Public Service Delivery in Hybrid Organisations: public management reform and horizontalisation as main challenges for public leaders

The public sector has been subject to some major movements the last 15 years. In public service delivery a trend called socialisation, leading to the displacement between public and private, is most crucial. A withdrawing government and privatization led to increased collaboration between public and private parties and made production, distribution and supply of services the responsibility of both public and private parties. Public administrators and managers are challenged to align their organisational with the changed practice. A renewed division of roles and tasks between government, society and market develops, and alignment of this new role with the organisation and embedding of the new tasks is needed. Especially in public service delivery, such as construction and IT, public organisations are increasingly depending on private parties to achieve their goals. In the context of public leadership this means that shaping the public role as well as shaping the public organisation is the current challenge. Yet, so far the field of research on public administration and public service delivery has failed to address these inter-organisational challenges of public clients in public service delivery. The paper presents the findings from a first explorative literature study into the meaning of public values in public administration looking from three perspectives; institutional logics, public organisation science and public value management. The aim of this paper is to improve the understanding of the new role of public organisations in public service delivery, the embeddedness of this new position in the organisation itself, and the meaning of this role and organisational change for public leadership. The topics from the different perspectives can be combined into two overarching domains that were found to both link public administration and public service delivery on inter-organisational level and give us implications for public leadership in the current public arena: public management reform and the flattening of public organisations. As this exploration of literature is part of a bigger research, we will end discussing the future research steps.