Irish Public Sector Research

DOCTOR OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University Nottingham, U.K. Making Sense of Public Administrative Leadership in the Republic of Ireland An Interpretive Research Project Cedric Chau Whitaker School of Government and Management Institute of Public Administration, Republic of Ireland 09 November 2012 1 Acknowledgement To God be all Glory, Honour and Praise “Among the gods there is none like you, Lord; no deeds can compare with yours.” (Book of Psalms chapter 86 verse 8, Holy Bible ) This work is dedicated to Ivy, Stephanie and Sabrina I also wish to express my gratitude to Professor Myra Hodgkinson of Nottingham Trent University, Professor Sharon Turnbull of the Leadership Trust and Dr. Daniel King of Nottingham Trent University for their tireless supervision and encouragement, without which this work would not have been completed. 2 Abstract This research is a research into the perceptions of senior public administrative leaders in the Republic of Ireland regarding their own leadership at the time when Ireland was facing a significant socio-economic crisis. The research examines the senior Irish administrative leaders’ own perspectives on how leadership should be exercised, and explores how they perceived the environment they were in and on how they made sense of their own leadership responses to the perceived environment. The research takes the Republic of Ireland as a national case study, and focuses on the public administrative leadership, which is the leadership of the implementation of public policies, rather than on the political leadership, which is the leadership of the selection of public policies (Montesquieu 1748, Ostrom 1973, Osborne and Plastrik 1997, Alimo-Metcalfe and Alban-Metcalfe 2003, Van Wart and Dicke 2008). The research is preluded by a conceptual discussion on leadership, morality, ethics and values (Chau 2007b); a qualitative research on leadership values in the Irish public services (Chau 2008); and a quantitative research on public service delivery perspectives in Ireland (Chau 2009). The research interviews were conducted amongst the top two echelons of public administrative leaders, with participation drawn from the Secretary General or Assistant Secretary levels of the Irish civil service, or their equivalent amongst the State Agencies. The research employs an interpretivist approach (Mason 2002, Willis 2007), exploring how these senior Irish public administrative leaders made sense of their own leadership during the crisis period. In particular, the interpretive approach explores how the leaders perceived their own leadership, explores how they interpreted the environment they perceived themselves to be in, and explores how they made sense of their own leadership in response to the perceived environment. The findings of the research reveal evidence pointing towards a social construction process (Berger and Luckmann 1966) through which the senior Irish public administrative leaders constructed their realities of leadership. The finding reveals that in their constructed realities, which were constructed through their dialectic social interactions, the senior Irish public administrative leaders considered that they made 3 appropriate responses to the socio-economic crisis. The approach which they considered appropriate could be described as a heroic (Ford et al 2008) approach, with particular emphasis on a number of positivistic leadership traits (Stogdill 1974, Gardner 1989, Méndez-Morse 1992, Spears 2000). Further, the findings indicate that in their constructed reality, the senior Irish administrative leaders had interpreted their environment as a significant crisis one, and had internalised a need to implement significant changes in response. However, the findings reveal that despite the perception of a crisis and despite the acknowledgement of a need for change, the leadership response seen as the appropriate response by the leaders themselves was one that reflects a degree of conservatorship (Selznick 1984, Terry 1995) – which is a leadership perspective that emphasises the conserving of various values and institutions (Scott 1995, Terry 2003), and is therefore a perspective that sees activating incremental change (Nadler 1988, Tushman 1988, Dunphy and Stace 1993, Senior 2002, Burnes 2004), even in the face of a perceived crisis of magnitude, as making more sense than pursuing disruptive reform or radical change (Grundy 1993, Kotter 1996). The findings therefore had revealed the existence of multiple constructed realities, some of them even appear to contradict each other. The contribution of this research to knowledge within public sector leadership and management is the contribution to the understanding of how leadership realities could be constructed, and to understand the extent to which, in a particular constructed leadership reality, the driving of disruptive change should be balanced by the maintaining of unwavering continuity even when faced with significant national socio-economic crises. The contribution to practice is to have fostered a less positivistic view of what Irish public administrative leadership should look like, and with a constructionist perspective, to suggest a viable construct of a public administrative leadership perspective that reflects a preference for responding to a significant crisis with a degree of conservatorship rather than responding only with a bias for radical reform. 4 Table of Contents Acknowledgement 2 Abstract 3 Document One: Exploring public leadership in the Republic of Ireland 13 – contending with contrasting and conflicting values Overview 15 Subject Matter and Research Objectives 16 Preface – Presenting an Analysis Dilemma in Public Leadership 16 The Hypothesis and the Research Questions 20 Brief Description of the Irish Public Service 22 The Irish State 22 The Irish Civil Service 23 Local Government Authorities in Ireland 24 Irish Semi-State Commercial Organisations 25 Preliminary Literature Review 26 Public Leadership 26 Attempting to Define Leadership 28 Ethical and Moral Leadership 31 Determining Ethics and Morality 31 Research Methodology 35 Outline for Document 2, 3, 4 and 5 38 Overall Strategy 38 Document 2 39 Document 3 39 Document 4 40 Document 5 40 Issues Arising 42 Reference s 44 Appendices 49 Document Two: Towards a conceptual framework – a study of leadership, 53 morality, ethics and values Overview 55 Overview of Concepts 55 Document Outline 58 Leadership Perspectives 59 Introduction 59 Human Influences 60 Historical Existence of Leadership 61 Attempting to Define Leadership 62 Public Leadership 65 Administrative Leadership 67 Ethics and Moral Values in the context of Public Leadership 69 Chairman Mao Zedong – a Case Discussion 70 The Great Leap Forward 71 5 Cultural Revolution 72 Mao’s Leadership Influence 75 Ethics and Moral Values in Public Leadership 77 The Cross-Cultural Dimension of Public Ethics and Morality 79 Determining an Ethical and Moral Framework 82 The Ends versus the Means 82 Ethical Perspectives Complexity 82 The Role of Perception in Judging Perspectives 90 Towards a Conceptual Framework 93 Enabling Circumstances 94 An Effective Leader 95 Ethics and Moral Concepts 95 Public Acceptance 96 Conceptual Framework 98 Research Methodology 99 Epistemological Discussion 99 Methodology 102 Possible Framing – Significant Event Analysis 102 Weaknesses of Methodology and Possible Remedies 103 References 105 Document Three: A Qualitative Analysis of Leadership Values in the 113 Irish Public Services Introduction 117 Conceptual Context of this Research 118 The Bounding and Focusing of this Research. 119 Document Outline 120 Public Service Leadership Context 122 Introduction 122 Public Leadership 122 Public Leaders as Servants 123 Administrative Leadership 124 The Administrator as Conservator 125 Leadership and Conservatorship – Never the Twain shall Meet? 126 Research Methodology 128 The Research Inquiry 128 Epistemological and Ontological Positioning 128 Research Methodology and Research Methods 129 Qualitative Research and Quantitative Research 129 Critical Evaluation of Qualitative Research 130 Qualitative Research Methods 132 Ethnographic / Participant Observation 132 Qualitative interviews 132 Sampling 133 Purposive Sampling 134 Possible Framing – Significant Event Analysis 136 The Research Question 136 Interpretive Analysis: Situational Context 138 Interview 1: Chairman of the Revenue Commissioners 139 6 Ethnographic Interpretation – the Situational Context 139 Contextual Interpretation – Leadership Behaviour Analysis 141 Interview 2: Director of the Equality Tribunal 141 Ethnographic Interpretation – the Situational Context 141 Contextual Interpretation – Leadership Behaviour Analysis 143 Interview 3: Deputy Commissioner of An Garda Síochána 143 Ethnographic Interpretation – the Situational Context 143 Contextual Interpretation – Leadership Behaviour Analysis 145 Interview 4: Assistant Secretary in the Dept. of Health and Children 145 Ethnographic Interpretation – the Situational Context 146 Contextual Interpretation – Leadership Behaviour Analysis 147 Interpretive Analysis: Analysing the Individual Transcripts 148 Interview 1: The Chairman of the Revenue Commissioners 148 Overall leadership style 148 Leadership behavioural elements 150 Vision 150 Communication 151 Risk adversity 151 Political constraint 153 Flexibility 153 Critical incidents of effective leadership 154 Critical incidents of ineffective leadership 157 Leadership Behaviour Interpreted 158 Interview 2: The

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