IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/oec/govaaa/40-en.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Leadership for a high performing civil service: Towards senior civil service systems in OECD countries

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel Gerson

    (OECD)

Abstract

Public service leaders – senior civil servants who lead and improve major government functions – are at the heart of government effectiveness. They translate political direction into the policies and programmes that keep citizens healthy, safe, and economically productive. In order to do so, however, they need to have both the right skills and institutional support to deploy them effectively. This paper summarises insights from a recently completed project that addressed this challenge. First, the paper identifies four leadership capabilities that are necessary to respond to complex policy challenges: values-based leadership, open inclusion, organisational stewardship, and networked collaboration. Second, the paper outlines a model for assessing senior civil service systems, i.e. the policies, processes and tools needed to develop these capabilities and support leaders in using them. The paper concludes with recommendations to help governments take a systematic approach to the development and management of their public service leaders.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel Gerson, 2020. "Leadership for a high performing civil service: Towards senior civil service systems in OECD countries," OECD Working Papers on Public Governance 40, OECD Publishing.
    • Handle: RePEc:oec:govaaa:40-en
    DOI: 10.1787/ed8235c8-en
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1787/ed8235c8-en
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1787/ed8235c8-en?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D73 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Bureaucracy; Administrative Processes in Public Organizations; Corruption
    • M12 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Administration - - - Personnel Management; Executives; Executive Compensation
    • H83 - Public Economics - - Miscellaneous Issues - - - Public Administration
    • L38 - Industrial Organization - - Nonprofit Organizations and Public Enterprise - - - Public Policy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oec:govaaa:40-en. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/teoecfr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.