Abstract
There is a pressing need for public administration leaders to exhibit expertise-based intuitive leadership traits for developing countries to respond to sustainability challenges. While the importance of explicit and tacit knowledge to underpin expertise-based intuitive decision-making is known, public service leaders of developing countries can lack these traits. It is necessary to explore the reasons for leadership skills gaps in order to define remedial actions, such as better executive development training. This study conducts 28 in-depth interviews with public administration leaders, managers, and executive training professionals in Pakistan to address the challenge of how to build expertise-based intuitive leadership traits in public administration leaders. The main findings highlight deficiencies in domain-specific knowledge and soft skills. Deficits in the formal training of leaders and the negative contribution of cultural preconditions both result in explicit and tacit knowledge gaps that undermine expertise-based intuitive decision-making. An “iceberg of expertise-based leadership” model is conceptualized, extending on previous models, to describe the intangible role that explicit and tacit knowledge play in the visible expression of leadership skills. The relevance of this model for the success of public sector-led initiatives for sustainable development is highlighted.
Highlights
South Asian countries represent almost every fifth person in the world, and the developmental challenges for the governments and citizens of these nations are enormous
One conceptualization of expert leaders is based on those leaders holding explicit knowledge acquired through formal training, and tacit knowledge aggregated over years of personal and professional experience
The difficulty is partly due to the hidden nature of tacit knowledge, and due to its dependency on variable individual personal and cultural precedents, gained through life experience and the position one occupies in a society or culture
Summary
South Asian countries represent almost every fifth person in the world, and the developmental challenges for the governments and citizens of these nations are enormous. Public sector leaders of developing countries are confronted with the governmental challenges of openness and accountability; access to public services and information; expansive bureaucracies; administrative patrimonialism; and public corruption [1]. Considering these public sector reform challenges, it is difficult for developing countries of South Asia to achieve sustainability targets defined in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [2]. Administrational and technical capacity building may require improved tacit knowledge through formal training, mobilized with implicit knowledge gained through years of workplace expertise [6] Such capacity building would assist the emergence of expert leaders capable of expertise-based intuitive decision-making to address sustainability challenges
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