Evaluating Organizational Leadership in the New Zealand Public Sector in the Aftermath of the Rankin Judgement
| Date | 01 March 2002 |
| Published date | 01 March 2002 |
| Author | Joe Wallis |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852302681011 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Evaluating organizational leadership in the New Zealand
public sector in the aftermath of the Rankin judgement
Joe Wallis
Introduction
Over the month of July 2001 the small nation of New Zealand was gripped by the
media frenzy that surrounded the legal action Christine Rankin, the former Chief
Executive (CE) of the Department of Work and Income (DWI), brought against
the government in the Employment Court. The substance of Rankin’s charge was
that key ministers within the Labour-led Coalition Government, elected in 1999,
exerted ‘political interference’ that influenced the decision by the State Services
Commissioner (hereafter the ‘Commissioner’), Michael Wintringham, not to re-
appoint her when her contract expired in July 2001.
The judgement delivered on 2 August 2001 by Thomas Goddard, Chief Judge
of the New Zealand Employment Court, held that the ‘central issue’ of the case
was Rankin’s complaint that ‘when it came to consideration of re-appointment,
she did not get a fair crack of the whip and was deprived of the chance of making
out a case for staying in the job’ (p. 54). In this regard he suggested that she ‘did
not receive procedural justice down to the time in November 2000 when Mr
Wintringham made his decision’ but that his compliance with the request, made
by Rankin’s lawyer, to reconsider his decision ‘cured the earlier failure of proce-
dural justice’ (p. 57). His judgement was therefore that Ms Rankin had suffered
no legal wrong. Accordingly he awarded her no damages in this case. While the
narrow focus of this judgement had the effect of defusing it from a political per-
spective, with Rankin announcing that she would pursue her case no further and
the government announcing that it would not seek to recover from her its legal
costs, it did leave unanswered a number of the policy issues that surrounded the
case.
This article will focus, in particular, on the issue of public sector leadership. It
is clear that Rankin was appointed because she was expected to supply the type of
transformational leadership that ‘managerialist’ literature holds to be necessary to
reshape an organization’s culture. However, this does beg a number of questions.
How can this type of leadership reshape an organization’s culture? What are its
Joe Wallis is at the Department of Economics, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin,
New Zealand. CDU: 65.012.3(931)
International Review of Administrative Sciences [0020–8523(200203)68:1]
Copyright © 2002 IIAS. SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New
Delhi), Vol. 68 (2002), 61–72; 023183
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International Review of Administrative Sciences 68(1)
potential benefits and risks from an economic perspective? Can it still be subject
to criticism according to the logic of appropriateness that cannot be eradicated
from ‘political’ evaluations of public sector behaviour? Is it possible to exercise a
more appreciative style of leadership that takes this into account? Before examin-
ing each of these questions, it is necessary to outline some salient features of the
background to Rankin’s appointment.
The background to Rankin’s appointment
Christine Rankin’s appointment to the position of CE of WINZ needs to be
examined within the context of the contractualist system of governance that
emerged after the wave of public sector reforms implemented New Zealand in the
late 1980s. The central purpose of these reforms was to address structural imbal-
ances between the trajectory of public demand for services provided by the state
and its capacity to finance them in a politically and economically sustainable
manner by restructuring government so that it could focus on its ‘core business’.
The State Sector Act of 1988 thus made the CEs of the new government depart-
ments that emerged from this restructuring process contractually accountable to
single ‘principals’ (such as portfolio ministers) for specified ‘outputs’ while, at
the same time, giving them discretion over ‘inputs’ so that they would be able to
further restructure their own organizations to achieve greater efficiency.
A major area of concern that remained for the National Government that held
office, by itself from 1990 to 1996, and in coalition with New Zealand First from
1996 to 1999 was the situation of ‘welfare dependence’ associated with the per-
sistence of historically high levels of long-term unemployment. This led it to
search for ways to provide ‘active (but still restrained) encouragement and assist-
ance to beneficiaries to get work skills, get the work habit and get work’ (James,
1998: 3). The elevation to the post of Minister of Employment of Peter McCardle,
a high-ranking member of New Zealand First gave this ‘policy entrepreneur’
(Kingdon, 1984) the opportunity to develop his ‘pet policy proposal’, a ‘commu-
nity wage scheme’, to the point where it could be launched, with full Cabinet
support, in April 1998.
This scheme involved the government making an undertaking to provide job-
seekers with a community wage (a single income support payment incorporating
all existing unemployment benefits) in return for participating in training, part-
time community work or other activities where provided. Quite clearly it required
a change in the structure and culture of government departments so that ‘front-
line staff’ could focus on providing the type of individualized case management
this new direction demanded.
This process of structural and cultural change was set in motion in October
1998 when the government announced the amalgamation of two government
departments — Income Support Service and the New Zealand Employment
Service — into ‘Work and Income New Zealand’ (WINZ). The official appointed
to be CE of this new department would have to oversee the integration and pro-
vide a unifying focus to two established organizations that had developed quite
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distinct cultures ‘the one internally focussed, the other externally; the one process
driven, the other relationship driven; the one stressing uniformity and con-
sistency, the other more free-wheeling and diverse’ (Hunn, 2000).
The appointed CE, Christine Rankin, certainly broke the mould of the stereo-
typical senior civil servant. In 1978, she became a temporary clerk at the
Department of Social Welfare after being a 24-year-old single mother on the
Domestic Purposes Benefit. After1987 she experienced a rapid advance through
different levels of management in which she was encouraged in her advocacy of
‘a management style where image and identity matter’ (Espiner, 2001). By 1997,
she was general manager of Income Support Services and was in the prime
position to apply for the post of CE of WINZ when it was formed in 1998. After
she was unsurprisingly selected from a group of 18 applicants, she was given the
following strong recommendation by Wintringham:
Ms Rankin has a distinctive and highly visible style of leadership . . . She is a strong
committed manager with a clear focus on the delivery of the Government’s social
policy outcomes . . . The panel saw Christine Rankin’s enthusiasm and drive as being
important elements required in creating a vision for the new agency, while maintaining
momentum on high volumes of current work and significant new initiatives . . . In
particular, she meets the express requirements for the job in being an experienced
change manager from a strongly operational environment. (Cited in Goddard, 2001:
17–18)
It is clear that Rankin brought into her job a specific understanding of the type
of leadership that would be required to establish a distinctive and...
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