The Practice of Collective and Strategic Leadership in the Public Sector

Currently, a dyadic and hierarchical vision dominates in the literature on leadership as it does in the public sector (Gronn, 2002; Hiller and Vance, 2006). The transactional and transformational perspectives present leaders in relation with their subordinates or their supporters. Yet, that is a truncated vision of the reality because it disregards the situation and the other leaders present (Gronn, 2002, 2008; Raelin, 2005; Yukl, 1989). In the public sector, since the leaders have limited control (Moynihan and Wallace-Ingraham, 2004) and coexist collectively and in a dependent and independent manner (Raelin, 2005; Bourgault, 2007), I propose that different leaders interact in complementarity at different levels of the practice of leadership. In this article, I propose a conceptual model of the individual development of leadership in connection with the practice of collective and strategic leadership in the public sector. Using a case history, I conduct an exploratory and heuristic study that leads to adoption, in a first phase, of Kuhnert and Lewis ’s model (1987). According to them, leadership can develop in individuals throughout their professional evolution. They propose three levels of leadership practice, two of which are transactional types (imperial, which is a weak level, and interpersonal, which is a higher level), and one of which is a transformational type (institutional). I propose a model that has four levels of individual practice of leadership, two of which are transactional (technical and organizational) and two of which are transformational (political and institutional). In a second phase, an exploratory and heuristic study is conducted by looking at the case of cadastral reform in Quebec, a strategic file managed by the same senior public servant I described in the first part of the article on leadership development throughout a career. The results show that different levels of leadership practice are necessary to the management and implementation of a strategic file and that if one or several levels of leadership are not assumed in a perspective of collective action, this has an impact on the overall performance. This new proposal makes several contributions from the theoretical and conceptual point of view : it takes into account the organized dimension of the individual practice of leadership as a context for applying the individual development of leadership, in the context of the public sector. The model is a conceptual base to understand the practice of distributed leadership (cf. Gronn, 2002, 2008). It is a relevant model for the public sector as a field of action for leaders who share the same public service mission even if they are in different organizations. This model takes into account the opportunity (rather than the constraint) represented by the legal context of managers’ accountability in the development of the practice of a collective and strategic leadership. I ultimately develop five main research hypotheses and five secondary hypotheses to test the generalizability of the results.