Perceived managerial and leadership effectiveness within the Canadian public sector

Abstract

AbstractThis study responds primarily to numerous calls for specific public management and public administration‐related research to better understand public leadership currently performed in an increasingly complex and ambiguous world. It also responds to calls in the human resource development (HRD) literature for more qualitative managerial behavior research. The inquiry explores perceptions of what behaviorally distinguishes effective managers from ineffective managers, as expressed by managers and nonmanagerial employees within a Canadian public utility company. It reaches for generalization by comparing the results against findings from equivalent qualitative managerial behavior studies carried out in three subareas of the British public sector. Using the critical incident technique (CIT), concrete examples (critical incidents [CIs]) of observed managerial behavior were collected from managers and nonmanagerial staff. The CIs (n = 530) were subjected to open and axial coding to identify a smaller number of discrete behavioral categories (BSs). Selective coding of the identified BSs (n = 99) resulted in 16 positive (effective) and 12 negative (ineffective) behavioral criteria (BCs) being deduced. Over 92% of the Canadian BSs are convergent in meaning with over 81% of the compared British BSs. Consequently, they are likely to be generalizable to other subareas of the Canadian public sector. The 8% of nonconvergent Canadian BSs and their respective underpinning CIs contain no content that could be construed as being context‐specific to the Canadian public utility sector. Implications of these study findings for HRD research and practice are discussed.