Transformational and transactional leadership strategies have become prominent in public administration research, but it is unclear whether they are compatible or whether they could undermine each other. We examine the combined and interactive effects of transformational and three types of transactional leadership (contingent verbal rewards, material rewards, and sanctions) on employee work motivation, conceptualized as work engagement and intrinsic motivation. Panel analyses using repeated measures of 385 leaders and 3,797 employees show that transformational leadership and contingent verbal rewards increased employee motivation. However, simultaneous use of contingent material rewards undermined the benefits of transformational leadership. Thus, the motivational potential of service‐ or community‐oriented visions was undercut when leaders also appealed to extrinsic material motives. This could help explain why financial incentives do not always have the expected benefits in public organizations. We therefore argue that research and practice should pay more attention to how different leadership strategies work in combination.

The relationship between managers' use of rewards and employees' motivation is controversial, but recent research suggests that employee perceptions of governance initiatives can help us understand the association. Experimental evidence further emphasizes the difference between verbal and material rewards, and this study therefore analyzes realworld public managers' use of these different rewards and their employees' perceptions of a governance initiative. This enables us to shed light on a mechanism through which rewards can be connected to motivation. Can rewards contribute to a supportive perception of governance initiatives and potentially crowd-in motivation? This is analyzed in a multi-level dataset with 82 Danish school principals and their 1,273 employees. Managers' use of contingent verbal rewards is positively associated with employees' perceptions of the relevant governance initiative, while the corresponding association between material rewards and employee perceptions is weak and statistically insignificant when controlling for other types of managerial behavior. Although the findings need to be tested in an experimental design, they suggest that verbal rewards are a promising tool for public managers.

Reputation scholars have convincingly demonstrated the relevance of understanding the behavior of government agencies as motivated by reputational concerns. Yet we must still expand our understanding of how agency audiences pass reputational judgments. Combining insights from bureaucratic reputation theory with psychological theories (motivated reasoning and attribution theory), this article theorizes and tests whether agencies’ reputational histories increase the likelihood of receiving positive or negative newspaper coverage. Our findings are based on an extensive coding of 11,041 newspaper articles over a 10-year period in Denmark and Flanders (Belgium) regarding 40 agencies. We introduce a measure of reputational history from communication studies. The analysis identifies that both negative and positive reputational histories are related to the valence of newspaper coverage, suggesting that the past reputations of agencies are part of the cognitive basis upon which audiences form reputational judgment.

A key argument in recent theorizing on the drivers of bureaucratic behaviour is that agencies seek to establish and maintain a unique reputation. While recent years have witnessed substantial empirical support for this claim, the field lacks comparative examinations of the dynamics of reputation and its management throughout crisis periods. This article draws on a systematic media content analysis to explore the exposure and communication responses of the German, Belgian and Danish financial regulators to reputational threats before, during, and after the financial crisis. Our results point at the dynamic and context-sensitive nature of reputation management.

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The study of organizational task for understanding how organizations behave and evolve has been one of the classic topics in organization theory and public administration. Reputation scholarship has appeared as a promising perspective to understand internal and external organizational dynamics. Reputation scholars, too, emphasize the critical importance of task. Despite this recognition, the literature is characterized by a lack of theorization, and large‐scale comparative analyses on how task characteristics are related to reputational dynamics. This study aims to address these concerns, relying on an extensive longitudinal dataset on the media reputation of 40 agencies in two countries to explain organizations' likelihood of attracting reputational threats (both in general and targeting specific reputational dimensions) through different task characteristics. Our main finding is that as agencies perform tasks of a more coercive and authoritative nature (regulatory tasks and, to a lesser extent, redistributive tasks), they are more likely to attract reputational threats (both in general and to all dimensions).

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Politicians who serve in standing executive committees can exercise active leadership but are not compelled to do so. Active leadership may be related to politicians’ personality traits and the position they hold in the committee. We investigate these antecedents of politicians’ use of transformational and transactional leadership using a unique survey of Danish local councilors that includes validated measures of the Big Five personality traits and leadership behavior. We theorize and find that politicians’ personality traits, notably Extraversion and Conscientiousness, are associated with their self-reported leadership behavior. The position as committee chair is also associated with leadership behavior among local councilors but less so.