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Employee resilience (ER) is often needed to face demands inherent in public sector work. Some types of demands, however, may hinder its development, rather than provide the type of challenging adversity from which resilience can develop. Public sector job demands have been a long-standing issue for public workplaces and employees but are also growing in salience as organisations face an increasingly variable, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment. Drawing on the Job Demands–Resources model and the challenge/hindrance stress literature, this multi-level study of Aotearoa New Zealand civil servants (n = 11,533) in 65 public sector organisations shows that ER is negatively affected by demands such as job insecurity, unclear job and organisational goals, and inter-agency collaboration. However, organisational resource constraints are positively associated with ER. This study identifies core PA job and organisational demands that hinder ER and offers practical implications and suggestions for further research. Points for practitioners: Job role ambiguity, job insecurity, unclear organisational goals, and inter-agency collaboration are common job and organisational demands in public sector workplaces. For employees, these demands are stressors that employees do not feel they control, and may therefore hinder employee resilience: the ability to learn, adapt, and leverage networks in the face of challenges. Surprisingly, resource constraints, where employees have to ‘do more with less’, might help employees develop ER. While inter-agency collaboration has potentially many benefits, it appears to have negative spillover effects on employees unaware of it or not involved in it. To encourage ER, agencies should clarify both organisational and job goals, and assure job security, control, competency development, and supervisor support.

This chapter provides background theory and practical steps for a possible selves approach to career development in adult education settings. It also identifies methods to foster development, enhance motivation, and manage setbacks.

Public services face increasing and more varied demands, but public service managers often lack the resources to develop their staff to effectively deal with them. This paper identifies how public sector line managers can support their subordinates to not just cope with challenges, but also to grow and develop in the midst of them. It primarily draws on employee attributions of leader effectiveness, to identify growth-oriented leadership behaviours. The framework is based on empirical data from two sequential phases of interviews, focus groups, and one-on-one discussions with employees and managers in the public sector. Five categories of growth-oriented leadership behaviours were identified: managing the whole team, enabling self-management, managing safe failures, supporting both career and personal growth, and recognising individual needs and contributions. Causation coding identified a set of processes through which these leadership behaviours supported staff to use networks, learn, and adapt. The developed framework can be used to enhance growth and development of public sector employees.

Leadership diversity has evoked tremendous debate for decades. This includes the profitability and creativity of organizations and the realization of social capital. In this regard, governments have initiated numerous programs to increase gender equality in leadership positions. A wealth of academic research has also been conducted to investigate factors influencing the paucity of women in the elite leadership group. One noticeable element at the organizational level is the way in which female leaders are selected. Given the increasing proportion of leadership selection conducted through headhunters, this thesis aims at investigating how headhunting influences female leadership progression in the Chinese context. Because the research focuses on meanings and interpretations of female headhunting practices, it employed a qualitative methodology. Consequently, 13 in-depth interviews were carried out in China. In order to make the results more representative, the diverse sample was dispersed not only in Mainland China but in Taiwan. The semi-structured interviews enabled the researcher to gain a deep understanding of how females are selected as well as the underlying elements that can exert influence on the selection results. The findings revealed that the headhunting of female leaders is not a simple or straightforward process. It is influenced by contextual constraints, the recruitment and selections used by headhunters, and no doubt, headhunters’ competency. Also, these issues are influenced by cultural beliefs, economic, and political factors in the Chinese context. Among them, political factors are powerful and interact with cultural and economic factors. They produce gendered results.

Agreement exists that leadership studies should give increased attention to the application of generic leadership in specific contexts. In the public sector, a specific need exists to examine the effect of public values on the content and effectiveness of leadership. This study adds to the public administration literature by, principally, developing a transactional leadership (TL) substyle that incorporates public values (PV). This thesis calls this substyle “Public Values-focused Transactional Leadership” (PVTL). Three main study questions are addressed: (1) What is the impact of Transactional Leadership on the Organisational Commitment (OC) of public employees? (2) What is the impact of Public Values on Organisational Commitment? (3) What is the impact of Public Values-focused Transactional Leadership on the Organisational Commitment? This study uses a multiphase mixed-method design and data gathered from 25 interviews and a dyadic survey of 499 employees and 78 supervisors across 27 public agencies in Vietnam. Empirical results show positive, direct impacts of TL, PV and PVTL on OC. It also finds indirect impacts of PVTL on OC through psychological contracts, and a mediation effect of a participatory style on the relationship between PVTL and OC. Hence, support is provided for the relationships of the above study questions. PVTL is discussed as a new, useful construct for public sector leadership studies and as holding promise for improving public sector management.

This mixed method research, in the area of HR and leadership, explores leadership behaviours that foster employee resilience. Resilience is a key capacity in contexts where job demands and challenges are often dynamic and complex, such as in the public sector. This research uses a contemporary definition of resilience, one that views employee resilience as a set of behaviours that help people grow and develop in their jobs, even in the face of challenges. Two questions guide this research: 1. What leadership behaviours enable employee resilience in the public sector?, and 2. How do these behaviours enable employee resilience? This study is situated in the public sector context. The research consists of five phases. The first phase was a cross-sectional survey of public servants’ views on whether paradoxical leadership behaviours, mediated by perceptions of organisational support, might foster resilience. These connections reflect the correspondence between paradoxical leadership and the dilemmas and paradoxes that arise in public sector work. Phases two and three concerned a series of qualitative studies which identified further leadership behaviours, as well as possible mechanisms and outcomes, and generated an explanatory framework to illustrate how managers can enable employee resilience. This led to the development of the construct resilience-enabling leadership. Phase four gathered feedback on the construct’s validity so that it could be tested quantitatively in a scale. The fifth and final phase tested the resilience-enabling leadership scale (RELS) as a predictor of resilience. It also tested psychometric properties of the scale, including factor structure, and discriminant and convergent validity. Findings show that a unique combination of leadership behaviours that foster growth, trust and collaboration in employees, is likely to play a pivotal role in developing employee resilience. The RELS is an innovative contribution to organisational scholarship. It r

This thesis is a study of business accelerators, and the efficacy of accelerators as learning environments. Accelerators are increasingly becoming a popular strategy for delivering a more authentic entrepreneurial learning experience. Accelerators provide a time-bound suite of highly structured educational and business development activities that provide learning support to cohorts of competitively selected high-potential entrepreneurial teams. The participants face considerable uncertainty and are exposed to complex learning and business development processes associated with rapidly building, validating, and scaling investable business models. Intense mentorship and entrepreneurial education are core features by which accelerators support this journey. Thus, an implicit assumption embedded in accelerator programme logic is the accelerator learning environment positively shapes learning and development outcomes. Yet little research has investigated how accelerators influence participant learning and development. This gap motives the current research. A multilevel quantitative and qualitative mixed methods approach was adopted to examine participant learning and development at the three levels of participation embedded within accelerator programme design – cohort, team and participant. Concepts and measures from academic work on accelerators, learning agility, and individual performance behaviour were assembled into a coherent set of investigative tools and lenses. Taken together, they frame the accelerator learning environment as a whole system of actors and elements that operate both independently and interdependently. The research setting is a Global Accelerator Network affiliate programme based in New Zealand. Three strands of data were collected on 29 participants associated with 10 venture teams participating in a single accelerator programme cohort. Strand 1 applied a multiphase quantitative survey approach to capture a longitudinal understanding of how accele

Public employees’ poor performance has been cited as one of the leading factors in the failure of reform programmes in developing countries. Although previous employee performance reforms have targeted selection, training, appraisal and compensation, agreement exists that these problems persist. Improving employee performance has proven difficult in developing and developed countries alike. Motivated by the New Public Management (NPM), employee performance management (PM) has been widely introduced by developed and developing countries as a public sector reform. Employee PM supposedly furthers development objectives by improving performance, enhancing accountability and aligning employee efforts with organisational goals. Unfortunately, the literature has reported many failed PM reforms. Arguably, employee PM in the public sector usually faces several difficulties, including the diversity of stakeholders, bounded delegated authority, ambiguous organisational and job goals, as well as the inherent complexity of employee PM activities. The situation is even more challenging for developing countries due to contextual problems of weak institutions, weak capacity and traditional cultures. There are perspectives that employee PM may not be compatible in developing contexts. Although there is no shortage of research on employee PM, most is theoretical research or conducted in developed countries. Empirical research in developing countries, particularly in the public sector, remains sparse. To address this gap, this research investigates whether employee PM is applicable or effective in the developing context, as well as exploring which contextual factors affect its development. To answer these research questions, a mixed methods approach guided by the research philosophy of pragmatism was adopted. The data for this research was gathered from 30 interviews and a survey of 322 respondents from 29 different organisations across five central Ministries and two provinces in Vie