Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 21st NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview Civil Service Author(s) Tudor Cristian Ticlau Babes-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca Romania Hintea Cristina, Balica Dan, Title Transformational leadership in Romania’s local public administration. A study regarding leadership types in decentralized local institutions in Romania File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Tudor Cristian Ticlau Abstract Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another, it is the only means. (Albert Einstein) Leadership seems to be one of the topics that social scientist can never drop from their agenda. Although approaches in studying the phenomenon has changed, the raw number of researches on this topic is truly outstanding. Yet this large number has not translated into a common accepted understanding, Stogdill’s belief that there are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are persons who have attempted to define the concept (Stogdill, 1974, p.259) still holds true today. Leadership in the public sector is a topic that has come into attention more recently, after the New Public Management movement, with researchers trying to find links between leadership and performance. Bass’s Transformational Leadership (1985) theory is between those that got most attention from researchers in the last decades, especially because of its claims of performance beyond expectations from groups led by this type of leaders. Information to back up such claims especially in the public sector is still limited, especially in ECE countries. Our study was focused on analyzing leadership in local public administration authorities in Romania in two types of institutions: decentralized and deconcentrated (representatives of the central government). We used Bass and Avolio’s Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (1995) to study leadership behavior in City Halls, County Councils and Prefectures at national level. We collected the data in April 2011, and got responses from 50 institutions (aprox 40% response rate) with 250 respondents in total ( 50 leaders, 200 subordinates). We tested 3 main assumptions: 1) that the dominant behavior (the most common) will not be transformational (either transactional or passive) 2) the type of institution will influence leadership behavior (decentralized vs. deconcentrated) 3) transformational leaders will have better scores on the results scale compared to the other two types. Preliminary data analysis shows that transformational leadership is more present in the public sector than we initially thought, that the type of institution does not make a difference in leadership behavior and that some specific transformational behaviors are correlated with better results perception from subordinates.
