1
Leading with political astuteness
Comparisons between the UK, Australian and New Zealand public sectors
Jean Hartley1, John Alford2 and Owen Hughes3
1
International Centre for Governance and Public Management, Warwick Business
School, University of Warwick
2
Melbourne Business School and the Australian and New Zealand School of
Government
3
Faculty of Business and Economics, Monash University and the Australian and New
Zealand School of Government
2
ABSTRACT
Public managers have always had to deal with politics of various types. Their work
is affected by the formal institutions and elected officials of the state, but it also
importantly involves dealing with a variety of stakeholders, both inside and external
to the organization, such as other public managers, partnerships or interest groups.
If anything, the importance of political skills for public managers is increasing with the
incidence of factors as diverse as globalisation and public management reform. Yet ,
despite the importance of political skills to long-standing issues such as the
politics/administration dichotomy or to more recent ones such as the public value
debate, there has been relatively little conceptualisation or empirical research on
public managers‟ political awareness and capacities. This paper reports findings
from a large-scale cross-national comparative research study based on a survey of
public managers in central and local government in the UK and national and state
governments in Australia and New Zealand (n = 1047). The survey was preceded by
focus groups in each of the three countries. We examined four key questions: what
political awareness skills public managers exhibit ; what contexts they use political
skills in; how skills vary by context, type of organisation, and type of manager; and
how they acquire their political skills. We also compare different institutional
arrangements of the three countries in relation to the findings. The paper concludes
by considering the implications for conceptualising and researching political
astuteness.
INTRODUCTION
Political astuteness (also described as political awareness, political savvy or „nous‟
e.g. Hartley and Fletcher, 2008) is an increasingly necessary skill for public
managers, but it has been relatively neglected in the research literature. It has
always been important for managers in the public sector to be able to work with the
formal political office-holders, institutions and processes of the state, though
classical public administration emphasised the separation of roles of politician and
administrator (e.g. Weber, 1946) and the need for civil servants to work with political
impartiality with the government of the day (e.g. Burnham and Pyper, 2008). Others
have argued that the separation of roles is a myth or a construct (e.g. Svara, 1998;
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2001; Selden et al, 1999). To what extent do public managers require political
astuteness to work with elected politicians?
In addition, public managers have to work not only with elected politicians but also to
interact with a range of other actors, institutions and stakeholders. They may have
to work with other government organizations, with civil society organizations and
movements that advocate or lobby on behalf of consumer, pressure and political
groups (and to some extent the latter has also been true for their counterparts in the
private and voluntary sectors). They may have to face the media to explain
particular policies, events or incidents. They may therefore be working with a range
of stakeholders where their legitimacy rests less on the exercise of formal authority
and more on persuasion and influence. They are, arguably, working with diverse
and sometimes competing interests which may involve the use of political not just
technical skills.
Several factors have heightened the salience of political awareness and skills for
public managers in recent decades, it can be argued. One is the rise of network
governance (e.g. Stoker, 2006a; Provan and Kenis, 2008; Benington, 2000), which
imparts a greater role to non-governmental actors in policy-making and servicedelivery, and a consequently greater need for mangers to interact with them as
stakeholders. Another is globalisation, which has created a range of uncertainties
about world governance, national stability or local priorities which managers need to
take account of, and which may have unexpected or substantial repercussions which
have to be addressed (e.g.Held, 2010). Another is the increasing intensity, ubiquity
and speed of media coverage, driven by the Internet and its accompanying 24-hour
news cycle, demanding very fast responses by governments and keen appreciation
by managers of the media implications of policy issues. Quite possibly also the
increasing salience of „wicked problems‟ (Rittel and Webber, 1973) confronting
governments has required managers to be more attuned to the political difficulties
which often permeate those kinds of problems. In short, it is now even more
important for public managers to be politically astute.
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But surprisingly, as discussed below, the literature on the political awareness and
skills of public managers is sparse, and even that on the political awareness of
private sector managers is somewhat narrowly one-sided. There is a need for
conceptual frameworks to understand political skill and for empirical work to examine
when and how such skills are used by public managers.
This paper is an effort to redress this deficiency. It reports on research which was
initially conducted with managers in the United Kingdom (Hartley and Branicki 2006;
Hartley et al 2007) and was subsequently replicated and extended to a crossnational comparison in Australia and New Zealand. The research has three aims:
1. To fill the conceptual and empirical gap in the literature on public managers‟
political astuteness. Drawing on data from samples of over 500 UK public
managers and a similar number in Australia and New Zealand, it adds to our
understanding of what public managers understand „politics‟ to mean, the
circumstances in which they use political astuteness, their assessment of the
effectiveness of their political skills, and how they acquire their political
awareness.
2. To compare the political astuteness of managers in the public sector with
what the literature tells us about managers in the private sector. The research
highlights some important differences between the two.
3. To begin exploring whether institutional differences also prompt differences in
both the need for and exercise of political astuteness by public managers. By
comparing managers in the UK, Australian and New Zealand governments,
the study unearths insights into whether their partially differing institutional
arrangements are associated with similarities or differences in political
awareness and skills.
POLITICAL ASTUTENESS IN THE MANAGEMENT AND PUBLIC
ADMINISTRATION LITERATURE
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Although politics is increasingly recognised by practitioners as a key factor for
managers to take into account, its treatment in the management literature has been
patchy and the literature is both sparse and ambiguous (Buchanan, 2008). Much of
the generic literature has treated politics with indifference or even outright negativity.
It has been seen as having no place in rational processes and systems of
management. It is seen as self-interested behaviour by managers seeking to further
their career or personal interests (Rosen 2007; Halbesleben and Wheeler 2006;
Byrne 2005; Ferris et al 2002, 2005). One recent writer referred to „illegitimate, selfserving political activities‟ (Chang 2009, 779). Relatedly, it is interpreted as
„politicking‟, and associated with blaming, attacking, scapegoating, manipulation and
exploitation (Mintzberg 1985; Allen et al 1979; Bower and Webbing 1988; Eiring
1999). Another variant sees it in terms of waging „turf wars‟ (Buchanan and Badham
1999; Bacharach and Lawler 1980). In short the „dark side‟ of politics tends to get the
most exposure in this perspective.
Other perspectives, notably from the political science literature, offer broader and
less negative views. A more pluralist view sees politics as a set of interactions within
and between public and private institutions, covering both formal and informal
activities. It has been described as all the activities of conflict, negotiation or cooperation over the use and distribution of resources (Leftwich 2004). Another
constructive view comes from Crick (2004, 67), who defines politics as the
mobilisation of support for a position, decision or action whereby „people act together
through institutionalised procedures to resolve differences, to conciliate different
interests and values, and to make public policies in the pursuit of common purposes‟.
The basic purpose of politics in this perspective is to mobilise support for particular
actions by reconciling different interests and values – a purpose diametrically at odds
with the „politics as self-interest‟ view.
One important extension of this perspective is the idea that politics entails reaching
beyond difference to find ways of co-operating in order to achieve consensus about
the broader purposes that are shared despite differences in emphasis, values or
specific goals. Dunn has captured this in his suggestion that politics are the
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“struggles which result from the collisions between human purposes: most clearly
when these collisions involve large numbers of human beings... it takes in, too, the
immense array of expedients and practices which human beings have invented to
cooperate, as much as to compete with one another” (quoted in Stoker, 2006b, p. 4).
These definitions of politics have important ramifications for managers. They mean
that politics can partly be understood in more familiar terms such as influencing
skills, partnership working, or social skills. Bacharach has argued that political
competence may make „the difference between someone who can get an idea off
the ground and accepted in an organisation and someone who can‟t‟ (2005, 93). It is
also possible that „constructive‟ politics can play a key part in achieving
organisational outcomes (Holbeche 2004). Thus, politics may or may not result in
positive outcomes – it can be seen as an important social influence process with the
potential of being functional or dysfunctional to organisations and individuals‟ (Allen
et al 1979, 82). Either way, managers cannot afford to ignore the political behaviour
going on around them.
The present study is designed to shed more light on which of these perspectives
best reflect the way public sector managers view politics. To facilitate this, we adopt
a broad definition of politics in and around organisations, to allow space for differing
conceptions. Drawing on the original UK literature review, we take the view that
„politics is about mobilising support for, and consent to, action in the context of
diverse, and sometimes competing interests and may involve either collaboration or
competition depending on purpose; that politics can be legitimate as well as
illegitimate, that it can be about pursuing either or both of self-interest and
organisational interests; and that these activities can take place external or internal
to the organisation‟(Hartley and Fletcher, 2008).
METHODOLOGY
This research has been conducted in two stages: an original project conducted in the
United Kingdom covered both public and private sector managers, though the
analysis reported here relates to public managers in national and local government
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only, in order to be directly comparative with the Australian and New Zealand where
the replication study was carried out. Thus, the data from public sector managers
has been extracted from the UK study and combined with that from the Australian
and New Zealand public mangers, to form a three-country data-base. The research
was focused on middle and senior managers in all three countries.
A central element of the research is the conceptual framework of political awareness
skills, developed in the first (UK) stage of the project (the methodology for which is
described below). The original authors proposed, constructed and statistically tested
a five dimensional framework of skills, which sought to conceptualise political
astuteness skills beyond the narrower account of political skills as self-interest extant
in much of the literature. These dimensions were operationalised in a 50-item
inventory using Likert-scale response categories, and this structure has been
confirmed in statistical factor analyses (Hartley, Fletcher and Ungemach, 2011). The
items formed the part of the survey concerned with self-reported political skills. The
five dimensions (which ascended from the „micro‟ personal level to the „macro‟
strategic level) were:

Personal skills.

Inter-personal skills

Reading people and situations

Building alignment and alliances

Strategic direction and scanning.
Other parts of the survey examined what managers considered politics to be in their
work as managers, in what contexts they deployed political skills, and how they
acquired their political skills. We also asked about how they rated the political skills
of the senior managers they worked with most closely (in order to be able to
compare ratings of self with other on the dimensions of political skill).
The study was conducted in two stages (one in the UK and one in Australia/New
Zealand) with matching methodology. Prior to dissemination of the survey, six focus
groups were conducted with senior managers in London, Birmingham, Cardiff,
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Canberra, Wellington and Melbourne to solicit information about political skills, the
contexts in which they are used, and the ways in which their own political skills had
been developed. The focus groups were held with managers from several different
locations in order to explore different types of governments (e.g. central,
commonwealth, local, devolved, state). A total of 60 managers participated in these
focus groups, which were tape-recorded and written up for analysis.
Participants for the self-report survey were recruited in a number of ways. In the UK,
participants responded to an email invitation sent from the Chartered Management
Institute (the national professional body for managers) to its members. The primary
method of recruitment in Australia/NZ was third-party recruitment through the central
agency responsible for government employment in each jurisdiction. The head of the
public service in each Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG)
jurisdiction (the CEO of the Public Service Commission or Department of
Premier/Prime Minister and Cabinet) was emailed an outline of the study and a
request for his/her cooperation in the dissemination of the survey instrument. Once
agreement was received, each relevant central agency was sent a letter of invitation
for potential participants, along with a draft covering note encouraging employees of
that government to take part. They were asked to forward these messages to all of
their senior managers. Two secondary methods of recruitment in Australia/NZ
included an advertisement on ANZSOG‟s website, and an email from ANZSOG to
alumni of its core programs, all of whom are senior managers in the target
governments.
The survey instrument was hosted online by the UK Chartered Management Institute
for all three countries, and was accessed via a link in the email invitation.
The self-report survey was developed by the UK researchers according to a political
awareness framework based on information from focus groups, a senior manager
advisory group, and a review of the literature (see Hartley et al, 2007, p. 23-27). It
was underpinned by the five-dimension framework described above, with further
sections examining participants‟ understanding of politics; the situations in which
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political skills are useful; the effectiveness of participants‟ skills; their evaluation of
their colleagues‟ skills; the development of these skills; and their importance to
participants‟ organisations.
Slight modifications were necessary in the Australia/New Zealand element of the
study, because the survey was originally developed for use with managers from the
public, private and non-profit sectors in the UK. A small number of questions were
altered, added or eliminated to reflect the different institutional context.
The survey questions were mainly quantitative, with participants asked to rate their
responses to various items on a four, five or six-point Likert scale. One question
asked for ranking of responses instead.
Participants were 1053 public sector managers from Australia, New Zealand and the
UK, nearly 80% of whom self-identified as senior managers. See Table 1 for
information about participants. We aimed to exclude junior managers on the
grounds of their not having sufficient experience in dealing with complex competing
interests in their work. In this we were not entirely successful, though the low
numbers of junior managers shows that our targeting of middle and senior managers
was largely accurate. The junior managers are excluded from certain analyses.
----------------------------Table 1 about here
----------------------------The participants came from all four countries of the UK and from nine of ANZSOG‟s
ten member governments. Thus, the scope of the study encompasses employees of
UK central and local governments, as well as all Australian and New Zealand state,
territory and national governments (with the exception of Tasmania).
FINDINGS
Survey findings: Similarities across the three countries
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We set out and discuss the findings from our survey at two levels. In this section, we
consider those patterns which are broadly similar across the three countries. This
enables us to comment on the extent to which the data concur with the treatment of
political awareness found in the extant literature. In subsequent sections, we
consider the ways in which political astuteness skills differ among the three
countries, and whether and to what extent any differences might be explicable by
differences in institutional arrangements.
The first research question to consider is how public managers understand politics in
their workplace – how far do their views reflect the „dark side‟ of politics and how far
a constructive view of politics. In the survey, managers were given six varied
definitions of politics in the workplace and were invited to endorse up to three of
these. The first area of similarity across the three countries concerned how public
managers understand „politics‟ (see Table 2 and Figure 1). The same four
understanding were the most important for survey respondents across all three
countries, and the same two were least important. The most frequently cited were all
meanings with positive or neutral connotations: alliance building, formal processes
and institutions of government, scanning factors in the external environment and
ways in which different interests are reconciled. Their dominant definitions were thus
primarily about „getting things done‟, both in the „big-P‟ (formal) political environment
and in the „small-p‟ (alliances, scanning environment and reconciling interests)
context. (At the same time, within those rankings of definitions, there some
differences of relative emphasis, covered in a later section).
--------------------------------------------Table 2 and Figure 1 about here
---------------------------------------------
By contrast, the two least frequently cited, by a clear margin, were those reflecting
the darker side of politics: pursuit of personal advantage, and people „protecting their
turf‟. This finding is clearly at odds with the position advanced in the generic
management literature on the meaning of politics in managerial work. It indicates that
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public managers in the three countries have a much more sanguine view of the role
of politics than appears to be the case based on the literature about their private
sector counterparts.
Secondly, in order to put this finding into perspective, we also sought to establish
how important different aspects of the political environment were to the respondents‟
organisations (ie to the organization not to their own work as such). In general,
formal political processes were seen as impinging more on respondents‟
organisations than „small-p‟ politics across all three countries (see Table 3 and
Figure 2).
--------------------------------------------Table 3 and Figure 2 about here
---------------------------------------------
Thirdly, we found a further area of broad similarity, which concerned the situations in
which respondents said they found political skills to be useful (i.e. in their own work)
(see Table 4 and Figure 3). (Some questions were only asked in Australia and New
Zealand and so there is no comparison with the UK for those questions. The reason
was that the UK survey covered private sector managers as well as public sector
ones.) Certain other questions were important but were framed in UK terms – such
as „Working with regional or local government‟, „Working with UK central
government‟, or „Working with European Union institutions and officials‟. On these
issues we therefore framed new questions for the Australian and New Zealand
respondents which were more context appropriate: „Dealing with Ministers‟, „Dealing
with other politicians‟, „Dealing with central agencies such as Treasury or the PM‟s
Department‟, „Dealing with interest groups‟, and „Working with different levels of
government‟. Table 4 and Figure 3 set out the responses to the common questions
as well as to those asked only in the UK or only in Australia and New Zealand (i.e.
the „non-common‟ questions). While the „non-common‟ questions are not comparable
across the three countries, they are comparable with the responses to common
questions within each country.
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--------------------------------------------Table 4 and Figure 3 about here
---------------------------------------------
Bearing this complication in mind, the situations reported as those where political
skills were most frequently used related to formal politics. In the UK, the most cited
situation was „Working with regional or local government‟ and among the most
frequent was „Working with UK central government‟. In Australia and New Zealand,
the most cited situations were „Dealing with Ministers‟ and „Dealing with central
agencies‟, while „Dealing with other politicians‟ was also among the most frequent.
These all reflect the importance of formal political institutions and processes across
all three countries.
Almost as important – for UK as well as for Australian and New Zealand managers –
were the challenges of understanding the public context and in particular in getting
things done: „Thinking about how public opinion has an impact‟, „Working with
influential people in the your organisation‟, „Working with the media‟, „Working with
partners and strategic alliances‟, „Scanning changes in society‟, and „Dealing with
interest groups‟. These reflect a perception by public managers that they need to
exercise political astuteness across a range of activities, indeed that the political
process in their countries is rather pervasive in their work. It could also indicate a
degree of responsiveness to the concerns of their political masters.
At the same time, this attention to political circumstances had a distinctively domestic
flavour. The situations where political skills were least used across all countries were
„Scanning changes internationally‟ and „Working with global organisations‟, while for
the UK, „Working with EU institutions and officials‟ was also among the least
frequent.
A fourth area of similarity was in one aspect of how respondents across the three
countries assessed the relative effectiveness of different categories of their own
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political skills (see Table 5 and Figure 4). In all three countries, public managers had
a generally higher opinion of what we might call their „micro‟ political skills – personal
skills, inter-personal skills, and reading people and situations – than their „macro‟
skills – building alignment and alliances, and strategic direction and scanning. (Note
that in other important respects there were significant differences between them in
this area, to be discussed below.) This was distinctly different for their ratings of the
senior managers whom they most closely worked with – across all three countries
managers rated their senior colleagues as scoring less well on personal and
interpersonal skills while scoring them relatively benignly on reading people and
situations.
--------------------------------------------Table 5 and Figure 4 about here
--------------------------------------------A significant similarity in this area was that respondents generally rated their own
political skills more highly than those of their fellow managers. This „leniency bias‟,
which is of course logically impossible if the sample is valid, frequently occurs when
survey respondents are asked to rate themselves and others (Fletcher, 2008). One
interesting exception, however, was in their assessments of how effective their peers
were at „reading people and situations‟. On this question, both the Australian and UK
respondents rated their fellow managers slightly more highly than themselves, and
the New Zealanders rated them almost as highly as themselves, i.e. by a much
closer margin than in other skill categories.
Finally, a fifth area of similarity concerned how managers developed their political
skills. In the survey, respondents were given 24 choices of experiences, events or
ways in which they might have developed their political astuteness skills.
Overwhelmingly, they acquired them through informal and experiential processes,
such as gaining experience on the job, handling crises, or learning from their own
mistakes, rather than from formal structured sources such as formal mentoring or
academic study. Table 6 sets out the top eight sources or influences cited by
respondents (in terms of the percentages citing that source as valuable or very
valuable. It shows that Australia‟s and New Zealand‟s top eight contain exactly the
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same items, albeit in a slightly different order, while the UK‟s contains six of those
items. Moreover, three of the bottom four items were also the same for each country.
----------------------------Table 6 about here
---------------------------Institutional arrangements in the three countries
While there were some broad similarities across the three countries, there were also
some significant differences among them. Before we turn to consider these
differences, and whether they are related to differing institutional arrangements, we
must first outline the key institutional features of the three governments.
When it comes to governmental arrangements, the United Kingdom, Australia and
New Zealand all sit squarely within the Westminster tradition. This tradition shares in
common with other democratic polities the essential conditions of democracy: the
rule of law, free, multi-party elections, freedom of expression and assembly, and so
on (Stoker, 2006b). What distinguishes it from other traditions of polities around the
world is the structure of the relationship between the legislative and executive
branches of government. Specifically, the executive government is drawn from the
legislature, rather than the strict separation between the two found in systems such
as that of the United States. The government of the day is formed from that party or
coalition which can command a majority of votes in the lower (or only) house of
parliament. Ministers are appointed from among those majority parliamentarians,
and are answerable to parliament.
Despite this basic similarity, there are also important institutional differences among
the three countries, which are set out in Table 7. First, Australia differs from the other
two governments in having a federal system. The national government (referred to
as the Commonwealth) formally shares power with the six states, each of which has
its own Westminster-style government. These states are not mere administrative
divisions of the Commonwealth, but rather have their positions guaranteed by the
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Constitution, which is very difficult, if not impossible, to amend.1 The practical
implication for public managers is that both formulating and implementing policy may
require dealing with other governments within the federal system. The Constitution‟s
authors did not provide a precise division of powers or formal machinery for conflict
resolution, leading to a system of „co-operative federalism‟ which rests on a series of
accommodations between the level of government. As Emy and Hughes put it, this
leads to „a great deal of conflict, competition, hard bargaining and political
grandstanding’ (1991).
----------------------------Table 7 about here
---------------------------Second, whereas Australia and the United Kingdom have bi-cameral parliaments,
New Zealand‟s parliament has only one chamber, its upper house having been
eliminated in 1951. In both the UK and Australia, the upper house may not
necessarily have the same party make-up as the lower house, meaning that the
government formed on the basis of its majority in the House of Lords (UK) or Senate
(Australia) may need to negotiate on legislation and other matters with those
controlling the upper house – particularly in Australia, where the Senate is elected
rather than appointed. By itself, this has meant that New Zealand governments, once
elected in their own right, are able to act decisively while in office – as was observed,
for instance, in the radical reform governments of the 1980s and early 1990s. The
practical implication of this for public managers is that in bi-cameral systems,
additional political considerations may impinge on the formulation and
implementation of policy. There may be less certainty and a greater need to take
other stakeholders into account in advising governments.
Third, the countries differ in their voting systems, in ways which affect the likelihood
of minor parties gaining representation in parliament. Specifically, the UK has a „first
past the post‟ (FPP) system, which makes it harder for minor parties to gain seats in
1
The Constitution lists particular matters over which the Commonwealth has power, and leaves anything not
mentioned to the States. However, High Court judgments and other factors have tended to expand the
Commonwealth’s sphere of influence over time. To change the Constitution requires a referendum in which a
majority of the voters and a majority of the states must support the change. Since Federation in 1901, only 8
matters out of the 44 put to a referendum have been passed.
16
parliament. On the other hand, New Zealand has since 1994 had a „mixed member
proportional‟ (MMP) system, which facilitates minor parties gaining seats and acts as
a check on the major parties. Indeed, this system was introduced specifically in
response to dissatisfaction with the perceived dominance of major parties in the
unicameral parliament. Somewhere in between is the Australian system of
preferential voting for the lower house (similar to the Alternative Vote (AV) system
recently rejected in the referendum in the UK), which gives minor parties some
influence in policy terms at election time, but does not in itself prompt their greater
representation in parliament. More importantly in Australia, the voting system for the
Senate is proportional, which in practice ensures that minor parties and
independents are represented in the Senate, and in likelihood hold the balance of
power. The practical implication of voting systems for public managers is similar to
that of having bicameral parliaments: they increase the range of stakeholders that
have to be taken into account in policy-making and implementation.
Finally, they vary in the extent to which the separation of politics from administration
is underpinned structurally. While there is a social consensus in all three countries
that the civil service should be politically neutral, there is variation in how strongly it
is backed up by legislative obligations to varying degrees. Most important in this
respect are the processes by which appointments and dismissals are made. All three
countries have institutions designed to ensure that these processes are governed by
the merit principle – that public servants should be hired or fired on the basis of their
competence and/or performance, not on the basis of political allegiance or bias.
To some extent this insulates public servants from the vicissitudes of politics. In the
UK, civil service recruitment is under the oversight of the Civil Service
Commissioners, who administer a merit-based recruitment code, approve senior
appointments and hear complaints of breaches of the code. The Australian Public
Service Commission plays a similar role. In both cases, however, it is still open to
the government of the day to appoint and dismiss department heads, who have the
authority to play an important role in upholding the independence of the public
service. In New Zealand, there are similar processes administered by the State
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Services Commission, albeit les detailed in procedural terms. However, in New
Zealand there is a further guarantee of the independence of the civil service, namely
that department heads (chief executives) cannot be dismissed without the
permission of the State Services Commissioner. This arrangement has real teeth:
there have been cases in recent years where a minister sought to terminate a chief
executive but the Commissioner, after enquiring into the matter, disallowed the
dismissal. The net effect is that NZ public servants have a somewhat greater sense
of the separation of politics from administration. This sense has been reinforced by
the fact that NZ has gone even further than the other two countries in structuring
services in such a way that policy functions are clearly separated from
administration, with the implication that those public servants performing the latter
roles are relatively insulated from formal „big p‟ politics. However, the unicameral
parliament in conjunction with the proportional voting system mean that politics is
likely to be significant in NZ managers‟ work.
Weighing up all these factors together, it is possible to argue that formal politics is
most salient to Australian public managers and least salient to those in the UK, with
New Zealand somewhere in between. Australia‟s federal system and bi-cameral
parliament in particular dictate that its public managers have to be aware of and
operate in their political environment. This is reinforced by its voting system, which
increases the likelihood of minor party representation in its Senate. At the same time,
its civil service oversight processes, while relatively robust, are not as strong as
those of New Zealand.
By contrast, the UK public service has not had to deal with state „provinces‟, and its
relationships with the devolved governments of Scotland, Wales and Ireland are still
being shaped. Moreover the UK‟s House of Lords is overall less of a political
obstacle for the government than is the Senate, and the Civil Service Commissioners
have sufficient authority to safeguard public service independence. On balance, the
world of politics seems to be experienced by UK public managers as a separate
world from which policy is dictated rather than a blending of worlds requiring
increased negotiation.
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Finally, while New Zealand has a strong custodian of civil service independence in
the State Services Commissioner, other features of its governance arrangements –
notably, its unicameral parliament and its proportional voting system – dictate that
public managers understand and interact with the world of politics, not on a partisan
basis but as a necessary means to get things done.
Survey findings: Differences among the three countries
With that backdrop, we turn to what the survey data reveal of the differences among
the three countries, and whether the institutional factors might account for any of
these differences.
First, although the „dark side‟ of politics (pursuit of personal advantage and people
protecting their turf) was less cited than more positive perspectives in definitions of
politics in all three countries, in the UK it was noticeably more important than in the
other two countries – 17% of UK managers said they thought politics was „pursuit of
personal advantage compared with 4% of Australian managers and only 1% of New
Zealand managers (see Table 1 and Figure 1), which is quite a striking difference.
One explanation for this could be that UK public managers feel that they are less
able to influence policy decisions or to understand the nuances of how political
factors might have affected them, and therefore are more sceptical of the legitimacy
of those decisions.
A second area of difference concerns respondents‟ nominations of the situations in
which they used political skills. Some of them entailed differences between the UK
on the one hand and Australia and New Zealand on the other. British public
managers were more likely to see the challenges of using political skills in thinking
about how public opinion had an impact on their organisation and in working with
partners and strategic alliances, but less likely to do so in scanning changes
internationally for their impact on the organisation.
19
As explained above, in this section of the survey, some of the questions asked in
Australia and New Zealand were different from those asked in the UK. Nevertheless,
there were a couple of interesting differences between Australia and New Zealand,
which at first sight seem to counteract each other. On the one hand, NZ managers
tended to use political skills more in dealing with politicians other than ministers,
while on the other, Australian managers used them more in dealing with interest
groups. The greater emphasis in NZ on dealing with other politicians may be
explicable by the presence of minor party representation in parliament due to the
MMP voting system, necessitating an awareness of them by public managers, as
well as a need to consult with them about implementation.
A third important difference lies in respondents‟ assessments of their own and their
peers‟ political skills. Although the relative ranking of the five main types of political
skill was the same for all three countries, in Britain the mean scores (of both
themselves and their peers) were significantly lower. In a word, public managers in
the UK took a dimmer view of the effectiveness of their own and their peers‟ political
skills than did their counterparts in Australia and New Zealand. This could, of course,
be attributable to some form of native British modesty or alternatively of brash
Antipodean braggadocio, but more realistically is explicable by the previously
discussed greater level of detachment of UK public managers from the political
realm. Put simply, they may have less occasion to apply political skills in the formal
realm of politics than their Australian and New Zealand counterparts, and feel less
confident about them as a result.
In summary, some of the differences in the possession and application of political
skills could be explained by reference to institutional factors. But these explanations
should be seen as promising lines of inquiry rather than settled verdicts. Other types
of explanations could be derived from considering factors as diverse as national
culture, governments‟ pursuit of „joined up government‟ or „whole of government‟
solutions, public management reforms, natural or economic crises, the stage of the
electoral cycle or political scandals. Having marked out what we might we might call
20
the dependent variables, we need to probe the responses more deeply to gain more
insight into what lies behind them.
NEXT STEPS AND CONCLUSIONS
The three-country cross-national comparison has yielded some important insights
about the value and use of the skills of political astuteness among public managers
in Australia, New Zealand and the UK and has addressed the three research
questions set for this paper. First, it has contributed to addressing the conceptual
and empirical gap in the understanding of the political astuteness characteristics of
public managers. The cross-national comparison supports the overall structure of
the conceptual framework based on five dimensions of political skill. It supports the
proposition that political skill is used by managers for not only formal political
situations but also with a range of stakeholders both within and outside government.
The research suggests that it is possible to construe politics not only as about selfinterest but also as about alliance-building and horizon-scanning for organizational
purposes. These findings suggest that public managers may be exercising
leadership skills not simply management skills, particularly where they work in a
network governance context.
The research shows that the leniency bias is present across the different samples,
and that the acquisition of political astuteness skills is currently haphazard in that it
occurs through informal and experiential events, including making mistakes.
Second, the research does suggest that the predominantly negative view of politics
within the management literature is not supported from the empirical data here, and
that there may be differences between public and private managers in this respect.
However, further research is needed to examine sectoral differences.
Third, there are some interesting and intriguing differences between the public
managers in the three countries, with more differences between the UK and the two
Antipodean countries. UK managers are considerably more likely to report that
politics is about self-interest and people protecting their turf in the workplace.
21
Australian and New Zealand managers self-report somewhat higher political
astuteness skills and they also report that the senior managers they work closely
with have higher skills. There are a wider range of formal political contexts where
Australian and New Zealand public managers say that their political astuteness skills
are important. We have suggested some possible institutional reasons which may
be influencing the perceptions and attitudes of these public managers in different
countries. Such explanations are, at this stage, speculative, but we aim to examine
these issues further in a series of interviews, which forms the next phase of this
research programme.
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Acknowledgements
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Government for research assistance and statistical analyses.
24
Table 1: Numbers and managerial level of participants by country
Managerial level
Australia
New Zealand UK
Department head, Deputy
Department head, Director or
equivalent
69 (15%)
21 (30%)
97 (19%)
Senior manager
375 (83%)
33 (46%)
219 (42%)
Middle manager
9 (2%)
14 (20%)
171 (33%)
Junior manager (should not
have been in the study and
excluded from some analyses)
0 (0%)
2 (3%)
33 (6%)
Did not answer
1 (0%)
1 (1%)
2 (0%)
Total
454
71
522
25
Table 2: Which of the following comes closest to your understanding of
politics in your work as a manager?*
Purpose of politics
AU%
NZ%
UK%
Significant
differences (chi
square tests)
Alliance-building to achieve
organisational objectives
67
71
58
AU and UK (p=0.006)
NZ and UK (p=0.045)
Formal processes and
institutions of government
58
62
53
No significant
differences
Pursuit of personal advantage
4
1
17
AU and UK (p<0.001)
NZ and UK (p=0.001)
People „protecting their turf‟
13
7
27
AU and UK (p<0.001)
NZ and UK (p<0.001)
Scanning factors in external
environment that organisation
needs to consider
59
64
37
AU and UK (p<0.001)
NZ and UK (p<0.001)
Ways in which different
interests are reconciled
52
45
36
AU and UK (p<0.001)
*Participants were asked to tick up to three options
26
Figure 1: Which of the following comes closest to your understanding of
politics in your work as a manager?
27
Table 3: “How far do the following apply to your organisation?” (mean 1-4)
Mean (1-4)
UK
Significance
(analysis of
variance tests)
AU
NZ
We work in a highly media-visible
environment
3.40
3.43 3.37
No sig differences
We work with a range of external
partnerships
3.60
3.53 3.53
No sig differences
We operate in an environment subject to a
lot of procedural controls
3.39
3.3
AU and UK
(p>0.001)
NZ and UK
(p=0.004)
External perception of my organisation is a
significant consideration in my work
3.30
3.36 3.28
My work is directly connected to the formal
political world (e.g. state or national
government, parliament)
3.47
3.59 3.56 No sig differences
Formal political decisions affect my
organisation
3.64
3.71 3.78
3.56
No sig differences
AU and UK
(p>0.001)
28
Figure 2: “How far do the following apply to your organisation?” (mean scores
on a 1-4 Likert scale)
29
Table 4: Please rate the extent to which you find it valuable to use political
skills in the following situations (mean of 0-4)
Situation
AU
NZ
UK
Significant
differences
(analysis of
variance tests)
Thinking about how public opinion has
an impact on your organisation
3.01
3.03
3.19
AU and UK
(p=0.002)
Working with the media
2.87
2.97
2.83
No sig differences
Scanning changes in society for their
impact on your organisation
2.81
2.86
2.85
No sig differences
Scanning changes internationally for
their impact on your organisation
2.33
2.23
2.06
AU and UK
(p<0.001)
Working with regional or local
government
N/A
N/A
3.2
N/A
Working with UK central government
N/A
N/A
3.12
N/A
Working with European Union
institutions and officials
N/A
N/A
2.12
N/A
Dealing with Ministers
3.42
3.43
N/A
No sig differences
Dealing with other politicians
2.93
3.18
N/A
AU and NZ
(p=0.038)
Dealing with central agencies such as
Treasury or the PM‟s department
3.15
3.12
N/A
No sig differences
Dealing with interest groups
2.93
2.69
N/A
AU and NZ (p<0.02)
Working with different levels of
government
2.77
2.71
N/A
No sig differences
Working with global governance
organisations
1.89
1.95
1.73
No sig differences
Working with partners and strategic
alliances
2.77
2.69
3.12
AU and UK
(p<0.001)
NZ and UK
(p<0.001)
Working with influential people in your
organisation
3.02
3.00
3.12
No sig differences
Working with cliques and power blocs in
your organisation
2.46
2.47
2.52
No sig differences
30
Figure 3: “Please rate the extent to which you find it valuable to use political skills in the following situations” (mean score
from 1= „of no value‟ to 5 = „extremely valuable‟; also possible to state not applicable which treated as missing value)
31
Table 5: Assessments of self and others across five domains of political skills
Self (mean, scale of
1-6)
Others (mean, scale of
1-6)
Domain of political skills
AU
NZ
UK
AU
NZ
UK
Personal skills
4.28
4.45
4.19
3.81
3.86
3.49
Interpersonal skills
4.26
4.36
4.16
3.87
3.87
3.51
Reading people and situations
4.19
4.32
4.03
4.32
4.29
4.06
Building alignment and alliances
4.07
4.19
3.93
3.89
3.87
3.58
Strategic direction and scanning
4.27
4.3
3.99
4.04
3.96
3.7
32
Figure 4: Assessments of self and others across five domains of political skills (mean scores: 1 = weak and 6 = excellent)
33
Table 6: Top eight influences on political skills in Australia, NZ and the UK
Rank Australia
1
Good example of senior
manager
2
Gaining experience in
the job
3
Handling crises
4
5
Learning from own
mistakes
Observing role models
6
Informal mentoring
7
Bad example of senior
manager
Secondment to another
organisation
8
New Zealand
Gaining experience in
the job
Handling crises
Good example of senior
manager
Observing role models
Learning from own
mistakes
Bad example of senior
manager
Secondment to another
organisation
Informal mentoring
United Kingdom
Learning from own
mistakes
Gaining experience in
the job
Handling crises
Good example of senior
manager
Bad example of senior
manager
Working with other
organisations
Observing role models
Having time out to
reflect
34
Table 7: Comparison of key institutional factors: UK, Australia and New
Zealand
Institutional factor
UK
Australia
New Zealand
Democratic elections, rule of
law, free media etc.



Executive drawn from
legislature (“Westminster”
system)




Federal system
Bi-cameral parliament


Electoral system enabling
significant minor party
representation
?

Institutional guarantees of
public service independence

