Interaction of Politics and Management in Public Leadership

Public sector leadership calls on public administrators to possess skills to resolve complex policy problems/crises and balance political interests and values through negotiation and conflict resolution. However, current leadership theories in the public administration literature have not paid sufficient attention to this issue. Even more surprisingly, almost no empirical studies have been done to measure and explain this particular dimension of public sector leadership. While the business literature has studied individual political skills focusing on interpersonal situations, the political skill construct in the field of public administration should consider both internal and external political environments. Thus, this study develops a new multidimensional construct--public political skill (PPS) that contains three sub-dimensions: political astuteness, inclusive skill, and visionary skill. Using survey data from the Florida Center for Public Management, this new construct is defined using confirmatory factor analysis and is tested for internal reliability and construct validity. Results show that PPS is different from the political skill inventory (PSI) developed by business scholars. In addition, the results find that PPS not only contributes to job promotion and satisfaction but also attenuates the negative effects of red tape on job satisfaction and neutralizes job tension. Yet, the PPS on job tension model shows insignificant results and the interaction with goal ambiguity has dazzling findings which require further discussion. The implications from these results and direction for future research are provided.