Other high profile cases reported in the media, such as significant failures of management in the NHS in relation to Staffordshire Hospital (Healthcare Commission, 2009); the attempted illegal closure of services at Lewisham Hospital (BBC, 2013a); investigations into the efficacy and legality of leadership practices in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets (Telegraph, 2014) and the decline of UK pupils’ scores in PISA tests (BBC, 2013b) hint at continued deep-seated problems in management and leadership in public services.
These apparently sustained and entrenched problems present an opportunity to rethink and reframe current approaches to governance, leadership and management in public service contexts. Public service organisations, and leadership within them, are complex systems of human interaction that embody intra- and interdependent relationships between a number of key stakeholders including central government, elected leaders, managers, employees and service users. This suggests the desirability of approaches to governance, leadership and management that are socially inclusive and recognise the complexity of human interactions in public service organisations. It further situates leadership and management in these contexts as a dynamic process that should both help frame and be shaped by the communities in which they operate. In this paper I explore these issues and propose a model of co-created leadership, grounded in the experiences and practices of the Methodist Church, which might provide useful insights into possible further public sector reform.
The rest of this paper proceeds as follows. First, I problematize notions of management and leadership as informed by ideologies underpinning NPM. Second, I present the Methodist Church as an exemplar of a model of governance, leadership and management based on an approach of co-creation. Third, I draw the threads of this exemplar out into a model which, I suggest, might meet some of the shortcomings identified in the current dominance of NPM. This is followed by discussion and conclusions that link the emerging model of co-created leadership with some current trends in leadership theory.
Concepts of management and leadership in UK public services
Over the last three decades, NPM has been the dominant paradigm of leadership and management in public services in the UK. NPM is strongly influenced by public choice theory, principal-agent theory and transaction cost economics (Gruening, 2001; Dunsire, 1995; Pollitt, 1990; Aucoin, 1990). An essential principle of NPM is that differences between public and private sector approaches to management and leadership should be minimised, thus ensuring the efficiency and effectiveness of public services (Barzelay, 2001; Hood, 1991, 1995; Pollitt, 1990). Whilst NPM is generally associated with public sector reform in industrialised economies, it has also exerted a significant influence on approaches to management and leadership throughout the not-for-profit sector in many OECD countries. Many areas of public service, from national and local government to education and health, have been significantly influenced by this approach to governance, management and leadership.
There are at least three main failings identifiable with NPM-inspired approaches to leadership and management in public service organisations. First, evidence suggests that NPM has failed, in practice, to empower local leaders and organisations to shape the delivery of their services in the context of local community needs (Drechsler, 2005). NPM, in seeking to move away from a bureaucratic model, has not significantly secured the delivery of local services according to community need. Provision of services such as health, education and housing policy are still largely driven by central government and an increasing number of standard setting quangos, thus reducing the ability of local service providers to envision or enact alternative models of provision. As Drechsler (2005) notes, this diminution of local leadership and management can be seen as a concomitant of the privileging of contracting out to the private sector of many essential local services, leading to a reduction in citizen participation and rights, merely disguising the role of the imperial bureaucrat as the entrepreneurial bureaucrat.