Breaking the Vicious Circle of Escalating Control:Connecting Politicians and Public Employees through Stewardship

Politicians applying general rules as a reaction to local failures has contributed to mushrooming control in the public sector, which has in turn spurred higher transactional costs and motivation crowding among public employees. Drawing on a qualitative case study in a Danish municipality, this article explores the prospects and challenges for politicians of breaking the vicious circle of escalating control by adopting stewardship ideals into their leadership of the public employees. The results show that stewardship offers new opportunities for politicians, enabling better diagnosis of control problems, more robust control solutions, as well as a pronounced mobilization of employee support for those solutions. However, political competition, political discontinuity after elections, scandals in the press, resistance in the administration, and more diffuse decision-making processes pose potential challenges for politicians striving to tackle the problem of escalating control through stewardship

Strengthening Local Political Leadership through Institutional Design:How and Why

Over recent decades, the institutions of political leadership have been criticised for being caught up in outdated designs that are not adapting to societal changes. In many western countries, this diagnosis has spurred design reforms aimed at strengthening political leadership at the local level. Based on a study of reforms in Norwegian and Danish municipalities, this article first develops a typology of reforms aimed at strengthening local political leadership. Leadership reforms are categorised into four types aimed at strengthening Executive, Collective, Collaborative, or Distributive political leadership. The typology is used to map the prevalence of the different types of reforms in the two countries. The results show that design reforms as such are more widespread in Danish than in Norwegian municipalities. In particular, reforms aimed at strengthening Distributive political leadership are used more extensively in Denmark than in Norway. The article discusses the contextual differences that may explain this variation

Does Stewardship Theory Provide a Viable Alternative to Control-Fixated Performance Management?

Stewardship theory provides an interesting alternative to agency theory, which in the recent New Public Management era supported the introduction of rigorous performance management systems based on generalized mistrust in and control of public employees. However, we lack empirical validation of the feasibility and positive outcomes of the new forms of trust-based management recommended by stewardship theory. As such, there are few examples of alternative ways of boosting the motivation of public employees that can serve as beacons for public service organizations (PSOs) eager to find new ways of motivating their staff to create public value for the users of public services and society as a whole. This article aims to remedy this problem by exploring a seemingly successful empirical case of trust-based management to see whether the core principles of stewardship theory apply and how new management practices may influence the motivation and well-being of the employees, the perceived satisfaction and involvement of the users, and overall organizational performance, including cost efficiency