This article reviews the mainstream leadership literature and its perennial debates and compares it to the public-sector (administrative) leadership literature. The mainstream leadership literature fully articulated the transformational models in the 1980s and began the serious work of integrating transactional and transformational types of leadership into comprehensive models in the 1990s. Many have considered this to be a major advance over the field’s previous fragmentation and excessively narrow focus. This integration has not been reflected in the public-sector literature, in which the normative debates about what leaders should do has received most of the attention in the last decade. Although many types of leadership in the public sector have been discussed extensively, such as leadership by those in policy positions and working in community settings, administrative leadership within organizations has received scant attention and would benefit from a research agenda linking explicit and well-articulated models with concrete data in publicsector settings.

Public-Sector Leadership Theory: An Assessment

In a knowledge-based economy, the success of organizations depends mostly on the quality of their human resource. Organizations rely on their competent employees as a main resource. The performance of organizations depends not only on the workforce competency, but also on their evaluation and development on an ongoing basis to meet the global competition. For obvious economic and business reasons, organizations have always been concerned about the competence of its people. In the modern world, characterized by rapid and dramatic change, the attainment of competence has become an integral component of individual and organizational strategies. The competency mapping process helps the organization in developing a clear strategy for developing competencies of their workforce. It supports successful performance of the employees within the organization. Gone are the days where gigantic plant, superior technology and marketing strategy played central role in organizational success. The organizational strategy must be designed to identify, nourish and utilize the competencies. This paper seeks to delve deeper into the concept of competency, tracing its history and its role in the current scenario.

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Understanding Competencies and Competency Modeling ― A Literature Survey

This study synthesized 30 years of research relating to successful student affairs administration using meta-analysis techniques. The findings suggest a successful student affairs administrator has skills such as administration, management, and human facilitation; knowledge of student development theory and functional responsibilities; and traits of personal integrity and cooperation. The researchers noted possible additional skills, knowledge bases, and personal traits for continued success as a student affairs administrator relating to technology, assessment, political skills, and postsecondary public policy knowledge.

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Skills, Knowledge, and Personal Traits Necessary for Success as a Student Affairs Administrator: A Meta-Analysis of Thirty Years of Research.

textService organizations have to deal with highly uncertain events, both in the internal and external environment. In the academic literature and in practice there is not much knowledge about how to deal with this uncertainty. This PhD dissertation investigates the role and impact of information technologies (IT) on business agility in service organizations. Business agility is a relatively new term defined as the capability of organizations to swiftly change businesses and business processes beyond the normal level of flexibility to effectively manage highly uncertain and unexpected, but potentially consequential internal and external events. Empirical research was carried out via surveys and interviews among managers from 35 organizations in four industries and in three governmental sectors. Four in-depth case studies were carried out within one service organization.

The dissertation has six key findings:

1) In many large service organizations business agility is hampered by a lack of IT agility.

2) Organization and alignment of processes and information systems via the cycle of sensing, responding and learning along with the alignment of business and IT are important conditions for improving business agility performance of service organizations.

3) Standardization of IT capabilities and higher levels of data quality support higher levels of business agility of service organizations.

4) Two knowledge management strategies – codification and personalization -- are identified that can be used to respond to events with different degrees of uncertainty. A codification knowledge management strategy supports the response to events with low levels of uncertainty by exploiting explicit knowledge from organizational memory. A personalization knowledge management strategy drives the response to events with high levels of uncertainty by exploitation of tacit knowledge and social capital.

5) Social capital is an important moderating variable in the relation between IT capabilities and business agility. Social capital can mitigate the lack of IT agility that exists in many service organizations by overcoming information system boundaries and rigidities via human relationships.

6) The combination of sensing, responding and learning capabilities is required to increase all dimensions of business agility performance.

Overall, this research introduces a new approach to analyze and measure business agility. This thesis takes the first steps to develop theoretical knowledge on the conditions under which IT supports higher levels of business agility and business agility performance.

Robert L. Katz

Papers

Skills of an Effective Administrator. An HBR Classic.