| Inter-organizational collaboration is both increasingly vital to the performance of public organizations and difficult to manage successfully (Kettl, 2006; Thomson & Perry, 2006). Collaboration is the process of working in a multi-organizational context to address challenges that cannot be overcome in isolation (Agranoff & McGuire, 2001), and an extensive literature looks at its antecedents, processes, and outcomes (Bingham & O’Leary, 2006; Campbell, 2016; Wood & Gray, 1991). Among the identified determinants of the initiation and performance of collaboration initiatives, a willingness to collaborate on the part of civil servants is either assumed or stated explicitly as a necessary condition (Esteve, Van Witteloostuijn, & Boyne, 2015; Martín-Rodríguez, Beaulieu, D’Amour, & Ferrada-Videla, 2005; Thomson & Perry, 2006). On the other hand, relatively few studies take a step back to focus on the antecedents of attitudes about collaboration, and fewer still undertake empirical tests (Esteve et al., 2015; Krueathep, Riccucci, & Suwanmala, 2010; Mitchell, O’Leary, & Gerard, 2015). Civil servants have substantial de facto discretion during the implementation of public policy, and collaborative initiatives lack the articulated and formal accountability structures that characterize bureaucratic action (Sun & Anderson, 2012), creating additional space for participants to contribute to (or sabotage) processes. Establishing the determinants of attitudes about collaboration among civil servants thus has practical implications, the more so to the extent that these can be influenced by management. This study therefore seeks an answer to the following question: What factors underlie attitudes about collaboration in the public sector? Leadership is a foundational construct in the public sector literature (Van Wart, 2013), and high-quality leadership has been linked specifically to the initiation and success of collaborative initiatives (Mitchell et al., 2015; O’Leary, Choi, & Gerard, 2012). Leadership styles in the public sector are diverse (Wart, 2003), and some, such as network governance leadership (Tummers & Knies, 2016) or, somewhat more obviously, collaborative leadership (Hallinger & Heck, 2010), are intuitively linked with collaboration. This study focuses on the more generic transformational leadership, a set of behaviors including role modeling, individualized consideration, and visionary speech that target follower sense of purpose (Bass, 1985; Paarlberg & Lavigna, 2010). Transformational leadership has been linked to a variety of outcomes including integrated thinking, innovation, change, and the instigation of collective responses to common challenges (Campbell, 2017a; Eisenbeiss, van Knippenberg, & Boerner, 2008; Sun & Anderson, 2012), and the construct is moreover associated with positive interpersonal dynamics (Campbell, Lee, & Im, 2016; Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Moorman, & Fetter, 1990). Taking these notions as building blocks, this study looks at the potential influence of transformational leaders on follower attitudes about collaboration. |
