Employee Perceived Effect of Leadership Training: Comparing Public and Private Organizations

ABSTRACT:

This study reports on the effectiveness of a year-long field experiment involving training in transformational and transactional leadership in the public and private sectors. Using before and after training assessments by employees of several hundred Danish leaders, the analysis shows that transformational leadership training is associated with increases in behaviors linked to both transformational leadership and the use of verbal rewards, but only for public sector organizations. There is no impact in private sector organizations. Transactional leadership training appears to be equally effective in stimulating the use of pecuniary rewards in both public and private organizations.

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual conference of American Society for Public Administration, Seattle, WA, USA, March 18–22, 2016.

Notes

1 This demonstrated effectiveness is the key reason our experimental study focuses on transformational and transactional leadership rather than other types of leadership.

2 A group of upper secondary school principals also participated in the study, but these were all from public schools. Because there were no private sector comparisons for this group, they are not included in the analysis. Only managers with direct responsibility for employees without leadership responsibilities are included (excluding daycare leaders of other daycare leaders).

3 The numbers in the tables will vary from this because, in some cases, the experimental groups not relevant to the hypothesis (that is, the transactional training group in the transformational behavior results) will not be included. There are also a modest number of missing cases.

4 The relationship between absences and the impact of training is not strictly linear. There is a negative impact (that is, less effective training) when there are two or more absences.

5 Only those employees who answered both pre- and post-surveys are included in the analysis. Approximately 20% of employees did not fill out the post-survey; in some cases, these individuals were no longer working for the organization. The individuals who only filled out the pre-survey were more negative in their assessments of leadership, but the standard deviations were similar. The use of only employees who filled out both surveys therefore might underestimate the impact of leadership training.

6 This relationship is not strictly linear with small quadratic coefficients also statistically significant. This nonlinearity indicates that the relationship itself has diminishing marginal returns. We will address this in terms of sector differences in the analysis in Table 4.

7 The average variance inflation scores for model 1, model 2, and model 3 are 11.04, 10.94, and 8.80, respectively. These indicate substantial collinearity, but the effects remain statistically significant.

8 The diminishing returns findings reflect clear differences in the slopes. They are not the result of differences in the pre-training values for transformational leadership and for pecuniary rewards.

Additional information

Funding

Support for this research was provided by the Danish Council for Independent Research, project no. 1327-00015B.

Notes on contributors

Seung-Ho An

Seung-Ho An ([email protected]) is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Texas Tech University. His research interests include public and nonprofit management, organizational behavior, leadership, representation, and research methods.

Kenneth J. Meier

Kenneth J. Meier ([email protected]) is a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the School of Public Affairs, American University. He is also a Professor of Public Management in the Cardiff School of Business, Cardiff University (Wales). His research interests include public management, representation, race and politics, and public policy.

Anne Bøllingtoft

Anne Bøllingtoft ([email protected]) is associate professor at the Department of Management at Aarhus University. She specializes in organizational behavior and her research interests include leadership and how leadership initiatives unfold in different contexts. Her recent publications focus on developing managers through learning programs.

Lotte Bøgh Andersen

Lotte Bøgh Andersen ([email protected]) is professor at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, and at VIVE–The Danish Center for Social Science Research. Her research interests include leadership, motivation, behavior and performance of public employees, and she has also contributed to research concerning economic incentives and motivation crowding theory. She was project leader for the LEAP-project (www.leap-project.dk) and is now leader of the Crown Prince Frederik Center for Public Leadership.