This enlightening book scrutinizes the shifting and overlapping governance paradigms that inform public administration reforms. Exploring the models that shape and reshape the daily operation of public organizations, it explains the core features of public bureaucracy and professional rule in the modern day. From the rise to supremacy of New Public Management to the growing preference for alternatives, such as Digital Era Governance, Public Value Management and New Public Governance, four world-renowned authors launch a powerful and systematic comparison of the competing and co-existing paradigms. Advancing the 'public governance diamond' as a critical tool for comparing the core features of governance paradigms, this insightful book discusses the underlying behavioural assumptions of these models and the challenges faced by leaders when managing in a public sector. Informed by both key theory and empirical analysis, this book will be crucial reading for students and researchers seeking an authoritative voice on competing and co-existing modes of governance. Public leaders and managers, as well as public employees, will also benefit from its insights into the varying and multifaceted dynamics of public governance.

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.