Measuring Public Leadership: Developing Scales for Four Key Public Leadership Roles

Abstract

This article on public leadership contributes to the literature by (1) focusing on the ‘public’ aspect of leadership and (2) developing quantitative scales for measuring four public leadership roles. These roles all refer to the extent to which public leaders actively support their employees in dealing with public sector issues: (1) accountability leadership, (2) rule-following leadership, (3) political loyalty leadership, and (4) network governance leadership. We tested the factor structure using exploratory and confirmatory analyses, with satisfactory results. Also, as expected, the scales for public leadership relate to transformational leadership and leadership effectiveness. The scales also correlate with organizational commitment, work engagement and turnover intention. These results indicate that our four scales of public leadership work adequately. We conclude with a future research agenda on how the scales can be used in survey and experimental research.

Keywords: Leadership, public administration, survey, scale development, measurement, public leadership, administrative leadership

JEL Classification: M1, M10, M12, M14, O3, O00, L3, L30, L31, L32, L33, L39, D73, D78, J2, J28, J58, J68, M12, M00, M1