The 'Publicness-puzzle' in public leadership. A theoretical exploration of leadership in public organizations

Abstract \nFollowing a contingency approach we argue that the content and style of administrative \nleadership depends on characteristics of the public context. The purpose of the paper is to \ndevelop hypotheses on the relationships between several dimensions of publicness and the \ncontent and style of leadership, by reviewing academic literature on public leadership. To \nbuild our argument we first conceptualize leadership and distinguish several theories, \ndefinitions, and styles of leadership based on four different basic conceptions of what \nleadership is: Leadership as traits; 2. Leadership as behavior; 3. Leadership as managing \nof meaning; 4. Leadership as interaction processes. Then, Bozeman’s model of publicness \nis described as well as the effects of publicness on organizational environments, \norganizational goals, organizational structures and managerial values. As a final step we \ndevelop hypotheses that relate leadership to publicness and identify possible contradictory \ndemands administrative leadership has to deal with. We conclude by outlining a research \nagenda on administrative leadership.