on established traditions and current trends, focusing on emerging, or reemerging, issues and challenges. The book identifies and analyzes the emergent research agenda in public administration, focusing on Canada to illustrate key concepts, frameworks, and issues. It consists of three thematically organized sections, exploring processes, structures, and principles of Canadian public administration. It addresses the broad, emergent trend in processes of service delivery or policy implementation generally referred to as the new public governance. It then critically examines the structural and institutional dimensions of Canadian public administration in light of recent directions in the field. A complete exploration of new principles, methods, values, and ethics in Canadian public administration research and practice rounds out the coverage. Bringing together emerging scholars, the book bridges the gap between established analytical traditions and novel theoretical and methodological approaches in the field. It proposes a new, more interdisciplinary public administration increasingly focused on governance and not solely on management.