The a priori of public leadership: Social attributions to public and private leaders in different performance contexts
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Author | Laura Hesmert,Fabian Hattke,Rick Vogel |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12780 |
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The a priori of public leadership: Social
attributions to public and private leaders in
different performance contexts
Laura Hesmert | Fabian Hattke | Rick Vogel
Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
Correspondence
Laura Hesmert, Department of Public
Management, Universität Hamburg,
Von-Melle-Park 9, 20146 Hamburg, Germany.
Email: laura.hesmert@uni-hamburg.de
Abstract
Previous scholarship provides little insight into the differ-
ences between public and private leadership in people's a
priori assumptions about leaders. We advance a socio-
cognitive approach and examine how implicit social attribu-
tions to leaders are contingent on sector and performance
cues. Participants completed the Semantic Misattribution
Procedure to reveal implicit associations of traits with
leaders in contrasting scenarios. Results show that sector
cues affect such attributions, which in turn influence behav-
ioral intentions, but only so in interaction with performance
information. We conclude that public leaders earn fewer
credits for success or failure than private leaders.
1|INTRODUCTION
Public administration (PA) scholarship has long paid only scant attention to the phenomenon of leadership. In his
review of the then available literature, Van Wart (2003) arrived at the conclusion that the field severely lagged
behind leadership studies in the business sector, where the conceptual and empirical variety had begun to grow
much earlier. In search for an explanation for this neglect, a predominant narrative is that the public sector provides
more “substitutes for leadership”(Kerr & Jermier, 1978) than the private sector: Public organizations are character-
ized by a denser web of rules and regulations, which provide firm guidance for organizational members and thus
inhibit or neutralize the influence of leadership. Moreover, public organizations have a role to play in the implemen-
tation of policies and the enforcement of law, which implies that many programs and activities are determined by
external bodies and are thus beyond the scope of administrative leadership. Under these constraints in the
Received: 4 January 2021 Revised: 28 July 2021 Accepted: 29 July 2021
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12780
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
© 2021 The Authors. Public Administration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
876 Public Admin. 2022;100:876–899.
wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm
organizational structure and environment, public leaders' room for maneuver is limited, as is their responsibility for
organizational performance. In turn, leaders in the public sector cannot be held accountable for success or failure to
the same extent than their counterparts in the business sector.
Recently, research on leadership in the public sector has gained considerable momentum (Crosby &
Bryson, 2018; t'Hart & Tummers, 2019; Vogel & Masal, 2015). Few scholars and practitioners would disagree that
public leaders can make a difference for the better of public organizations and beyond. However, if and how public
and private leadership differ, and if and how such differences matter, is still an unsolved puzzle. This is an important
knowledge gap because the vast majority of leadership studies is still carried out in private organizations, and the
transferability of results to PA remains in question as long as sector differences in leadership are unclear. Previous
research provides only piecemeal evidence in this regard, with few scholars studying how public and private leaders
differ in terms of personality traits (Andersen, 2006; Judge et al., 2002), ascribed roles (Hooijberg & Choi, 2001;
Tummers & Knies, 2016), or behavioral patterns (Hansen & Villadsen, 2010). Consistent with the view that leader-
ship “is in the eye of the beholder”(Jacobsen & Bøgh Andersen, 2015), most studies in this stream use perceptual
measures and ask followers for their a posteriori ratings of leaders. This approach leaves open whether differences
in such ratings result from cues that indeed emanate from variations in leaders' personality, roles, or behaviors, or if
the mere context of public or private sector organizations triggers followers' a priori attributions that are indepen-
dent from leader-related characteristics.
Scholarship in social cognition suggests that leadership attributions might originate from individuals' perception
and cognitive processing of contextual cues, rather than from observable characteristics of a target person. The
socio-cognitive approach to leadership has shown that people bring their implicit conceptions of leadership to social
situations and to the categorization of actors therein (Lord et al., 2020). Such “implicit leadership theories”(ILTs;
Eden & Leviatan, 1975; Epitropaki et al., 2013; Junker & van Dick, 2014; Lord et al., 2020) are organized in a hierar-
chical system with the broadest possible category of a “leader”at the top and more nuanced conceptions of leaders
in particular social spheres (e.g., societal sectors) at lower levels. These mental representations of prototypical traits
are important drivers of attributions to leaders; a categorization process that largely occurs at subconscious levels
(Epitropaki et al., 2013). It follows from this line of reasoning that people may approach public and private leaders
differently in the first place and independently from observed personal or behavioral characteristics. In this case, the
sectoral affiliation of an organization (i.e., public vs. private sector) is a contextual cue leading to social attributions to
leaders that might differ in both strength and kind.
Among the insights provided by the socio-cognitive approach is the observation that people tend to over-
estimate the influence of leadership (Meindl et al., 1985). More precisely, they ascribe organizational success to
leaders even if the success is beyond leaders' influence and, for instance, the result of mere luck. This phenomenon,
called the “romance of leadership”(Meindl et al., 1985), is likely to interfere with the attribution process when peo-
ple are exposed to public or private leaders. In the case of public organizations, limited responsibility for success and
failure might be part of individuals' mental heuristics that structure their sense-making. The public sector is thus
likely to be a less romantic setting than the private sector, resulting in other, and potentially weaker, trait attributions
to leaders. Accordingly, the public–private distinction might matter more for social attributions to leaders once peo-
ple additionally receive and process contextual information on performance.
Previous scholarship in PA has not explored if and how ex ante attributions to leaders, as triggered by contextual
cues, differ. We address this gap and pursue the following research question: “Do social attributions to leaders differ
depending on sector (i.e., public vs. private) and performance cues (i.e., success vs. failure), and if so, how and at
which strength?”We tackle this question in an online scenario experiment with a total of n=734 German
employees. To account for the implicit dimension of social attributions, we apply the Semantic Misattribution Proce-
dure (SMP; Imhoff et al., 2011), thus extending the range of implicit methods in PA research (e.g., Marvel &
Resh, 2019; Ngoye et al., 2018) and responding to calls to “roam more freely through the disciplines and experiment
with a variety of methods”(Crosby & Bryson, 2018, p. 1265). Results of linear mixed modeling (LMM) show that fol-
lowers' social attributions to leaders vary mainly as a result of interactions between the sector and performance
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