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This article reviews the mainstream leadership literature and its perennial debates and compares it to the public-sector (administrative) leadership literature. The mainstream leadership literature fully articulated the transformational models in the 1980s and began the serious work of integrating transactional and transformational types of leadership into comprehensive models in the 1990s. Many have considered this to be a major advance over the fields previous fragmentation and excessively narrow focus. This integration has not been reflected in the public-sector literature, in which the normative debates about what leaders should do has received most of the attention in the last decade. Although many types of leadership in the public sector have been discussed extensively, such as leadership by those in policy positions and working in community settings, administrative leadership within organizations has received scant attention and would benefit from a research agenda linking explicit and well-articulated models with concrete data in publicsector settings.
In 1995, Larry Terry noted the neglect of administrative or "bureaucratic leadership" in the public-sector literature. This article assesses the state of the administrative leadership literature. It examines the following questions:
* Is the study of administrative (that is, bureaucratic) leadership important?
* What are the reasons for the neglect of administrative leadership, including the difficulties associated with this type of research?
* Has the administrative leadership literature made significant strides since Terry's observation in 1995? If not, why?
* What are the specific strengths and weaknesses of the literature, whatever its overall robustness? In particular, how does it compare with the mainstream (that is, largely private-sector-focused) literature?
* What areas are ripe for research?
To address these questions, a relatively exhaustive review of public-sector leadership was conducted, as well as a thorough review of the major schools in the mainstream literature. Because of the many weaknesses in the literature (in scope, in numerous gaps. and in theory building), it is hoped this article can make a major contribution in defining the terrain of this complex and difficult area so that more rapid and coherent progress can be made.
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