Developing and Testing an Integrative Framework of Public Sector Leadership: Evidence from the Public Education Arena

In an effort to bring some order to the leadership literature and integrate existing knowledge on the topic of leadership, some scholars have begun to develop integrative frameworks of leadership. Integrative frameworks incorporate leadership skills, traits, behaviors, and styles and situational variables in a single theoretical model to explain a leader's influence on performance. This study advances that line of research by developing an integrative framework of public sector leadership and testing the framework using different quantitative techniques and a large-N data set from the public education arena. Six of nine hypotheses derived from the leadership literature are supported empirically. Moreover, the framework explains over half of the variance in organizational performance, with the leadership variables accounting for over two-thirds of the explained variance. Overall, the results suggest that integrative frameworks are a promising approach for the study of leadership.