The Importance of Being Earnest:
Righteous Administrative Leaders Enhances Civil Servants’ Effort Propensity
2
Abstract
In recent years, public sector leadership is emerging as a distinctive and autonomous research
domain in public administration literature, with one the most studied causal relation being the one
between leadership and performance. This study aims at enriching this stream of research by
investigating the impact of different public sector leadership behaviors on effort propensity. We rely
on an integrated leadership framework and we test hypotheses through a randomized vignette
survey which has been carried forward among national government public executives. We compare
civil servants’ effort propensity pre and post treatment. Our empirical findings indicate that leaders
emphasizing honesty and integrity as core values have a stronger impact on their followers’
motivation compared to other types of leaders. On the contrary, leaders relying on boosting change
and innovation seem to have lower impact in motivating followers in working more.
Keywords
Public sector leadership, federal government, integrity, effort propensity
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Introduction
Public sector leadership is emerging only recently as a distinctive topic of discussion in public
administration and public management literature (Van Wart, 2003; Van Slyke and Alexander,
2006). With the nearly unique exception of Selznick’s classic Leadership in Administration (1957)
the exploration on which leadership style describes better public executive behavior has been
limited (Van Wart, 2003). The main reason for this situation can be easily understood: executives in
the public sector had less control and discretion over employees behaviors given strict civil service
rules and regulations (Riccucci et al. 2004).
In the early Nineties, however, recurrent waves of administrative reforms in most Western countries
have increased public sector executives’ autonomy and they have empowered administrative heads
in leading governments. The Weberian supremacy of bureaucracy (according to which the less civil
servants’ discretion, the better) has been challenged only recently by the so called New Public
Management wave which depicted government executives (called
‘public entrepreneurs’) as
trapped by red tape and obsolete regulations constraining their leadership skills: elected
representatives should have let managers manage, letting them decide on how to reach good
performances and administrative goals (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992; Gore, 1993, Di Iulio, 1994;
Guy-Peters, 1996. Kettl, 1997, Light, 1997). Harvard’s political management approach has
explicitly claimed that executives having more and more responsibilities for goal settings should
even participate to political dialogue about purposes and methods of government (Moore, 1995).
Execucrats have therefore emerged as new professional hybrids, above all in national governments
(Riccucci, 1995). On one side these professionals exert a different leadership from their political
designees: even when elected as directors and executives they perform non policy functions as a
significant component of their responsibility (van Wart, 2003). On the other side they differ from
business leaders: administrative heads behavior should concern a public service mission including
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being aware of competing interests, being dedicated to the common good, respecting regulations
and enforcing external accountability even in their day-to day behavior (Perry, 1995, van Wart,
2003; Borgonovi, 2007).
Recent studies have also highlighted that the main trait of execucrats’ leadership behavior is an
integrated one, with a strong presence of ‘transformational’ traits, and a moderate level of
‘transactional’ characteristics (Yukl; 2002, Trottier, Van Wart and Wang, 2008). Integrative
leadership studies have also supported the idea that administrative leaders use a combination of
practices such as providing clarity of desired outcomes, increasing followers’ intrinsic motivation,
recognizing accomplishments, rewarding high performance, as well as by adopting varying degrees
of transactional interactions with subordinates (Silvia and McGuire, 2010; Morse, 2010).
Few empirical test have been carried forward to assess which leadership role is comparatively more
effective in enhancing employees’ productivity or effort. Our research aims at contributing to the
administrative leadership literature empirically testing to what extent different public sector leaders
style has more impact on subordinates. We rely on Fernandez, Perry and Cho (2010) taxonomy of
public sector leadership behavior in carrying forward an experimental vignette study that explore
the impact of supervisors’ behaviors on national government civil service performance.
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Public sector leadership and its effects on employees’ effort propensity: hypotheses
From an organizational point of view there is a general agreement that leadership has a positive
impact on employees’ performance also in the public sector (van Wart, 2003). Which leadership
behavior performs comparatively better in government is however still controversial: the
‘balkanization’ of research on leadership in governments does not increase the clarity of research
achievements for managerial practices (Orazi et al. 2013, Yukl, 2012).
We rely on Fernandez, Perry, Cho (2010) taxonomy in order to put boundaries on which leadership
roles are more frequent in governments. These authors distinguished five leadership roles: taskoriented leadership (defined as a behavior focusing on defining and organizing group activities,
setting and communicating goals and performance standards, coordinating followers, monitoring
compliance with procedure and goal achievements, providing feedbacks, etc), relation-oriented
leadership (which includes a deep concerns by leaders about followers’ welfare and wellbeing,
establishing good interpersonal relations among subordinates, treating them as equals, involving
them in the decision making process, providing opportunities to personal development), change
oriented leadership (which has much in common with transformational leadership as it stresses the
importance of fostering change and creativity among employees), diversity-oriented leadership
(including those leader’s behaviors directed to increase the quality of decisions by leveraging on
followers’ diverse skills, knowledge and background) and integrity-oriented leadership (imposing
strong attention by leaders for legality, fairness, and equitable treatment of employees and service
recipients) (Fernandez, Perry, Cho, 2010)
According to different leadership roles recent literature has found, directly or indirectly, some
effects on individual employees’ performances including enhanced productivity and extra effort.
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Task-oriented leadership and relations-oriented leadership resemble the traditional distinction
between concern for production and concern for people in the Blake and Mouton’s managerial grid
model (Yukl et al, 2002). The copious amount of studies in leadership suggests that relationshiporiented behaviors are associated more closely with effectiveness (Fisher and Edwards, 1988, Bass,
2008) and this seems to hold also in organizations like governments. Even if the majority of
administrative heads in central governments are recognized as ‘transactional’ (Trottier, van Wart,
Wang, 2008),
Park and Rainey (2008), for example, found a weak relationship between
transactional leadership behavior and federal government employees’ job satisfaction or other
individual performances. It seems that as the public sector is characterized by a high level of
formalization and red tape in particular on hiring, firing, waging and purchasing decisions (Rainey
and Bozeman, 2000) it is likely that repeated remarks regarding standard to be respected or process
to be followed probably won’t be well accepted in an environment where strict policies and rules
are applied. On the contrary, participative- or relations-oriented have overall positive effects on
individual job satisfaction (and consequently on individual performance) especially when used in
strategic planning process (Kim, 2002) or in establishing good
labour-management relations
(Kearney and Hays, 1994). Relations oriented leadership and effective communications seem to
result in stronger cooperation and organizational commitment by individuals enabling them to
perform better in their tasks (Fernandez, 2008). In sum it is likely that task-oriented leadership acts
as a negative reinforcement: all leaders must possess it and its absence generates negative
outcomes, but its presence alone is not enough to bolster effort. The opposite does not hold for
relations-oriented leadership. On theses bases we hypothesize that:
H1a: Task-oriented leadership will have a comparatively weaker effects on civil servants’ effort
propensity
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H1b: Relations oriented leadership will have a comparatively higher effects on civil servants’ effort
propensity
As change and reform have been imperatives for governments in the last decades administrative
leaders adopting a change-oriented attitude and behavior have been the preferred unit of analysis of
public administration/public management studies (Terry, 1998). This type of leadership includes
different types of behaviors such as identifying the best strategic options and alternatives for public
organizations they lead, encouraging employees to search for creative solutions to problems,
making major change in administrative processes, increasing flexibility and innovation (Fernandez,
Cho and Perry, 2010; Yukl, 2002). Such leadership role is often recommended to business leaders,
but also the public sector literature has shown consistently that change-oriented leadership often
translates into higher perceived performance and job satisfaction (Fernandez, 2008). Charismatic
leadership style seems also to enhance the self-esteem of followers (Javidan and Waldman, 2003)
More recently, these results have been however criticized. Vigoda-Gadot and Beeri (2011) have in
fact found a negative relationship between transformational leadership practices and changeoriented organization citizen behaviors (OCB) (i.e.: employees acting beyond the rules and bringing
constructive change in the organizations). They argue that this negative effect of change oriented
leader and his follower may be related to the intimidating effect that a charismatic supervisor has on
employees in the public sector resulting in less innovative practices at work. Paradoxically “the
specific transactional contingent- reward aspect of this relationship is more effective than abstract
transformational types of relationship in supporting innovation and creativity, especially among
public sector employees (Vigoda-Gadot and Beeri, 2011, p.592)”. Assuming that this effect works
also for effort propensity we therefore hypothesize that:
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H1c: Change-oriented leadership will have a comparatively weaker effects on civil servants’ effort
propensity
Diversity-oriented leadership, which is principally focused on racial and demographic diversity,
attains the advantage given by leveraging on different points of view to obtain an increasing
decision making quality, a larger number of ideas and better decision acceptance (Fernandez, Cho
and Perry, 2010). Research in this domain has been fragmented but there is a general agreement that
good diversity leadership and management foster creativity, greater performance and cohesion
(Elron,1997; Cox and Blake, 1991). Diversity management policies, strategies and actions in public
administration rely on untested assumptions and no usable empirical knowledge has been available
so far (Tschihart and Wise, 2000, Pitts and Wise, 2010). We rely on Pitts (2009) in molding our
hypotheses. Using a survey among U.S. federal employees Pitts (2009) indicates that diversity
management is strongly linked to both work group performance and job satisfaction. We therefore
hypothesize that this holds also when exploring the effects on effort propensity.
H1d: Diversity-oriented leadership have a comparatively stronger effects on civil servants’ effort
propensity
Finally, the integrity-oriented leadership role is particularly relevant in the public sector
domain because “the institutionalized and politicized environments in which public managers
operate impose strong demands for legality, fairness, and equitable treatment of employees and
service recipients” (Fernandez, Cho and Perry, 2010, p. 312). Kakabadse et al. (2003) have further
signaled the importance of standards and qualities of governance in addition to the more
9
conventional, limiting norms concerning the technical design of policies, organizations or operating
systems. Integrity-oriented leadership can also be advocated as the leadership style on which
leadership development programs must focus due to the ethical behaviors and vision it transfer. It
seems that focusing on integrity translates to better organizational alignment, cultivation of moral
virtues, cheating and finance misuse reduction, job involvement increase, performance increase and
countering of alienation and social loafing (Kunthia and Suar, 2004). On these basis we hypothesize
that:
H1e: Integrity-oriented leadership will have a comparatively stronger effects on civil servants’
effort propensity
Methods, Data and Measures
As Hunter et al. (2007) have highlighted, an average leadership study (which relies on the
distribution of a self-report questionnaire among employees, on using a behaviorally-based
leadership assessment tool and on asking for a self-report assessment of employees’ immediate
supervisor's behavior) presents some relevant flaws. This type of studies, in fact, typically assume
that the subordinate has been exposed to supervisors acting as leaders of any kind, and that
supervisors generally possesses some leadership traits (which, as mentioned, is quite rare in public
sector organizations). In average leadership studies it is also often assumed that subordinates’
ratings on their supervisors’ behaviors are accurate (which might not hold as conscious biases
deriving from social approval might distort the answers) and that the context where leadership
occurs simply does not influence leadership roles or its effects on subordinates (Hunter, 2007).
Finally, in these leadership studies problematic measurement issues emerge as well: multilevel
constructs and hierarchically nested data can create biased statistical results, especially when data
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are gathered from individuals belonging to the same work teams or the same organization (Van
Slyke and Alexander, 2006).
In order to avoid these flaws we decided to carry forward a different type of study, a vignette
study resembling a field experiment. Vignette methods have been extensively employed in social
sciences and consumer behavior research, especially when less accessible attitudes and behavioral
patterns have to be assessed (Soydan, 1996). Vignettes are “short descriptions of a person or a
social situation which contain precise references to what are thought to be the most important
factors in the decision-making or judgment-making processes of respondents” (Alexander and
Becker, 1978, p. 94). Consisting of stimuli perceived as real descriptions, vignettes give the
respondents the perception that contextual factors are not overcome, but at the same time “the
respondent is not as likely to consciously bias his report (…) as he is when being asked directly”
(Alexander and Becker, 1978, p. 94). Finally the “systematic variation of characteristics in the
vignette allows for a rather precise estimate of the effects of changes (…) in respondent attitude or
judgment” (Alexander and Becker, 1978, p. 95).
In our study we conceived five vignettes, one for each of the five leadership styles that we
wanted to compare: i.e., task-, relations-, change-, diversity-, and integrity-oriented. Each vignette
described a scenario in which a hypothetical supervisor embodying one of the five leadership roles
communicated to the respondent – i.e. the subordinate – that he/she will join a new project. Each
particular leadership role emerged from the portrayed recommendations given by the supervisor
about how the subordinate should participate in the project. The vignettes were included in a survey
that was administered to a sample of senior civil servants working for the Italian central
government. We randomly allocated the five vignettes to participants, with each respondent being
presented only one of the five scenarios. The rest of the survey was the same for all respondents.
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We distributed a questionnaire to five samples of 30 public executives: each questionnaire
was different only for the vignette included. We collected data from an assortment of executives in
different ministries at different hierarchical levels. In Italy, in fact, national Ministries are organized
in Departments or General Directions and Sub-Division. The primary source of data consisted of
public executives working in different Ministries and in different Sub-Divisions within the same
Ministry.
Dependent Variable
The dependent variable was the level of effort that participants would put in the project described in
the vignette. Following the vignette, were asked: “On a scale from 0% to 100%, in which 0%
represents a state of total calm and relax (reading a newspaper in the garden or sleeping on a shore)
and 100% represents the maximum employment of your psycho-physical energies (hours and hours
of meetings, research and work), how much effort would you put in the project?”
Before featuring the vignette, the questionnaire asked participants to report the level of effort that
they ordinarily expended at work: “On a scale from 0% to 100%, in which 0% represents a state of
total calm and relax (reading a newspaper in the garden or sleeping on a shore) and 100% represents
the maximum employment of your psycho-physical energies (hours and hours of meetings, research
and work), how much effort would do you usually put in your work?”
This double request of effort propensity allowed us to minimize the limit of self-report
measurements, conducting our analysis on performance on the basis of the variation between the
average daily level of effort and the leadership-stimulated level of effort.
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Vignette methods require a contextual measure that can quickly catch the respondent’s response to
the stimuli. As real performance can be only measured in a field experiment or in laboratory
conditions, effort propensity could have been easily assessed by respondents. In order to study the
link between leadership styles and effort propensity we have asked for the general effort proneness
of every respondents through the After the vignette description, the respondents were asked to
provide their effort propensity.
Manipulated Variables
The five leadership styles were the manipulated the manipulated variables. They have been included
in the survey in the vignette section in the form of different leadership behaviors. We first drafted a
neutral scenario for which the five leadership dimensions were set to zero: this scenario resulted in a
basic supervisor’s proposal to work for a new project. In their study, Fernandez, Cho and Perry
(2010) proposed 16 statements (each linked to a particular leadership roles) to measure integrative
leadership (see Appendix A). We introduced into the neutral scenario groups of statements related
to a given leadership style to form a specific leadership style vignette. The respondents were then
asked to report the effort they would put in the described project. Every scenario was also followed
by a “scenario realism” question. In a preliminary test on 24 civil servants, we noticed that the level
of perceived realism of the scenario scored very different values, from 1 to 10, with an average of
4.49. Qualitative interviews revealed that the respondents’ majority that selected low value of
realism were intended to communicate not that the scenario wasn’t accurate o incomplete, but that
some of the behaviors presented were rare or totally absent in their public context. We slightly
changed the vignette in order to make it more realistic.
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Control Variables
Public service motivation was included as a control variable in the analysis, alongside with
contextual and socio-demographic variables. Public service motivation (PSM) has been defined by
Perry (1996) as “an individual's predisposition to respond to motives grounded primarily or
uniquely in public institutions”. Through confirmatory factor analysis Perry was able to end up to a
model composed by four elements: attraction to public policy making, which can be exciting and
dramatic and can reinforce one's image of self-importance; commitment to the public interest,
essentially altruistic even when the public interest is conceived as an individual's opinion (Downs,
1967); compassion, an extensive love of all people within political boundaries and the imperative
that they must be protected in all of the basic rights granted to them; and self-sacrifice, the
willingness to substitute service to others for tangible personal rewards. Given this characteristics,
PSM is likely to influence the relationship we wanted to investigate. We measured PSM with a
widely-used, 5-item version of Perry’s (1996) original scale (Alonso and Lewis 2001; Brewer,
Selden, and Facer 2000; Kim 2005; Pandey, Wright, and Moynihan 2008; Wright and Pandey 2008,
Christensen and Wright 2011).
Results
Data were gathered by e-mail submission (607 surveys submitted, 155 completed). After the
elimination of incomplete surveys, the ending data set used for this study consisted of 153
respondents. The five vignette-related surveys have been randomly assigned to the sample (see
Table 1). No significant differences have been found within the groups, confirming the overall
homogeneity and the validity of the random assignment.
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Tab. 1: Leadership style scenario distribution
Among 153 questionnaires 58 were completed by civil servants pertaining to the Ministry of
Economics and Finance (37,9%), 41 by managers pertaining to the Ministry of Economic
Development (26,8%), 23 by directors accountable to the Ministry of Justice (15%), 10 by civil
servants accountable to the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (6,5%) and 21 by various
managers associated with the Ministries of Defense, foreign Affairs, Agriculture, Forest and
Alimentary Politics, and the Ministry of University and Instruction
(13,8%).
Referring to
demographic variables, 45,1 % of the sample is composed by females (69) and 54,9% by males
(84), with an average age of 51 years.
For what concerned contextual variables, we investigated tenure as a scale variable and
wage and number of subordinates as ordinal variables. The mean for tenure is 21,4 years of public
service (St. deviation=10.08). Approximately half of the sample (49,7%, 76 respondents) is
responsible for a number of subordinates ranging from 0 to 10, 21,6% of the sample (33) is
responsible for a number of subordinates ranging from 11 to 25, 13,1% of the sample (20) is
responsible for a number of subordinates ranging from 26 to 50, another 13,1% of the sample (20)
is responsible for a number of subordinates ranging from 51 to 100, and only 2,6% (4) declared to
manage between 100 and 200 subordinates.
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A paired t-test on the difference between effort level post and before treatment was
conducted to assess the impact of each leadership style on effort and, consequently, expected
performance (see Table 2).
Paired t-tests showed a significant decrease in effort propensity for participants exposed to
change-oriented leadership (∆ effort= -5.0 scale points, one-tail p-value=.027) and a significant
increase in effort propensity among participants exposed to integrity-oriented leadership (∆effort=
+8.0 scale points, two-tailed p-value=.000).
No significant pre-post treatment changes showed up for the other three treatments – i.e.,
task-oriented leadership (∆ effort= +0.3031 scale points, two-tail p-value= 0.931), relations-oriented
leadership (∆ effort= +1.5384 scale points, one-tailed p-value= 0.291), and diversity-oriented
leadership (∆ effort= +3.0 scale points, two-tail p-value= 0.213).
Tab. 2: Differences in Effort pre-treatment/Effort post-treatment for each leadership style
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An ANOVA test showed that integrity-oriented leadership style is overall significant at the
0.01 level in influencing effort propensity (F [9, 143]= 3.31, p-value=.005) (see Table 3)
Tab. 3: ANOVA on Effort Difference (pre and post) by Leadership Style (Bonferroni)
Task-Oriented
Relations-Oriented
Change-Oriented
Diversity-Oriented
Integrity-Oriented
1.2354
1.000
-5.30303
1.000
2.6969
1.000
7.69697
0.379
RelationsOriented
ChangeOriented
DiversityOriented
-6.53846
0.869
1.46154
1.000
6.46154
0.9999
8
0.299
13
0.005
5
1.000
Control variables were included to assess potential moderating effects of public service
motivation in the relationship between leadership style and the effect on effort propensity, pre and
post treatment. A linear regression between leadership styles and public service motivation showed
that PSM has no significant relation with effort propensity for the first four leadership style (F [9,
143]= 3.31, R-squared= 0.1484). However, a significant relation has been found between PSM and
integrity-oriented leadership: this leadership style is more effective when applied to civil servants’
with lower public service motivation (P>|t|= 0.05, Beta= -1.565). This result opens the path for
interesting hypothesis discussed in the next paragraph.
Discussion and Conclusions
The recent birth of many national leadership development programs highlights
governments’ strong will to improve public leaders and managers’ skills and performances, but
which leadership style can be the core of an effectively designed leadership training program for
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civil servants? Our analysis tries to answer to this interrogative. We presented five hypotheses,
assessing a particular relationship between a specific leadership style and the desired outcome – in
this case, subordinates’ effort propensity. Three out of the five hypotheses were confirmed by the
analysis, suggesting that civil servants may be “accustomed” to certain leadership styles and react
less positively to them than what is commonly hypothesized in literature. As a matter of fact taskoriented leadership (H1a accepted), relations-oriented leadership (H1b refused) and diversityoriented leadership (H1d refused) do not influence significantly performance. In the new public
management era, it’s likely to suppose that supervisors’ transactional behaviors such as
communicating clear goals and providing feedbacks are commonly expected by public
administration subordinates from their leaders, along with relation-oriented behaviors (i.e. work
recognition and empowerment) and diversity-oriented behaviors (i.e. acceptance of different points
of view regardless of age, sex and race in order to increase the quality of decisions). These three
leadership styles constitute the core traits and competencies that administrative leaders
must
possess nowadays. Change-oriented leadership (H1c accepted), however, does not fit well any
longer in the public administration arena. As shown by Fernandez (2005), the high level of red tape
related to hiring and buying policies, the high number of hierarchical levels and the massive
presence of bureaucracy and policies tend to form a barrier to innovative leadership. Integrityoriented leadership (H1e accepted) proves to be the only leadership style able to increase
subordinates’ performance in the public sector. Standards and qualities of governance are vital in
addition to conventional norms concerning the technical design of policies, organizations or
operating systems. Evidently one important limit of our study relies on the context in which it took
place. It might be possible that leader’s integrity influence followers’ behavior above all in
countries like Italy where the level of corruption in the public sector is relatively high. Future
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studies replicating our research protocol in countries experiencing lower level of dishonesty in
government can assess the magnitude of the context.
19
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Yukl G (2002) Leadership in Organizations. Prentice Hall.
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Appendix
Appendix 1: 2006 Federal Human Capital Survey items
Items used to construct integrated leadership measure, source: 2006 Federal Human Capital Survey,
U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
Task-oriented leadership role
I1. Managers communicate the goals and priorities of the organization.
I2. I know how my work relates to the agency's goals and priorities.
I3. Managers promote communication among different work units (for example, about projects,
goals, and needed resources).
I4. Managers review and evaluate the organization's progress toward meeting its goals and
objectives.
I5. Supervisors/team leaders provide employees with constructive suggestions to improve their job
performance.
Relations-oriented leadership role
I6. I am given a real opportunity to improve my skills in my organization.
I7. Supervisors/team leaders in my work unit provide employees with the opportunities to
demonstrate their leadership skills.
I8. Employees have a feeling of personal empowerment with respect to work processes.
I9. Supervisors/team leaders in my work unit support employee development.
Change-oriented leadership role
I10. I feel encouraged to come up with new and better ways of doing things.
I11. Creativity and innovation are rewarded.
Diversity-oriented leadership role
I12. Supervisors/team leaders in my work unit are committed to a workforce representative of all
segments of society.
I13. Managers/supervisors/team leaders work well with employees of different backgrounds.
Integrity-oriented leadership role
I14. My organization's leaders maintain high standards of honesty and integrity.
I15. Prohibited Personnel Practices (for example, illegally discriminating for or against any
employee/applicant, obstructing a person's right to compete for
employment, knowingly violating veterans' preference requirements) are not tolerated.
I16. I can disclose a suspected violation of any law, rule or regulation without fear of reprisal.
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Appendix 2: Leadership-style Vignettes (translation from Italian)
Vignettes employed in the experimental section of the survey. The green highlighted part refers to
the leadership specific items imported from the HCS described in Appendix 1.
Task-oriented leadership role
Imagine the following situation. You are convened by your boss to discuss about a very important
project. The project is a priority for the public administration you work and your participation to
the project is considered fundamental. During the meeting your boss clearly identifies goals and
objectives to be achieved (I3) and the resources at your disposal (I1, I2, I4). He/she gives you
many useful advice to lead the project team and to achieve the targeted results (I5). Your boss
highlights how important the project is for your organization and that you must respect general
administrative rules and guidelines, without taking personal initiatives. In the end your boss inform
you about the members of the team: a middle aged colleague you perfectly know and a young
intern. Before exiting the office your boss’ adds “Don’t worry if you need more resources: I will do
everything to support you for any of your needs”
Relations-oriented leadership role
Imagine the following situation. You are convened by your boss to discuss about a very important
project. The project is a priority for the public administration you work and your participation to
the project is considered fundamental. During the meeting your boss clearly highlights that this
project is not only important for the organization but also for your personal development and
career (I8): working for this project will improve your skills as a professional (I6) and as a
manager (I7). Your boss tells you also that he/she will be supportive and close to you for any
advice at any time (I9). Your boss highlights how important the project is for your organization
and that you must respect general administrative rules and guidelines, without taking personal
initiatives. In the end your boss inform you about the members of the team: a middle aged colleague
you perfectly know and a young intern. Before exiting the office your boss’ adds “Don’t worry if
you need more resources: I will do everything to support you for any of your needs”
Change-oriented leadership role
Imagine the following situation. You are convened by your boss to discuss about a very important
project. The project is a priority for the public administration you work and your participation to
the project is considered fundamental. During the meeting your boss clearly highlights that you
will have total freedom in choosing how to develop the project (I10) and you will be
compensated for any improvement or change in the way people work (I11). Your boss
highlights how important the project is for your organization and that you must respect general
administrative rules and guidelines, without taking personal initiatives. In the end your boss inform
you about the members of the team: a middle aged colleague you perfectly know and a young
intern. Before exiting the office your boss’ adds “Don’t worry if you need more resources: I will do
everything to support you for any of your needs”
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Diversity-oriented leadership role
Imagine the following situation. You are convened by your boss to discuss about a very important
project. The project is a priority for the public administration you work and your participation to
the project is considered fundamental. Your boss highlights how important the project is for your
organization and that you must respect general administrative rules and guidelines, without taking
personal initiatives. In the end your boss informs you about the members of the team: an Afro
American young colleague and a colleague of yours that is openly gay (I12). Your boss
highlights that working with them should be an opportunity to enrich competencies and the
results of the project (I13) Before exiting the office your boss’ adds “Don’t worry if you need
more resources: I will do everything to support you for any of your needs”
Integrity-oriented leadership role
Imagine the following situation. You are convened by your boss to discuss about a very important
project. The project is a priority for the public administration you work and your participation to
the project is considered fundamental. Your boss highlights how important the project is for your
organization and that you must respect general administrative rules and guidelines, without taking
personal initiatives. Your boss highlights how important the project is for your organization and
that you must respect general administrative rules and guidelines, without taking personal
initiatives. In the end your boss inform you about the members of the team: a middle aged colleague
you perfectly know and a young intern. Before exiting the office your boss’ adds “I am telling you:
don’t be tempted to incur in extra costs (I14). Working in governments means being honest
and righteous (I15): if you came to know about colleagues violating rules or norms, you
should communicate it and you will get a compensation (I16)”
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