In this article, we aim to portray the state of the art in public sector leadership in order to recommend directions for research and training practice. To this end, we review the scattered strands of literature on public sector leadership (PSL) and classify them in a single framework. The results of the study suggest that public sector leadership is emerging as a distinctive and autonomous domain in public administration/public management studies, although the debate is still underdeveloped compared to business administration studies. Leadership skills truly do matter in improving the performance of public sector organizations, and it is highly likely that the optimum leadership style is an integrated one: Public sector leaders should behave mainly as transformational leaders, moderately leveraging transactional relationships with their followers and heavily leveraging the importance of preserving integrity and ethics in the fulfillment of tasks. Points for practitioners This study on public leadership suggests that administrative leaders in the public sector behave differently from their counterparts in the business world, and as a result there is a great need for leadership development programs which focus on these differences instead of merely mimicking programs designed for leaders in the private sector.
While environmental claims are increasingly used by companies to appeal consumers, they also attract greater scrutiny from independent parties interested in consumer protection. Consumers are now able to compare corporate environmental claims against external, often disconfirming, information to form their brand attitudes and purchase intentions. What remains unclear is how the level of information specificity of both the environmental claims and external disconfirming information interact to influence consumer reactions. Two experiments address this gap in the CSR communication literature. When specific (vs. vague) claims are countered by specific (vs. vague) external information, consumers report more negative brand attitudes and lower purchase intentions (Experiment 1). The effect is serially mediated by (1) skepticism toward the claims and (2) lack of corporate credibility (Experiment 2). We conclude by discussing strategies that firms can utilize to avoid information dilution and ensure that external disconfirming information percolates to consumers as specific.
The growing relevance of improvisation for successful organizing calls for a better understanding of how individuals develop improvisation skills. While research has investigated the role of training and simulations, little is known about how individuals develop improvisation skills when formal training is not an option and how individual-level factors shape development trajectories. We explore these issues in a longitudinal qualitative analysis of live action role-playing. Our findings reveal a three-stage process of improvisation development shaped by the presence of task and social structures, which act as both constraints and resources. Moreover, our findings illuminate how collaborative and competitive orientations shape whether improvisers perceive these structures as a resource that they need to nurture and renew (i.e., collaborative) or to seize and exploit (i.e., competitive). We also show that individual orientations are not always enduring but can change over time, engendering four types of improvisation development trajectories. Our work provides a longitudinal account of how individual orientations shape the process of improvisation development. In so doing, we also explain why individuals who are skilled improvisers do not necessarily improvise effectively as a collective, and we reconcile different conceptualizations of improvisation.
From reenactments to pilgrimages, extraordinary experiences engage consumers with frames and roles that govern their actions for the duration of the experience. Exploring such extraordinary frames and roles, however, can make the act of returning to everyday life more difficult, a process prior research leaves implicit. The present ethnography of live action role-playing explains how consumers return from extraordinary experiences and how this process differs depending on consumers’ subjectivity. The emic term “bleed” captures the trace that extraordinary frames and roles leave in everyday life. The subjective tension between the extraordinary and the ordinary intensifies bleed. Consumers returning from the same experience can thus suffer different bleed intensities, charting four trajectories of return that differ in their potential for transformation: absent, compensatory, cathartic, and delayed. These findings lead to a transformative recursive process model of bleed that offers new insights into whether, how, and why consumers return transformed from extraordinary experiences with broader implications for experiential consumption and marketing.
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