Public Leadership: A review of the literature and framework for future research

Abstract

This study analyses and reviews the literature on public leadership with a novel combination of bibliometric methods. We detect four generic approaches to public leadership (i.e. a functionalist, a behavioural, a biographical and a reformist approach) which differ with regard to their philosophy of science (i.e. objective vs subjective) and level of analysis (i.e. micro-level vs multi-level). From our findings, we derive four directions for future research which involve shifting the focus from the aspect of ‘leadership’ to the element of ‘public’, from simplicity to complexity, from universalism to cultural relativism and from public leadership to public followership.

Key words:

• Leadership
• publicness
• followership
• bibliometrics
• network analysis

Notes

1 Our interpretations were primarily guided by the publications that loaded highest on each factor, as these works are most characteristic of the respective cluster. For example, the seminal publications by Bozeman (1987), Rainey, Pandey, and Bozeman, (1995), and Chun and Rainey (2005) are among the highest-loading documents on the third factor extracted from the co-citation matrix (see Table 1). Since these publications elaborate on the distinctiveness of public as compared to private organizations, we gave the respective cluster the label of Organizational Publicness.