This symposium about public leadership features three articles that examine different facets of leadership in a public context. In “Local government managers’ change-oriented leadership and employees’ change-supportive behaviour during COVID-19: utilising the theory of planned behaviour”, Wisanupong Potipiroon & Worasan Thawornprasert seek to extend our understanding of the role of public leaders in fostering employees’ change-related behaviour. Their sample is drawn from local government managers in Thailand. They use theory of planned behaviour and value-congruence to identify underlying psychological mechanisms by which local government managers influenced employees’ change-supportive behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the second article in the symposium, Junesoo Lee, Jongwoo Chung and Booyuel Kim examine a neglected facet of leadership in the context of a community-driven development programme in Myanmar. In “Leaders need to be led: complementary followership in the context of community-driven development program”, the authors look at situations in which strong followership complements weak leadership to result in better group or team performance than expected based on leadership alone. The article highlights the importance of followership in leader-follower relationships. The findings are especially significant given the high reliance on teamwork in public settings.
The final article in the symposium, “Abusive supervision in public service organisations: investigating the moderating effect of attribution styles”, calls attention to the effects of abusive supervision and moderating effects on negative outcomes associated with abusive supervision. Using a multi-wave longitudinal survey method, Abdul Kadir, Hillman Wirawan, Rudi Salam, Syahruddin Hattab, and Daswati Daswati examine abusive supervision across five types of public service organisations in Indonesia. Although they found that abusive supervision increases turnover intention, they also found that positive and negative effects were moderated by self-, supervisor-, and organisation-directed attributions of the sources of abusive supervision.