Unraveling Determinants of Inclusive Leadership in Public Organizations

Abstract

The aim of this article is to unravel the determinants of inclusive leadership by combining mixed methods in two phases to explore and test theoretically grounded personal and organizational antecedents of inclusive leadership. The first qualitative phase used semi-structured interviews with public managers, while the second quantitative phase tested assumptions using survey data from employees working in the Dutch public sector. The findings support the hypothesized positive association of leader humility as well as a flexible culture on inclusive leadership. Public managers also tend to have, both social justice and business case arguments for diversity, affecting their inclusive leadership. Motivation and discretionary room enable public managers to cope with structural constrains. Top management support is important to change organizational culture and norms, motivating and stimulating lower level managers to actively show inclusive leadership. Overall, our findings contribute to a better understanding of inclusive leadership in a public sector context.

Managing for Public Service Performance

“…Pitts (2009) shows with U.S. federal data that perceived diversity management activities are positively related to self-reported job satisfaction and work group performance of racial minorities. Similarly, Ashikali andGroeneveld (2015a, 2015b) found a positive relation between diversity management and employees' affective commitment and organizational citizenship behaviour. More importantly, the impact of diversity management on employees' outcomes did not vary between different sociodemographic groups (2015b).…”

“…Accordingly, diversity management research has more and more called attention for shifting the focus from formal policies to actual practices of the supervisor in order to reach diversity management's intended outcomes as described previously (Ashikali, 2018;Pitts & Wise, 2010).…”

Editorial: Public leadership research trajectories: articulating a new agenda

“…Some scholars have started to write about the concept of inclusive public leadership (Ashikali and Groeneveld, 2015; Ashikali et al , 2021; Ashikali, 2023), but this is an emerging area of inquiry for public leadership research; as such, I would encourage scholars working on various facets of inclusive leadership to submit their work to the journal. Moreover, another area that is ripe for scholarly research is intersectionality.…”