Zeger van der Wal

The ability of public organizations to effectively leverage performance-enhancing interventions depends on their alignment with the institutional and motivational determinants of public sector performance and on how these are reflected in governance design choices. A mismatch between performance logics and governance design may potentially render interventions ineffective or even detrimental. In this article, we deconstruct the theoretical foundations of such a mismatch and propose an interactional causal model to examine how governance design can either effectuate or inhibit the institutional and individual motivational determinants affecting performance. In doing so, we evaluate the fitness of governance designs against public sector attributes and constraints and identify actionable managerial interventions for improving the fit. The article argues that alignment between governance design and the logics underpinning public sector performance regimes is critical for producing outcomes that are effective and consistent with the traits and value systems of the public sector.

This article compares the effects of senior leadership support and direct supervisor support on public sector innovation, and the degree to which these innovations are internally or externally targeted. Using the 2017 Australian Public Service (APS) survey (n = 79,946), our findings show that leadership support at both levels is positively associated with innovation. Additionally, most innovations are internally targeted, and leadership level does not correlate significantly with the innovation target. Our study contributes to current debates about the drivers and orientation of public sector innovation by unravelling and juxtaposing the effects of leadership at different levels in relation to innovation targets.

Today's globalized world calls for a deeper understanding of how and why administrative practices differ across regions and what that means for theory and practice. However, empirical comparative studies in public administration incorporating local and regional particularities in their design, constructs, and interpretation of results are scarce, with the exception of studies on specific constructs such as public service motivation, professional values, and emerging approaches to non‐Western public administration. Consistently, scholars engaged in comparative studies highlight theoretical, methodological, and empirical difficulties in comparing public agencies, employees, and practices as the research instruments and assumptions used often originate from Western countries. Thus, there is a serious need today for adopting more context‐sensitive and balanced approaches to advance our scholarly understanding of systems and practices in different regions. This symposium aims to advance comparative public administration by bringing together novel empirical comparative contributions from scholars from different parts of the world.

Public policy education in the Global South has mushroomed in the past 2 decades, concomitant with governance models that provide an alternative to liberal Western democracies. However, not much empirical evidence exists on the drivers and implications of this trend, with few exceptions that point toward a form of internationalization in the policy sciences. This study aims to fill this scholarly gap by comparing 46 public policy schools on various dimensions including degree offerings, institutional establishment and status, and mission. Further, to determine whether a unique model for public policy education is emerging that extends beyond mimicry of longstanding programs in the USA and Western Europe, we surveyed the senior management of the schools in our sample. We find that less than 25% have been directly modeled after a Western school. We discuss the implications of our findings for the practice and study of public policy education.

Public service motivation (PSM) scholarship has mushroomed since the early 2000s. After initially being an exclusively Western field of study, scholarship has recently become more internationalised. As a corollary, scholars have begun to formulate a research agenda for advancing non-Western PSM research. To contribute to this advancement, and examine how non-Western PSM scholarship has developed in recent years, we conduct a systematic literature review of 83 empirical studies published between 2015 and 2020. We assess origin of scholarship, theories, samples and methodologies used, and empirical findings on the relation between PSM and key antecedents and outcomes. Our findings show that non-Western PSM scholarship is growing, and increasingly using contextual variables to explain variance in findings in comparison with Western studies. That being said, ample opportunity remains for leveraging contextual and regional particularities to build a more distinct body of scholarship. We conclude with suggestions for further advancing non-Western PSM research.

The COVID‐19 pandemic is seen as the biggest crisis since World War II. What started out as a public health issue has quickly morphed into a political, economic, and societal crisis of epic proportions. Administrative capacity is a major factor in determining whether societies will emerge from this unprecedented situation with resilience and optimism or despair and disconnectedness, and whether trust in government will increase or decrease. Autonomous and competent public managers are key producers of such administrative capacity. This essay addresses those public managers, the unsung administrative heroes leading us through times of crisis from behind the scenes. Translating the state of the art in public administration literature, with a particular emphasis on publications in this journal, into accessible practitioner recommendations, it identifies three key competencies paramount to public managers in times of crisis: managing stakeholders, political masters, and collaborative networks.

Public organizations face a multitude of challenges that force them to innovate existing processes, policies, programs, and products. Indeed, in recent years, innovation has become a core topic of study in public administration. However, the vast majority of the public sector innovation literature stems from the United States and Western Europe. The lack of Asia‐Pacific studies is particularly striking given that countries like Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan consistently rank high on public sector innovation. This special issue brings together state of the art empirical research on public sector innovation in the Asia‐Pacific region that examines a range of drivers and outcomes of innovation, including studies comparing Asia‐Pacific countries and countries in the East and the West. The findings show that public sector employees in the studied countries all seek opportunities to innovate, whereas cultural norms and values either constrain or enable innovative behaviour and affect the extent to which employees experience leadership support for displaying such behaviour.

Are ethical public organisations more likely to realize innovation? The public administration literature is ambiguous about this relationship, with evidence being largely anecdotal and focused mainly on the ethical implications of business‐like behaviour and positive deviance, rather than how ethical behaviour and culture may contribute to innovation. In this paper we examine the effects of ethical culture and ethical leadership on reported realized innovation, using 2017 survey data from the Australia Public Service Commission (n = 80,316). Our findings show that both ethical culture at the working group‐level and agency‐level as well as ethical leadership have significant positive associations with realized innovation in working groups. The findings are robust across agency, work location, job level, tenure, education, and gender and across different samples. We conclude our paper with theoretical and practical implications of our research findings.