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There are important reasons to conceptualize leadership credibility and formulate explicit expectations about its causes. First, credibility can be an important precondition when leaders aim to increase performance in public organizations that face complex societal problems and volatile governance. Second, leadership credibility is often mentioned but seldom systematically studied in the public administration literature. Based on a conceptualization of five distinct systematized concepts of leadership credibility, this article develops a theory of the perceived credibility of leadership initiatives and its antecedents (leader credibility, leader investments in the initiative and rules concerning authority, benefits, and costs). We define perceived credibility of leadership initiatives as the plausibility followers assign to a leadership initiative being realized. The concept is applicable across various types of leadership initiatives including visionary and transactional leadership within the public sector. The theory illuminates how leadership credibility draws on individual follower perceptions, leader behaviors, and institutions such as formal rules and professional norms. Compared to existing conceptualizations within public administration, it is more specific as it separates credibility from its effects, its antecedents, and the applied leadership strategies. It provides a much needed theoretical vocabulary for the study of leadership credibility within public administration and adjacent disciplines.

The implementation of learning-oriented performance reforms that seek to replace performance regimes based on external accountability is an important phenomenon. This article examines how leaders respond to such reforms and what factors make leaders pursue a prospector response. The article conceptualizes and examines the phenomenon through a mixed method study in the Danish hospital sector and find that some leaders respond in a prospector way and that reactor responses disappear over time. The key result is that leader buy-in to the vision of learning-oriented performance reform and the perception of higher level commitment to the reform further prospector responses.

Public performance regimes are bedeviled by a paradox: they must engage the specialized knowledge of professionals who often perceive those very regimes as a threat to their autonomy. The authors use a mixed‐method analysis of performance management in Danish hospitals, with separate data for managers and frontline professionals, to offer two insights into this challenge. First, the study shows that managerial behavior—in the form of performance information use—matters to the way frontline professionals engage in goal‐based learning. Second, it shows that the way managers use performance data matters. When managers use data in ways that reinforce the perception of performance management as an externally imposed tool of control, professionals withdraw effort. However, when managers use data in ways that solve organizational problems, professionals engage in goal‐based learning. The threat to professional values that performance regimes pose can therefore be mitigated by managers using data in ways that complements those values.

Why public organizations adopt and abandon organizational innovations is a key question for any endeavor to explain large-scale developments in the public sector. Supplementing research within public administration on innovation with the related literature on policy diffusion, this article examines how external factors such as conformity pressure from institutionalized models, performance information from other organizations, and political pressure affect innovation adoption. By the use of two survey experiments in very different political contexts—Texas and Denmark—and a difference-in-differences analysis exploiting a reform of the political governance of public schools in Denmark, we find that public managers respond to political pressure. We find no indications that they emulate institutionalized models or learn from performance information from other organizations when they adopt organizational innovations. The results thereby point to political pressure as an important factor behind large-sca...

How frontline employees cope with perceived work pressure may be of direct influence on policy outcomes. This study contributes to the street-level bureaucracy literature in several ways. First, we study both passive client-oriented and active system-oriented coping. Second, we analyse how these coping behaviours relate to work pressure and work autonomy. Finally, this article analyses whether these relationships are conditioned by the performance regime. Using a unique set-up of hospital employees (n = 979) working in external and internal performance regimes, we find a higher level of system-oriented active coping than client-oriented passive coping. Moreover, we find that autonomy matters for system-oriented coping and work pressure for client-oriented coping, and that these relationships are context-dependent.

Public performance regimes are bedeviled by a paradox: they must engage the specialized knowledge of professionals who often perceive those very regimes as a threat to their autonomy. We use a mixed-method analysis of performance management in Danish hospitals, with separate data for managers and frontline professionals, to offer two insights into this challenge. First, we show that managerial behavior – in the form of performance information use - matters to how frontline professionals engage in goal-based learning. Second, we show that how managers use performance data matters. When managers use data in ways that reinforce the perception of performance management as an externally-imposed tool of control, professionals withdraw effort. However, when managers use data in ways that solve organizational problems, professionals engage in goal-based learning. The threat to professional values that performance regimes pose can therefore be mitigated by managers using data in ways that complements those values.

The claim that perceived organizational red tape hampers public services has become a central theme in public administration research. Surprisingly, however, few scholars have empirically examined the impact of perceived red tape on organizational performance. This article empirically analyzes how perceived organizational red tape among managers and frontline staff relates to objectively measured performance. The data consist of survey responses from teachers and principals at Danish upper secondary schools combined with grade-level administrative performance data. Based on theories of red tape and motivation crowding, the authors hypothesize that perceived organizational red tape reduces performance within such organizations. The empirical result is a small negative relationship between staff perception of red tape and performance and no relationship between manager-perceived red tape and performance.

This article examines the relationship between transformational, transactional, and empowering leadership and the innovative behavior of public sector employees. Instead of investigating their association individually, this article focuses on the interaction between different types of leadership. The analysis is based on a survey from one of Denmark’s largest hospitals (n = 1,647). The main result is that empowering leadership, which focuses on employee capacity, moderates the association between transformational leadership, which is directed at motivation, and innovative behavior. The findings emphasize the importance of not only focusing on a single leadership style but also understanding how they work in combination.

The doctrine of performance management has been promoted as an alternative to rule-based governance. Analyzing performance management as a system of rules, this article examines how performance management is adopted through rules. The question is examined based on a systematic counting and content coding of national rules within the domain of primary education in Denmark from 1989 to 2010. Contrary to the prescriptions of the performance management doctrine, the analysis shows a clear increase in the number of rules. This reflects the creation of many new rules about performance measurement without a proportionate repeal of production rules constraining the autonomy of public service providers and their managers. The result is congruent with the expectations derived from the literature on rule dynamics, which emphasizes rules as the carriers of learning and interests. The article thereby demonstrates the utility of analyzing performance management as a system of rules.

Performance budgeting systems have been introduced in the OECD countries with the proclaimed aim to increase public sector efficiency. However, the aim has often been hampered by a lack of relevant information, symbolic politics and conflicting political preferences. In this study, we investigate Danish public hospitals to see how performance budgeting works in the regions where the fundamental problems ofperformance information are negligible and the regions statutorily obligated to increase public sector efficiency by performance budgeting. The analysis shows that the regions in general have designed the performance budgeting system to increase efficiency andmitigate the dilemma of performance budgeting between increasing activity and controlling cost at the same time. Still, there are signs of moderation of the instrumental efficiency use of performance budgeting due to political concerns for equity.

This article examines the impact of politics on governmental rule production. Traditionally, explanations of rule dynamics have focused on nonpolitical factors such as the self-evolvement of rules, environmental factors, and decision maker attributes. This article develops a set of hypotheses about when, why, and how political factors shape changes in the stock of rules. Furthermore, we test these hypotheses on a unique, new data set based on all Danish primary legislation and administrative rules from 1989 to 2011 categorized into 20 different policy domains. The analysis shows that the traditional Weberian “rules breed rules” explanations must be supplemented with political explanations that take party ideology and changes in the political agenda into account. Moreover, the effect of political factors is indistinguishable across changes in primary laws and changes in administrative rules, a result that challenges the depiction of the latter rule-making process as more or less disconnected from the political domain.

During the past two decades there has been increased interest in collective or distributed forms of leadership within generic leadership theory and organizational psychology. “Distributed leadership” describes the sharing of leadership tasks between employees and managers with the aim to influence decision making, resource availability, and goal setting within an organization. This article introduces the concept of distributed leadership to the public administration literature and empirically examines the relevance of this leadership constellation for different public organization performance measures. Using survey and archival data collected at one of Denmark’s largest public hospitals, the analysis shows that hospital wards with high levels of distributed leadership also have employees who are more satisfied and innovative and who report higher levels of performance. Moreover, distributed leadership seems to be positively related with lower sickness absence among hospital employees. This indicates that distributed leadership is a relevant leadership constellation in public service producing organizations.

It has become broadly accepted that causal ideas affect institutional reforms. Now the key question is why such ideas matter. In the literature on ideas, uncertainty is presented as an important precondition for the impact of ideas. This article develops the argument that uncertainty makes causal ideas matter, because the ideas help decision makers manage uncertainty by linking problems to solutions. The more uncertainty about what is at stake and the consequences of different choices decision makers face when deciding on institutional reforms, the more causal ideas shape their choices of new institutional models. The hypothesis is probed in a cross-sectoral (telecommunications and electricity) and cross-national (Great Britain and Germany) analysis of liberalization reforms from 1980 to 2000. The analysis provides some support for the hypothesis, but also calls for its further development.

In terms of clinical procedures (to take the example used in this article, hip operations), both public and private organizations provide highly professionalized services. For this service type, our knowledge about ownership differences is sparse. To begin to fill this gap, we investigate how the ownership of hip clinics affects professional behaviour, treatment quality and patient satisfaction. The comparison of private and public hip clinics is based on data from the Danish Hip Arthroplasty Register and the Danish Central Patient Register combined with 20 semi-structured interviews. We find that private clinics employ stronger individual financial incentives and try harder to increase the income/costs ratio than do public clinics. Private clinics optimize non-clinical factors such as waiting time much more than public clinics and have fewer complication-prone patients than public clinics. However, the clinical procedures are very similar in the two types of clinics. Private clinics do not achieve better clinical results, but patient satisfaction is nevertheless higher with private clinics. The implication is that ownership matters for highly professionalized services, but professionalism neutralizes some – but not all – ownership differences.

Den offentlige sektor kan godt innovere. Nogle af de mest banebrydendeinnovationer i samfundet såsom internettet er faktisk startet som offentligsektor-innovation. Men der gælder særlige vilkår for innovation i denoffentlige sektor, hvor demokratisk beslutningstagning og den bureaukratiskeorganisationsform er et grundvilkår.