Leadership and team performance in the public sector

In the public management discipline, there have been a number of important studies on the leadership-performance relationship. Most of these studies, however, focus on transformational leadership and overall performance at the individual level. This study contributes by investigating the role of empowering and rule-following leadership for both team innovation and team job performance. Multi-source data is used to reduce common source bias. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) results show firstly that empowering leadership improves both team performance indicators. Secondly, contrary to our theoretical expectations, rule-following leadership does not predict team innovation performance and team job performance. The results emphasize the importance of empowering leadership for increasing performance in the public sector.