Seminal articles on organisational commitment in public organisations have assumed that employees reciprocate the attitudes of their peers, but recent studies suggest that the impact of managers' organisational commitment on employees' organisational commitment depends on how leaders convey their organisational commitment. In this study we investigate how transformational leadership moderates the relationship between mangers' and employees' organisational commitment. Multilevel data from surveys of 68 principals and 1,349 teachers in the area of upper secondary education show that there is no direct relationship between principals' and teachers' organisational commitment, but that transformational leadership moderates the relationship.

The HRM literature argues that intended leadership practices can be perceived entirely different by employees, and that perceived practices are more likely to be related to performance than intended practices, because perceived practices are closer related with motivation and commitment. Using a sample of 1,621 teachers and 79 Danish high schools, we find that intended and perceived transformational and transactional leadership strategies are only weakly correlated, and that only perceived strategies (both transformational and transactional) are significantly related to objectively measured school performance.

Public personnel policies increasingly adapt performance management systems that focus on goal attainment making goal commitment a critical issue in contemporary public administration research. Few studies have however empirically investigated how context factors such as goal conflicts reduce or hinder goal commitment. Accordingly, this paper investigates the interplay between public managers' goal prioritisation, goal conflict and employees' goal commitment. Multilevel data from two electronic surveys of 67 principals and 1362 teachers in secondary education show that goal conflict moderates the association between principals' goal prioritisation and teachers' goal commitment.