Public Interest Leadership Framework

A Collective Leadership Conceputal Framework

The overall frame of reference is the ’20 Ps of collective leadership’. It emerged through the influence of realistic evaluation as a method of study, as applied to the study and practice of leadership.

The first benefit of using a realistic evaluation (RE) approach is that leaders and leadership adapt (the mechanisms) and change according to the attributes of the people involved in leading, those who ‘follow’, and internal dynamics (the contexts). A second is that RE helps to identify outcomes. Leadership activities produce complex patterns of outcomes, with winners and losers, successes, and failures. A third benefit is that we can take account of the external conditions.

Leaders and leadership are apt to vary and to change over time, and as Tilley ¹ argues, “sometimes in chaotic and inherently unpredictable ways”. The realist is interested in identifying and testing configurations, rather than one-to-one causal relationships. This relatively simple framework relies upon the configuration of context, mechanisms, and outcomes (CMO configurations).

The New Public Leaedership (NPL) Framework is illustrated here. The framework represents the 20 Ps which together define the realist evaluation framework focused on ‘contexts, mechanisms and outcomes’. The E-Learning Nugget below runs for 13 minutes.

[1] TILLEY, N. 2010. Can Leadership be Evaluated? In: BROOKES, S. & GRINT, K. (eds.) The Public Leadership Challenge. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (page 634).