Relations-Oriented Leadership in Public Organizations

Relations-oriented leadership is key to handling significant challenges in public organizations today. In societies characterized by growing complexity, collaboration is an important driver of public service delivery. Moreover, public organizations are facing challenges such as high levels of sickness absenteeism, new work pressures, and recruitment and retention issues. Research shows that social relationships are an important resource for handling such challenges in public organizations. Therefore, fostering strong social relationships in the organization is key for public managers. Public managers can influence social relationships through relations-oriented leadership. Despite existing research, however, knowledge gaps still exist, limiting our understanding of relationsoriented leadership and its consequences, thus making it difficult to work with relations-oriented leadership effectively. Therefore, further research is required. This dissertation proposes a refined conceptualization of relations-oriented leadership, examines consequences of relations-oriented leadership and strong organizational relationships, and illustrates what relations-oriented leadership looks like in practice. Across four research articles, the dissertation makes several contributions to theory, empirical research, and practice.

The ambition of relations-oriented leadership is to influence employees to connect in ways that foster high-quality relationships. Based on a conceptual critical review of management and leadership literature, conceptual insights from a diverse, theoretical landscape are synthesized into five important dimensions of relations-oriented leadership: showing individual consideration, developing employee skills, supporting social interactions, fostering task coordination, and communicating a shared vision. Each dimension covers different, more specific core behaviors. This conceptual framework provides a more coherent overview of relations-oriented leadership and enables a more comprehensive operationalization of relations-oriented leadership, thus constituting a stepping-stone towards more rigorous, empirical investigations of relations-oriented leadership.

Moreover, by analyzing extensive real-life survey data from the Danish Municipality of Esbjerg, this dissertation shows that relations-oriented leadership positively relates to strong organizational relationships within and between work groups. The dissertation also reveals that leadership behaviors targeting a collective level, in particular behaviors aimed at fostering task coordination and communicating a shared vision, are more important than leadership behaviors targeting individual employees, when it comes to fostering strong employee relationships. By highlighting the importance of these collective dimensions, which have frequently been overlooked in conceptualizations of relations-oriented leadership, the dissertation expands our understanding of relations-oriented leadership and provides guidance to public managers on what to focus on in their relations-oriented leadership. 

Furthermore, this dissertation identifies opposing, indirect effects of strong coworker relationships on attendance behavior in times of sickness: strong coworker relationships reduce the tendency to attend work while ill (presenteeism) by lowering stress levels, but also increase the tendency to attend work while ill by enhancing work engagement. This evidence deepens our understanding of the consequences of strong organizational relationships and offers a promising approach for the further exploration of complex, social mechanisms, including the potential dark sides of strong social relationships at the workplace.

Finally, based on a qualitative interview study among managers in Esbjerg Municipality, this dissertation illustrates what relations-oriented leadership can look like in practice. By providing empirical examples of relations-oriented leadership, the dissertation invites and supports enhanced reflexivity on how to exercise relations-oriented leadership.