Leadership and performance in public sector networks

The role of governments has changed in the past decades and this change has had important consequences in what current public management involves (Lemaire, 2012). The relevance of jurisdictions and bureaucratic capacity (Frederickson, 1999) has progressively lost grip in favour of governance by network (Goldsmith and Eggers, 2005). More specifically, networks are seen as the response to some main developments in the public sector such as the increasing role of private organizations, agencies and public-private partnerships in the delivery of service (Rhodes, 1996), the emergence of “wicked” problems (Head and Alford, 2015) which require the coordination of different actors (Rittel and Webber, 1973) and the development, in the contemporary society, of new communication forms, driven by technological changes (Castells, 2000). However, the increasing significance being given to the concept of network ought to not be surprising as an approach to govern as it simply represents the growth of network in society (Castells, 1996). “Networks are structures of interdependence involving multiple organizations where no unit is merely subordinated to the others in some larger hierarchical arrangement” (O’Toole, 1997: 45). The change in governing, leading to the development of networks as an alternative approach to the bureaucratic and hierarchical one, has also determined a shift in the concept of management. Management in network settings is not based on central authority and cannot be guided by a single organizational goal as is the case in the classic management approach which has informed both public and business administration for more than a century. Therefore, “managing networks should not be confused with managing hierarchies” (Agranoff and McGuire, 1999: 21). While networks have been extensively investigated in the literature, leadership and performance in networks have been largely neglected. Some peculiarities of networks such as the absence of a hierarchical authority, a formal subordination, and the interaction among members based on expertise, trust and legitimacy have led to the misbelief that networks are leaderless (Lipnack and Stamps, 1994). Therefore, a strong leadership is necessary to align the distinct network members with cooperative whole (Bryson et al., 2006; Lemaire and Provan, 2010). While the first generation of network studies mainly concentrated on the description of networks, the reasons of their emergence, and the analysis of their features and functioning mechanism (Sørensen and Torfing, 2009), the second generation pointed out that networks might fail as they can produce conflict and tensions (Provan and Kenis, 2008) and unfavourable outcomes (Raab and Kenis, 2009: 198). This has resulted in an increase of theoretical and empirical interest in the issue of network performance assessment and evaluation. This thesis aims to shed light on the neglected topics of leadership and performance in public sector networks within public management literature. This aim has been translated into two research questions: 1. What is the difference between network and single-agency structure in terms of leadership? 2. What are the factors or combination of factors that lead to high and low level of performance in public networks? This work is composed of three chapters. The first chapter provides a theoretical background on network leadership and performance which have been neglected within public management literature. In regard to network performance, five different models are presented with specific attention paid to the multidimensional network performance model developed by Cepiku (2014) and empirically tested in chapter 3. In the second chapter, an empirical analysis of network leadership is performed in two different Italian local government contexts: single municipalities (representing singleagency structure) and unions of municipalities (representing public networks). In the third chapter, an assessment of community-level performance is carried out on twelve UNESCO’s Heritage Sites with the purpose of investigating the configurational conditions that may impact positively and negatively on community-level performance (Provan and Milward, 2001). Regarding the methods employed, accordingly to the classification developed by Tsang and Kwan (1999), network leadership is investigated through an empirical replication of a study conducted by Silvia and McGuire (2010) in emergency management networks in the United States. The aim is to understand the existence and the extent of the difference between leadership in public networks (unions of municipalities) and in single-agency structures (single municipalities). Network performance is analysed through a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis -fsQCA (Ragin, 1987; 2008; Fiss, 2011; Andrewes et al., 2019) on twelve UNESCO’s Heritage Sites. The aim is to investigate configurational conditions that can impact positively and negatively on community-level performance (Provan and Milward, 2001). This work provides a contribution to the so far limited application of the configurational approach to network performance analysis. It does so by verifying the feasibility of QCA as methodology. Results confirms the presence of a difference in terms of leadership between single-agency structure and networks, nevertheless, to a different extent from the original study conducted on by Silvia and McGuire (2010) on emergency management networks. Regarding network performance, the analysis revealed different but functionally equivalent configurations of causal conditions that led to high performing networks at the communitylevel which were different from the configurations that led to poor performance. The results contribute to advancing the knowledge of the mechanisms within networks managing World Heritage Sites.