Management Changes and Adapting Leadership Practices: The Case of the Shared Services Initiative of the Queensland State Government

Abstract

From a more general design-oriented perspective nearly all OECD member states are presently held to give their ongoing attempts to modernise management of the state and administration the now needed stronger strategic shape. In this regard, it is true that in these countries also strongly concept-driven approaches of modernising management of the state and administration have been pursued from the very beginning for bringing the various highly demanding economic as well as social challenges of an ongoing process of globalisation under control. In the course of these processes not only a re-positioning of the state as an ‘enabling authority’, but also moves towards a stronger competition-or even market -based type of management (so called NPM-approaches) have been made used off for driving public service delivery to the now needed higher levels of efficiency or effectiveness. Given this heavy reliance on either competition or market-based concepts there at least in principle should be ample prescriptions available for giving also the whole process of readjusting inherited management practices a fairly strong conceptual guidance.