Making Sense of Leadership

Making Sense of Leadership Montgomery Van Wart, Dynamics of Leadership in Public Service: Theory and Practice (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2005). 520pp., $84.95 (hardbound), ISBN: 9780765609014.

The author of a major work on values in public administration (1998) and a trainer of executive officers, Montgomery Van Wart has taken on the ambitious task of reviewing the subject of administrative leadership in public organizations. To that end, his Dynamics of Leadership in Public Service: Theory and Practice has two goals: first, an analysis of the leadership "competencies" and assessment abilities that all organizational leaders should have, and second, a comparative review of the theoretical literature on leadership in the public sector. The book is focused on public and nonprofit organizational leadership, but the author also draws freely from the literature and models developed in the private corporate arena. The result is an exhaustive treatment of the subject of administrative leadership, impressive in its scope and painstaking in its workmanship.

The book is, above all, a teaching text, and it works well in this regard. Each chapter ends with discussion questions, some of which include simulated cases that stimulate the student to revisit and apply the concepts that have been introduced. The language is explanatory and clear, benefiting from frequent public sector examples.

The plan of the book revolves around a "leadership action cycle," which Van Wart describes as "designed to be useful in training and applied settings." The primary function of the model is to exhaustively mine and organize the leadership literature as it relates to personal traits, skills, and behaviors-collectively called "competencies"-that bear on a leader's effectiveness. Van Wart does this by presenting, with considerable mastery in the writing and completeness of explanation, fully 37 competencies, a laborious enterprise that takes him well into the second half of this rather large book. The competencies approach is augmented by two early chapters on the nature of the "global assessments" that all leaders are (or ought to be) called upon to make of their environments, limitations, and priorities as they take on their positions. The author's word "taxonomy" aptly describes his approach to both competencies and leader assessments and gives the book a highly classificatory and encyclopedic character and feel.

If the book were to end...