NPM reforms are often argued to promote efficiency, because they enhance strategic and competitive behaviour among public organisations. Oppositely, critics argue that strategic behaviour can be problematic for public organisations, because co-operation and collaboration is needed to increase the general public value rather than just maximising organisational profit. In this paper, we study how an NPM reform (introducing self-government for upper secondary schools coupled with quasi-markets with activity based funding) in the Danish secondary school sector changes strategic management both in regard to strategic orientation and strategic processes.

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.

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.

Public management literature has often debated the usefulness of transactional leadership. Some scholars are concerned that transactional leadership strategies will harm public employees' perceived competence (ie: their self-efficacy), but in fact there are also arguments for the opposite result - that feelings of competence are strengthened by conditional rewards, because they provide feedback about performance. This study explores how 91 high school principals' reported use of rewards and sanctions affect perceived professional competence among their 1,921 teachers. The results show that the use of rewards strengthens self-efficacy, and that the use of sanctions does not seem to have negative effects. Furthermore, the teachers' self-efficacy can be linked positively to organisational performance. This suggests that rewards can be an important tool for managers in the public sector.