leading with political astuteness comparisons between the ... · political astuteness (also...

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Leading with political astuteness

Comparisons between the UK, Australian and New Zealand public sectors

Jean Hartley1, John Alford2 and Owen Hughes3

1International Centre for Governance and Public Management, Warwick Business

School, University of Warwick

2Melbourne Business School and the Australian and New Zealand School of

Government

3Faculty of Business and Economics, Monash University and the Australian and New

Zealand School of Government

2

ABSTRACT

Public managers have always had to deal with politics of various types. Their work

is affected by the formal institutions and elected officials of the state, but it also

importantly involves dealing with a variety of stakeholders, both inside and external

to the organization, such as other public managers, partnerships or interest groups.

If anything, the importance of political skills for public managers is increasing with the

incidence of factors as diverse as globalisation and public management reform. Yet ,

despite the importance of political skills to long-standing issues such as the

politics/administration dichotomy or to more recent ones such as the public value

debate, there has been relatively little conceptualisation or empirical research on

public managers‟ political awareness and capacities. This paper reports findings

from a large-scale cross-national comparative research study based on a survey of

public managers in central and local government in the UK and national and state

governments in Australia and New Zealand (n = 1047). The survey was preceded by

focus groups in each of the three countries. We examined four key questions: what

political awareness skills public managers exhibit ; what contexts they use political

skills in; how skills vary by context, type of organisation, and type of manager; and

how they acquire their political skills. We also compare different institutional

arrangements of the three countries in relation to the findings. The paper concludes

by considering the implications for conceptualising and researching political

astuteness.

INTRODUCTION

Political astuteness (also described as political awareness, political savvy or „nous‟

e.g. Hartley and Fletcher, 2008) is an increasingly necessary skill for public

managers, but it has been relatively neglected in the research literature. It has

always been important for managers in the public sector to be able to work with the

formal political office-holders, institutions and processes of the state, though

classical public administration emphasised the separation of roles of politician and

administrator (e.g. Weber, 1946) and the need for civil servants to work with political

impartiality with the government of the day (e.g. Burnham and Pyper, 2008). Others

have argued that the separation of roles is a myth or a construct (e.g. Svara, 1998;

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2001; Selden et al, 1999). To what extent do public managers require political

astuteness to work with elected politicians?

In addition, public managers have to work not only with elected politicians but also to

interact with a range of other actors, institutions and stakeholders. They may have

to work with other government organizations, with civil society organizations and

movements that advocate or lobby on behalf of consumer, pressure and political

groups (and to some extent the latter has also been true for their counterparts in the

private and voluntary sectors). They may have to face the media to explain

particular policies, events or incidents. They may therefore be working with a range

of stakeholders where their legitimacy rests less on the exercise of formal authority

and more on persuasion and influence. They are, arguably, working with diverse

and sometimes competing interests which may involve the use of political not just

technical skills.

Several factors have heightened the salience of political awareness and skills for

public managers in recent decades, it can be argued. One is the rise of network

governance (e.g. Stoker, 2006a; Provan and Kenis, 2008; Benington, 2000), which

imparts a greater role to non-governmental actors in policy-making and service-

delivery, and a consequently greater need for mangers to interact with them as

stakeholders. Another is globalisation, which has created a range of uncertainties

about world governance, national stability or local priorities which managers need to

take account of, and which may have unexpected or substantial repercussions which

have to be addressed (e.g.Held, 2010). Another is the increasing intensity, ubiquity

and speed of media coverage, driven by the Internet and its accompanying 24-hour

news cycle, demanding very fast responses by governments and keen appreciation

by managers of the media implications of policy issues. Quite possibly also the

increasing salience of „wicked problems‟ (Rittel and Webber, 1973) confronting

governments has required managers to be more attuned to the political difficulties

which often permeate those kinds of problems. In short, it is now even more

important for public managers to be politically astute.

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But surprisingly, as discussed below, the literature on the political awareness and

skills of public managers is sparse, and even that on the political awareness of

private sector managers is somewhat narrowly one-sided. There is a need for

conceptual frameworks to understand political skill and for empirical work to examine

when and how such skills are used by public managers.

This paper is an effort to redress this deficiency. It reports on research which was

initially conducted with managers in the United Kingdom (Hartley and Branicki 2006;

Hartley et al 2007) and was subsequently replicated and extended to a cross-

national comparison in Australia and New Zealand. The research has three aims:

1. To fill the conceptual and empirical gap in the literature on public managers‟

political astuteness. Drawing on data from samples of over 500 UK public

managers and a similar number in Australia and New Zealand, it adds to our

understanding of what public managers understand „politics‟ to mean, the

circumstances in which they use political astuteness, their assessment of the

effectiveness of their political skills, and how they acquire their political

awareness.

2. To compare the political astuteness of managers in the public sector with

what the literature tells us about managers in the private sector. The research

highlights some important differences between the two.

3. To begin exploring whether institutional differences also prompt differences in

both the need for and exercise of political astuteness by public managers. By

comparing managers in the UK, Australian and New Zealand governments,

the study unearths insights into whether their partially differing institutional

arrangements are associated with similarities or differences in political

awareness and skills.

POLITICAL ASTUTENESS IN THE MANAGEMENT AND PUBLIC

ADMINISTRATION LITERATURE

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Although politics is increasingly recognised by practitioners as a key factor for

managers to take into account, its treatment in the management literature has been

patchy and the literature is both sparse and ambiguous (Buchanan, 2008). Much of

the generic literature has treated politics with indifference or even outright negativity.

It has been seen as having no place in rational processes and systems of

management. It is seen as self-interested behaviour by managers seeking to further

their career or personal interests (Rosen 2007; Halbesleben and Wheeler 2006;

Byrne 2005; Ferris et al 2002, 2005). One recent writer referred to „illegitimate, self-

serving political activities‟ (Chang 2009, 779). Relatedly, it is interpreted as

„politicking‟, and associated with blaming, attacking, scapegoating, manipulation and

exploitation (Mintzberg 1985; Allen et al 1979; Bower and Webbing 1988; Eiring

1999). Another variant sees it in terms of waging „turf wars‟ (Buchanan and Badham

1999; Bacharach and Lawler 1980). In short the „dark side‟ of politics tends to get the

most exposure in this perspective.

Other perspectives, notably from the political science literature, offer broader and

less negative views. A more pluralist view sees politics as a set of interactions within

and between public and private institutions, covering both formal and informal

activities. It has been described as all the activities of conflict, negotiation or co-

operation over the use and distribution of resources (Leftwich 2004). Another

constructive view comes from Crick (2004, 67), who defines politics as the

mobilisation of support for a position, decision or action whereby „people act together

through institutionalised procedures to resolve differences, to conciliate different

interests and values, and to make public policies in the pursuit of common purposes‟.

The basic purpose of politics in this perspective is to mobilise support for particular

actions by reconciling different interests and values – a purpose diametrically at odds

with the „politics as self-interest‟ view.

One important extension of this perspective is the idea that politics entails reaching

beyond difference to find ways of co-operating in order to achieve consensus about

the broader purposes that are shared despite differences in emphasis, values or

specific goals. Dunn has captured this in his suggestion that politics are the

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“struggles which result from the collisions between human purposes: most clearly

when these collisions involve large numbers of human beings... it takes in, too, the

immense array of expedients and practices which human beings have invented to

cooperate, as much as to compete with one another” (quoted in Stoker, 2006b, p. 4).

These definitions of politics have important ramifications for managers. They mean

that politics can partly be understood in more familiar terms such as influencing

skills, partnership working, or social skills. Bacharach has argued that political

competence may make „the difference between someone who can get an idea off

the ground and accepted in an organisation and someone who can‟t‟ (2005, 93). It is

also possible that „constructive‟ politics can play a key part in achieving

organisational outcomes (Holbeche 2004). Thus, politics may or may not result in

positive outcomes – it can be seen as an important social influence process with the

potential of being functional or dysfunctional to organisations and individuals‟ (Allen

et al 1979, 82). Either way, managers cannot afford to ignore the political behaviour

going on around them.

The present study is designed to shed more light on which of these perspectives

best reflect the way public sector managers view politics. To facilitate this, we adopt

a broad definition of politics in and around organisations, to allow space for differing

conceptions. Drawing on the original UK literature review, we take the view that

„politics is about mobilising support for, and consent to, action in the context of

diverse, and sometimes competing interests and may involve either collaboration or

competition depending on purpose; that politics can be legitimate as well as

illegitimate, that it can be about pursuing either or both of self-interest and

organisational interests; and that these activities can take place external or internal

to the organisation‟(Hartley and Fletcher, 2008).

METHODOLOGY

This research has been conducted in two stages: an original project conducted in the

United Kingdom covered both public and private sector managers, though the

analysis reported here relates to public managers in national and local government

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only, in order to be directly comparative with the Australian and New Zealand where

the replication study was carried out. Thus, the data from public sector managers

has been extracted from the UK study and combined with that from the Australian

and New Zealand public mangers, to form a three-country data-base. The research

was focused on middle and senior managers in all three countries.

A central element of the research is the conceptual framework of political awareness

skills, developed in the first (UK) stage of the project (the methodology for which is

described below). The original authors proposed, constructed and statistically tested

a five dimensional framework of skills, which sought to conceptualise political

astuteness skills beyond the narrower account of political skills as self-interest extant

in much of the literature. These dimensions were operationalised in a 50-item

inventory using Likert-scale response categories, and this structure has been

confirmed in statistical factor analyses (Hartley, Fletcher and Ungemach, 2011). The

items formed the part of the survey concerned with self-reported political skills. The

five dimensions (which ascended from the „micro‟ personal level to the „macro‟

strategic level) were:

Personal skills.

Inter-personal skills

Reading people and situations

Building alignment and alliances

Strategic direction and scanning.

Other parts of the survey examined what managers considered politics to be in their

work as managers, in what contexts they deployed political skills, and how they

acquired their political skills. We also asked about how they rated the political skills

of the senior managers they worked with most closely (in order to be able to

compare ratings of self with other on the dimensions of political skill).

The study was conducted in two stages (one in the UK and one in Australia/New

Zealand) with matching methodology. Prior to dissemination of the survey, six focus

groups were conducted with senior managers in London, Birmingham, Cardiff,

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Canberra, Wellington and Melbourne to solicit information about political skills, the

contexts in which they are used, and the ways in which their own political skills had

been developed. The focus groups were held with managers from several different

locations in order to explore different types of governments (e.g. central,

commonwealth, local, devolved, state). A total of 60 managers participated in these

focus groups, which were tape-recorded and written up for analysis.

Participants for the self-report survey were recruited in a number of ways. In the UK,

participants responded to an email invitation sent from the Chartered Management

Institute (the national professional body for managers) to its members. The primary

method of recruitment in Australia/NZ was third-party recruitment through the central

agency responsible for government employment in each jurisdiction. The head of the

public service in each Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG)

jurisdiction (the CEO of the Public Service Commission or Department of

Premier/Prime Minister and Cabinet) was emailed an outline of the study and a

request for his/her cooperation in the dissemination of the survey instrument. Once

agreement was received, each relevant central agency was sent a letter of invitation

for potential participants, along with a draft covering note encouraging employees of

that government to take part. They were asked to forward these messages to all of

their senior managers. Two secondary methods of recruitment in Australia/NZ

included an advertisement on ANZSOG‟s website, and an email from ANZSOG to

alumni of its core programs, all of whom are senior managers in the target

governments.

The survey instrument was hosted online by the UK Chartered Management Institute

for all three countries, and was accessed via a link in the email invitation.

The self-report survey was developed by the UK researchers according to a political

awareness framework based on information from focus groups, a senior manager

advisory group, and a review of the literature (see Hartley et al, 2007, p. 23-27). It

was underpinned by the five-dimension framework described above, with further

sections examining participants‟ understanding of politics; the situations in which

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political skills are useful; the effectiveness of participants‟ skills; their evaluation of

their colleagues‟ skills; the development of these skills; and their importance to

participants‟ organisations.

Slight modifications were necessary in the Australia/New Zealand element of the

study, because the survey was originally developed for use with managers from the

public, private and non-profit sectors in the UK. A small number of questions were

altered, added or eliminated to reflect the different institutional context.

The survey questions were mainly quantitative, with participants asked to rate their

responses to various items on a four, five or six-point Likert scale. One question

asked for ranking of responses instead.

Participants were 1053 public sector managers from Australia, New Zealand and the

UK, nearly 80% of whom self-identified as senior managers. See Table 1 for

information about participants. We aimed to exclude junior managers on the

grounds of their not having sufficient experience in dealing with complex competing

interests in their work. In this we were not entirely successful, though the low

numbers of junior managers shows that our targeting of middle and senior managers

was largely accurate. The junior managers are excluded from certain analyses.

-----------------------------

Table 1 about here

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The participants came from all four countries of the UK and from nine of ANZSOG‟s

ten member governments. Thus, the scope of the study encompasses employees of

UK central and local governments, as well as all Australian and New Zealand state,

territory and national governments (with the exception of Tasmania).

FINDINGS

Survey findings: Similarities across the three countries

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We set out and discuss the findings from our survey at two levels. In this section, we

consider those patterns which are broadly similar across the three countries. This

enables us to comment on the extent to which the data concur with the treatment of

political awareness found in the extant literature. In subsequent sections, we

consider the ways in which political astuteness skills differ among the three

countries, and whether and to what extent any differences might be explicable by

differences in institutional arrangements.

The first research question to consider is how public managers understand politics in

their workplace – how far do their views reflect the „dark side‟ of politics and how far

a constructive view of politics. In the survey, managers were given six varied

definitions of politics in the workplace and were invited to endorse up to three of

these. The first area of similarity across the three countries concerned how public

managers understand „politics‟ (see Table 2 and Figure 1). The same four

understanding were the most important for survey respondents across all three

countries, and the same two were least important. The most frequently cited were all

meanings with positive or neutral connotations: alliance building, formal processes

and institutions of government, scanning factors in the external environment and

ways in which different interests are reconciled. Their dominant definitions were thus

primarily about „getting things done‟, both in the „big-P‟ (formal) political environment

and in the „small-p‟ (alliances, scanning environment and reconciling interests)

context. (At the same time, within those rankings of definitions, there some

differences of relative emphasis, covered in a later section).

---------------------------------------------

Table 2 and Figure 1 about here

---------------------------------------------

By contrast, the two least frequently cited, by a clear margin, were those reflecting

the darker side of politics: pursuit of personal advantage, and people „protecting their

turf‟. This finding is clearly at odds with the position advanced in the generic

management literature on the meaning of politics in managerial work. It indicates that

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public managers in the three countries have a much more sanguine view of the role

of politics than appears to be the case based on the literature about their private

sector counterparts.

Secondly, in order to put this finding into perspective, we also sought to establish

how important different aspects of the political environment were to the respondents‟

organisations (ie to the organization not to their own work as such). In general,

formal political processes were seen as impinging more on respondents‟

organisations than „small-p‟ politics across all three countries (see Table 3 and

Figure 2).

---------------------------------------------


---------------------------------------------

Thirdly, we found a further area of broad similarity, which concerned the situations in

which respondents said they found political skills to be useful (i.e. in their own work)

(see Table 4 and Figure 3). (Some questions were only asked in Australia and New

Zealand and so there is no comparison with the UK for those questions. The reason

was that the UK survey covered private sector managers as well as public sector

ones.) Certain other questions were important but were framed in UK terms – such

as „Working with regional or local government‟, „Working with UK central

government‟, or „Working with European Union institutions and officials‟. On these

issues we therefore framed new questions for the Australian and New Zealand

respondents which were more context appropriate: „Dealing with Ministers‟, „Dealing

with other politicians‟, „Dealing with central agencies such as Treasury or the PM‟s

Department‟, „Dealing with interest groups‟, and „Working with different levels of

government‟. Table 4 and Figure 3 set out the responses to the common questions

as well as to those asked only in the UK or only in Australia and New Zealand (i.e.

the „non-common‟ questions). While the „non-common‟ questions are not comparable

across the three countries, they are comparable with the responses to common

questions within each country.

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---------------------------------------------


---------------------------------------------

Bearing this complication in mind, the situations reported as those where political

skills were most frequently used related to formal politics. In the UK, the most cited

situation was „Working with regional or local government‟ and among the most

frequent was „Working with UK central government‟. In Australia and New Zealand,

the most cited situations were „Dealing with Ministers‟ and „Dealing with central

agencies‟, while „Dealing with other politicians‟ was also among the most frequent.

These all reflect the importance of formal political institutions and processes across

all three countries.

Almost as important – for UK as well as for Australian and New Zealand managers –

were the challenges of understanding the public context and in particular in getting

things done: „Thinking about how public opinion has an impact‟, „Working with

influential people in the your organisation‟, „Working with the media‟, „Working with

partners and strategic alliances‟, „Scanning changes in society‟, and „Dealing with

interest groups‟. These reflect a perception by public managers that they need to

exercise political astuteness across a range of activities, indeed that the political

process in their countries is rather pervasive in their work. It could also indicate a

degree of responsiveness to the concerns of their political masters.

At the same time, this attention to political circumstances had a distinctively domestic

flavour. The situations where political skills were least used across all countries were

„Scanning changes internationally‟ and „Working with global organisations‟, while for

the UK, „Working with EU institutions and officials‟ was also among the least

frequent.

A fourth area of similarity was in one aspect of how respondents across the three

countries assessed the relative effectiveness of different categories of their own

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political skills (see Table 5 and Figure 4). In all three countries, public managers had

a generally higher opinion of what we might call their „micro‟ political skills – personal

skills, inter-personal skills, and reading people and situations – than their „macro‟

skills – building alignment and alliances, and strategic direction and scanning. (Note

that in other important respects there were significant differences between them in

this area, to be discussed below.) This was distinctly different for their ratings of the

senior managers whom they most closely worked with – across all three countries

managers rated their senior colleagues as scoring less well on personal and

interpersonal skills while scoring them relatively benignly on reading people and

situations.

---------------------------------------------


---------------------------------------------

A significant similarity in this area was that respondents generally rated their own

political skills more highly than those of their fellow managers. This „leniency bias‟,

which is of course logically impossible if the sample is valid, frequently occurs when

survey respondents are asked to rate themselves and others (Fletcher, 2008). One

interesting exception, however, was in their assessments of how effective their peers

were at „reading people and situations‟. On this question, both the Australian and UK

respondents rated their fellow managers slightly more highly than themselves, and

the New Zealanders rated them almost as highly as themselves, i.e. by a much

closer margin than in other skill categories.

Finally, a fifth area of similarity concerned how managers developed their political

skills. In the survey, respondents were given 24 choices of experiences, events or

ways in which they might have developed their political astuteness skills.

Overwhelmingly, they acquired them through informal and experiential processes,

such as gaining experience on the job, handling crises, or learning from their own

mistakes, rather than from formal structured sources such as formal mentoring or

academic study. Table 6 sets out the top eight sources or influences cited by

respondents (in terms of the percentages citing that source as valuable or very

valuable. It shows that Australia‟s and New Zealand‟s top eight contain exactly the

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same items, albeit in a slightly different order, while the UK‟s contains six of those

items. Moreover, three of the bottom four items were also the same for each country.

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Table 6 about here ----------------------------

Institutional arrangements in the three countries

While there were some broad similarities across the three countries, there were also

some significant differences among them. Before we turn to consider these

differences, and whether they are related to differing institutional arrangements, we

must first outline the key institutional features of the three governments.

When it comes to governmental arrangements, the United Kingdom, Australia and

New Zealand all sit squarely within the Westminster tradition. This tradition shares in

common with other democratic polities the essential conditions of democracy: the

rule of law, free, multi-party elections, freedom of expression and assembly, and so

on (Stoker, 2006b). What distinguishes it from other traditions of polities around the

world is the structure of the relationship between the legislative and executive

branches of government. Specifically, the executive government is drawn from the

legislature, rather than the strict separation between the two found in systems such

as that of the United States. The government of the day is formed from that party or

coalition which can command a majority of votes in the lower (or only) house of

parliament. Ministers are appointed from among those majority parliamentarians,

and are answerable to parliament.

Despite this basic similarity, there are also important institutional differences among

the three countries, which are set out in Table 7. First, Australia differs from the other

two governments in having a federal system. The national government (referred to

as the Commonwealth) formally shares power with the six states, each of which has

its own Westminster-style government. These states are not mere administrative

divisions of the Commonwealth, but rather have their positions guaranteed by the

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Constitution, which is very difficult, if not impossible, to amend.1 The practical

implication for public managers is that both formulating and implementing policy may

require dealing with other governments within the federal system. The Constitution‟s

authors did not provide a precise division of powers or formal machinery for conflict

resolution, leading to a system of „co-operative federalism‟ which rests on a series of

accommodations between the level of government. As Emy and Hughes put it, this

leads to „a great deal of conflict, competition, hard bargaining and political

grandstanding’ (1991).

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Table 7 about here ----------------------------

Second, whereas Australia and the United Kingdom have bi-cameral parliaments,

New Zealand‟s parliament has only one chamber, its upper house having been

eliminated in 1951. In both the UK and Australia, the upper house may not

necessarily have the same party make-up as the lower house, meaning that the

government formed on the basis of its majority in the House of Lords (UK) or Senate

(Australia) may need to negotiate on legislation and other matters with those

controlling the upper house – particularly in Australia, where the Senate is elected

rather than appointed. By itself, this has meant that New Zealand governments, once

elected in their own right, are able to act decisively while in office – as was observed,

for instance, in the radical reform governments of the 1980s and early 1990s. The

practical implication of this for public managers is that in bi-cameral systems,

additional political considerations may impinge on the formulation and

implementation of policy. There may be less certainty and a greater need to take

other stakeholders into account in advising governments.

Third, the countries differ in their voting systems, in ways which affect the likelihood

of minor parties gaining representation in parliament. Specifically, the UK has a „first

past the post‟ (FPP) system, which makes it harder for minor parties to gain seats in

1 The Constitution lists particular matters over which the Commonwealth has power, and leaves anything not

mentioned to the States. However, High Court judgments and other factors have tended to expand the

Commonwealth’s sphere of influence over time. To change the Constitution requires a referendum in which a

majority of the voters and a majority of the states must support the change. Since Federation in 1901, only 8

matters out of the 44 put to a referendum have been passed.

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parliament. On the other hand, New Zealand has since 1994 had a „mixed member

proportional‟ (MMP) system, which facilitates minor parties gaining seats and acts as

a check on the major parties. Indeed, this system was introduced specifically in

response to dissatisfaction with the perceived dominance of major parties in the

unicameral parliament. Somewhere in between is the Australian system of

preferential voting for the lower house (similar to the Alternative Vote (AV) system

recently rejected in the referendum in the UK), which gives minor parties some

influence in policy terms at election time, but does not in itself prompt their greater

representation in parliament. More importantly in Australia, the voting system for the

Senate is proportional, which in practice ensures that minor parties and

independents are represented in the Senate, and in likelihood hold the balance of

power. The practical implication of voting systems for public managers is similar to

that of having bicameral parliaments: they increase the range of stakeholders that

have to be taken into account in policy-making and implementation.

Finally, they vary in the extent to which the separation of politics from administration

is underpinned structurally. While there is a social consensus in all three countries

that the civil service should be politically neutral, there is variation in how strongly it

is backed up by legislative obligations to varying degrees. Most important in this

respect are the processes by which appointments and dismissals are made. All three

countries have institutions designed to ensure that these processes are governed by

the merit principle – that public servants should be hired or fired on the basis of their

competence and/or performance, not on the basis of political allegiance or bias.

To some extent this insulates public servants from the vicissitudes of politics. In the

UK, civil service recruitment is under the oversight of the Civil Service

Commissioners, who administer a merit-based recruitment code, approve senior

appointments and hear complaints of breaches of the code. The Australian Public

Service Commission plays a similar role. In both cases, however, it is still open to

the government of the day to appoint and dismiss department heads, who have the

authority to play an important role in upholding the independence of the public

service. In New Zealand, there are similar processes administered by the State

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Services Commission, albeit les detailed in procedural terms. However, in New

Zealand there is a further guarantee of the independence of the civil service, namely

that department heads (chief executives) cannot be dismissed without the

permission of the State Services Commissioner. This arrangement has real teeth:

there have been cases in recent years where a minister sought to terminate a chief

executive but the Commissioner, after enquiring into the matter, disallowed the

dismissal. The net effect is that NZ public servants have a somewhat greater sense

of the separation of politics from administration. This sense has been reinforced by

the fact that NZ has gone even further than the other two countries in structuring

services in such a way that policy functions are clearly separated from

administration, with the implication that those public servants performing the latter

roles are relatively insulated from formal „big p‟ politics. However, the unicameral

parliament in conjunction with the proportional voting system mean that politics is

likely to be significant in NZ managers‟ work.

Weighing up all these factors together, it is possible to argue that formal politics is

most salient to Australian public managers and least salient to those in the UK, with

New Zealand somewhere in between. Australia‟s federal system and bi-cameral

parliament in particular dictate that its public managers have to be aware of and

operate in their political environment. This is reinforced by its voting system, which

increases the likelihood of minor party representation in its Senate. At the same time,

its civil service oversight processes, while relatively robust, are not as strong as

those of New Zealand.

By contrast, the UK public service has not had to deal with state „provinces‟, and its

relationships with the devolved governments of Scotland, Wales and Ireland are still

being shaped. Moreover the UK‟s House of Lords is overall less of a political

obstacle for the government than is the Senate, and the Civil Service Commissioners

have sufficient authority to safeguard public service independence. On balance, the

world of politics seems to be experienced by UK public managers as a separate

world from which policy is dictated rather than a blending of worlds requiring

increased negotiation.

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Finally, while New Zealand has a strong custodian of civil service independence in

the State Services Commissioner, other features of its governance arrangements –

notably, its unicameral parliament and its proportional voting system – dictate that

public managers understand and interact with the world of politics, not on a partisan

basis but as a necessary means to get things done.

Survey findings: Differences among the three countries

With that backdrop, we turn to what the survey data reveal of the differences among

the three countries, and whether the institutional factors might account for any of

these differences.

First, although the „dark side‟ of politics (pursuit of personal advantage and people

protecting their turf) was less cited than more positive perspectives in definitions of

politics in all three countries, in the UK it was noticeably more important than in the

other two countries – 17% of UK managers said they thought politics was „pursuit of

personal advantage compared with 4% of Australian managers and only 1% of New

Zealand managers (see Table 1 and Figure 1), which is quite a striking difference.

One explanation for this could be that UK public managers feel that they are less

able to influence policy decisions or to understand the nuances of how political

factors might have affected them, and therefore are more sceptical of the legitimacy

of those decisions.

A second area of difference concerns respondents‟ nominations of the situations in

which they used political skills. Some of them entailed differences between the UK

on the one hand and Australia and New Zealand on the other. British public

managers were more likely to see the challenges of using political skills in thinking

about how public opinion had an impact on their organisation and in working with

partners and strategic alliances, but less likely to do so in scanning changes

internationally for their impact on the organisation.

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As explained above, in this section of the survey, some of the questions asked in

Australia and New Zealand were different from those asked in the UK. Nevertheless,

there were a couple of interesting differences between Australia and New Zealand,

which at first sight seem to counteract each other. On the one hand, NZ managers

tended to use political skills more in dealing with politicians other than ministers,

while on the other, Australian managers used them more in dealing with interest

groups. The greater emphasis in NZ on dealing with other politicians may be

explicable by the presence of minor party representation in parliament due to the

MMP voting system, necessitating an awareness of them by public managers, as

well as a need to consult with them about implementation.

A third important difference lies in respondents‟ assessments of their own and their

peers‟ political skills. Although the relative ranking of the five main types of political

skill was the same for all three countries, in Britain the mean scores (of both

themselves and their peers) were significantly lower. In a word, public managers in

the UK took a dimmer view of the effectiveness of their own and their peers‟ political

skills than did their counterparts in Australia and New Zealand. This could, of course,

be attributable to some form of native British modesty or alternatively of brash

Antipodean braggadocio, but more realistically is explicable by the previously

discussed greater level of detachment of UK public managers from the political

realm. Put simply, they may have less occasion to apply political skills in the formal

realm of politics than their Australian and New Zealand counterparts, and feel less

confident about them as a result.

In summary, some of the differences in the possession and application of political

skills could be explained by reference to institutional factors. But these explanations

should be seen as promising lines of inquiry rather than settled verdicts. Other types

of explanations could be derived from considering factors as diverse as national

culture, governments‟ pursuit of „joined up government‟ or „whole of government‟

solutions, public management reforms, natural or economic crises, the stage of the

electoral cycle or political scandals. Having marked out what we might we might call

20

the dependent variables, we need to probe the responses more deeply to gain more

insight into what lies behind them.

NEXT STEPS AND CONCLUSIONS

The three-country cross-national comparison has yielded some important insights

about the value and use of the skills of political astuteness among public managers

in Australia, New Zealand and the UK and has addressed the three research

questions set for this paper. First, it has contributed to addressing the conceptual

and empirical gap in the understanding of the political astuteness characteristics of

public managers. The cross-national comparison supports the overall structure of

the conceptual framework based on five dimensions of political skill. It supports the

proposition that political skill is used by managers for not only formal political

situations but also with a range of stakeholders both within and outside government.

The research suggests that it is possible to construe politics not only as about self-

interest but also as about alliance-building and horizon-scanning for organizational

purposes. These findings suggest that public managers may be exercising

leadership skills not simply management skills, particularly where they work in a

network governance context.

The research shows that the leniency bias is present across the different samples,

and that the acquisition of political astuteness skills is currently haphazard in that it

occurs through informal and experiential events, including making mistakes.

Second, the research does suggest that the predominantly negative view of politics

within the management literature is not supported from the empirical data here, and

that there may be differences between public and private managers in this respect.

However, further research is needed to examine sectoral differences.

Third, there are some interesting and intriguing differences between the public

managers in the three countries, with more differences between the UK and the two

Antipodean countries. UK managers are considerably more likely to report that

politics is about self-interest and people protecting their turf in the workplace.

21

Australian and New Zealand managers self-report somewhat higher political

astuteness skills and they also report that the senior managers they work closely

with have higher skills. There are a wider range of formal political contexts where

Australian and New Zealand public managers say that their political astuteness skills

are important. We have suggested some possible institutional reasons which may

be influencing the perceptions and attitudes of these public managers in different

countries. Such explanations are, at this stage, speculative, but we aim to examine

these issues further in a series of interviews, which forms the next phase of this

research programme.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr Christoph Ungemach of Warwick University, and Sophie

Rae Yates of Melbourne University/Australian and New Zealand School of

Government for research assistance and statistical analyses.

http://www.uctc.net/mwebber/Rittel+Webber+Dilemmas+General_Theory_of_Planning.pdf

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Table 1: Numbers and managerial level of participants by country

Managerial level Australia New Zealand UK

Department head, Deputy Department head, Director or equivalent

69 (15%) 21 (30%) 97 (19%)

Senior manager 375 (83%) 33 (46%) 219 (42%)

Middle manager 9 (2%) 14 (20%) 171 (33%)

Junior manager (should not have been in the study and excluded from some analyses)

0 (0%) 2 (3%) 33 (6%)

Did not answer 1 (0%) 1 (1%) 2 (0%)

Total 454 71 522

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Table 2: Which of the following comes closest to your understanding of politics in your work as a manager?*

Purpose of politics AU% NZ% UK% Significant differences (chi

square tests)

Alliance-building to achieve organisational objectives

67 71 58 AU and UK (p=0.006) NZ and UK (p=0.045)

Formal processes and institutions of government

58 62 53 No significant differences

Pursuit of personal advantage 4 1 17 AU and UK (p<0.001) NZ and UK (p=0.001)

People „protecting their turf‟ 13 7 27 AU and UK (p<0.001) NZ and UK (p<0.001)

Scanning factors in external environment that organisation needs to consider

59 64 37 AU and UK (p<0.001) NZ and UK (p<0.001)

Ways in which different interests are reconciled

52 45 36 AU and UK (p<0.001)

*Participants were asked to tick up to three options

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Figure 1: Which of the following comes closest to your understanding of politics in your work as a manager?

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Table 3: “How far do the following apply to your organisation?” (mean 1-4)

Mean (1-4) Significance (analysis of variance tests)

AU NZ UK

We work in a highly media-visible environment

3.40 3.43 3.37 No sig differences

We work with a range of external partnerships


We operate in an environment subject to a lot of procedural controls

3.39 3.3 3.56 AU and UK (p>0.001)

NZ and UK (p=0.004)

External perception of my organisation is a significant consideration in my work


My work is directly connected to the formal political world (e.g. state or national government, parliament)


Formal political decisions affect my organisation

3.64 3.71 3.78 AU and UK (p>0.001)

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Figure 2: “How far do the following apply to your organisation?” (mean scores on a 1-4 Likert scale)

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Table 4: Please rate the extent to which you find it valuable to use political skills in the following situations (mean of 0-4)

Situation AU NZ UK Significant differences (analysis of

variance tests)

Thinking about how public opinion has an impact on your organisation

3.01 3.03 3.19 AU and UK (p=0.002)

Working with the media 2.87 2.97 2.83 No sig differences

Scanning changes in society for their impact on your organisation


Scanning changes internationally for their impact on your organisation

2.33 2.23 2.06 AU and UK (p<0.001)

Working with regional or local government

N/A N/A 3.2 N/A

Working with UK central government N/A N/A 3.12 N/A

Working with European Union institutions and officials

N/A N/A 2.12 N/A

Dealing with Ministers 3.42 3.43 N/A No sig differences

Dealing with other politicians 2.93 3.18 N/A AU and NZ (p=0.038)

Dealing with central agencies such as Treasury or the PM‟s department

3.15 3.12 N/A No sig differences

Dealing with interest groups 2.93 2.69 N/A AU and NZ (p<0.02)

Working with different levels of government

2.77 2.71 N/A No sig differences

Working with global governance organisations


Working with partners and strategic alliances

2.77 2.69 3.12 AU and UK (p<0.001) NZ and UK (p<0.001)

Working with influential people in your organisation


Working with cliques and power blocs in your organisation


30

Figure 3: “Please rate the extent to which you find it valuable to use political skills in the following situations” (mean score from 1= „of no value‟ to 5 = „extremely valuable‟; also possible to state not applicable which treated as missing value)

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Table 5: Assessments of self and others across five domains of political skills

Self (mean, scale of 1-6)

Others (mean, scale of 1-6)

Domain of political skills AU NZ UK AU NZ UK

Personal skills 4.28 4.45 4.19 3.81 3.86 3.49

Interpersonal skills 4.26 4.36 4.16 3.87 3.87 3.51

Reading people and situations 4.19 4.32 4.03 4.32 4.29 4.06

Building alignment and alliances 4.07 4.19 3.93 3.89 3.87 3.58

Strategic direction and scanning 4.27 4.3 3.99 4.04 3.96 3.7

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Figure 4: Assessments of self and others across five domains of political skills (mean scores: 1 = weak and 6 = excellent)

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Table 6: Top eight influences on political skills in Australia, NZ and the UK

Rank Australia New Zealand United Kingdom

1 Good example of senior manager

Gaining experience in the job

Learning from own mistakes

2 Gaining experience in the job

Handling crises Gaining experience in the job

3 Handling crises Good example of senior manager

Handling crises

4 Learning from own mistakes

Observing role models Good example of senior manager

5 Observing role models Learning from own mistakes

Bad example of senior manager

6 Informal mentoring Bad example of senior manager

Working with other organisations

7 Bad example of senior manager

Secondment to another organisation

Observing role models

8 Secondment to another organisation

Informal mentoring Having time out to reflect

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Table 7: Comparison of key institutional factors: UK, Australia and New Zealand

Institutional factor UK Australia New Zealand

Democratic elections, rule of law, free media etc.

Executive drawn from legislature (“Westminster” system)

Federal system

Bi-cameral parliament

Electoral system enabling significant minor party representation

?

Institutional guarantees of public service independence

leading with political astuteness comparisons between the ... · political astuteness (also...

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