Matthew R. FairholmUniversity of South Dakota | USD
Matthew R. Fairholm
PhD
About
45
Publications
119,140
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631
Citations
Introduction
Matthew R. Fairholm currently works at the Department of Political Science, University of South Dakota. Matthew does research in Public Policy, Public Administration and Organizational Studies.
Additional affiliations
August 2002 - present
Position
- Professor (Full)
Description
- Research: public administration & leadership theory & practice; constitutional governance. Publishes in leadership & public administration journals. He coathored Understanding Leadership Perspectives (2009) and wrote Putting Your Values to Work (2013).
Education
August 1997 - May 2002
August 1990 - August 1993
Publications
Publications (45)
Public administrators need not only practical and intellectual permission to exercise leadership, but also a practical and intellectual understanding of what leadership actually is. Much has emerged in the public administration literature and practice about the need for and legitimacy of public managers exerting leadership in their work, complement...
Traditional management training stresses what could be called the impersonal aspects of organizational life. Managers come to see people as one part of a greater overall organizational system that they can create, control, and change as needed. People become assets to allocate and control. The more personal aspects of peoples' lives are ignored at...
The main question this article seeks to address is how the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) bureaucratic autonomy is affected by deep ideological divides over public lands management policy. Daniel Carpenter’s theory of bureaucratic autonomy serves to provide the definition and method for evaluating the research question. The case study identifies...
This article examines the organizational reputation of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) using Daniel Carpenter’s reputation and power theory as a theoretical and methodological base. Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) is utilized to guide and organize case selection, as it is the legal mandate behind BLM authority and represents the...
Purpose
Trust and culture are common themes in leadership literature and research. The purpose of this paper is it to describe an emergent model of trust-culture leadership from the comments of local government managers in the USA. The environment of local government requires a level of trust between government and citizens. Comments from local go...
The refounding movement emerged the same time as Leadership Studies. As leadership practices were conflated with management practices, much of what might be useful in the refounding in the literature on leadership was either (a) simply missed or (b) modestly addressed by these scholars. Any reasserting of the refounding should consider the lessons...
Real leadership asks leader and follower to deal with each other on a values basis, so a choice to follow is available. Though this may not be easy, it is essential.
This chapter brings together research on the dark side of leadership caused by hate and fear and then offer tactics leaders may use to counteract their negative impacts. It explores behavioral representations of each and how they impact the work environment. For instance, hate is often reflected in our organizations in terms of bullying or consiste...
The way management has been traditionally taught is linked to a management theory that dismisses the personal aspects of life. To better position managers in their organizations today, they need to embrace and apply a spiritual connotation to the work they do. By exploring how management training needs to change to include a mindset that accepts bo...
In today’s organizational climate it makes sense to focus on what is meant by leadership and management. “Leader" is a title an individual may have. It may connote someone who practices leadership or it may merely
connote the head person of a group, regardless of the functions and role he or she performs. In other words, leader and leadership do no...
As players in the social and interpersonal world, people have their own conceptions of leadership; in other words, “We know it when we see it.” While
many researchers recognize this, few study leadership with that notion in
mind.
The intention of this work is to review the major themes of Burns’ book, discuss the two concepts that are most often debated and studied (i.e. transactional and transforming leadership), and suggest that these two concepts are important mainly as they help to elucidate the real focus of the book -- a general theory of leadership that is inherently...
This article focuses on the leadership practices of local public administrators that display elements of spiritual leadership in the workplace. It explores empirical research about municipal managers that suggests organizational leadership based on the notion of someone’s spirit, rather than merely someone’s bundle of workplace skills and abilities...
It is good to remind ourselves that local government administrators are often put into a difficult position when councils, elected officials, residents, and courts interact during the making and implementing of local public policy. Our common forms of local government give definitive decision making to elected executives and legislators. Residents...
The direct result of the author's experience in teaching leadership and conducting management training sessions for professional organizations, this book describes four fundamental ideas that explain how and why people are compelled to follow: Values, Vision, Vector, and Voice. Together, these concepts form the essence of leadership and inform the...
This chapter argues that today’s society renders traditional management practice incomplete. To better position managers in their organizations, they need to embrace and apply a spiritual connotation to the work they do. The task set forth in this chapter is to explore how management education and training needs to change to include a managerial mi...
PhD programs in the United States are increasingly marked by the rising influence of market-oriented dynamics. As a case in point, one of the primary objectives of the new PhD program offered at the University of South Dakota is to deliver a doctoral program through a flexible—or hybrid—format that is accessible to nontraditional as well as traditi...
This paper attempts to uncover and explore the implications of the term and notion of “governance” as it may impact Public Administration’s attention to Constitutional frameworks and principles. Discussing and defining governance is not a new effort (Frederickson, 1997; Frederickson & Smith, 2003; Hill, 1991; Krahmann, 2003; Lowery, 1993; Peters &...
A B S T R A C T There is an increasing focus in today's organization on measuring results and calculating return on investment. Efforts of administrators today to control organizational endeavors are essential and generally aligned with current best practices. Control mechanisms, however, ultimately prove to be only part of the puzzle. Strategic pl...
There is an increasing focus in today's organization on measuring results and calculating return on investment. Efforts of administrators today to control organizational endeavors are essential and generally aligned with current best practices. Control mechanisms, however, ultimately prove to be only part of the puzzle. Strategic planning, encompas...
Strategic planning, an umbrella term used to include and summarize such activities as planning, performance measurement, program budgeting, and the like, has proven to be very useful but limited. It is a technical fix that gets at only part of the question of organizational effectiveness and only deals with some of the dilemmas organizations face....
There is no dearth of popular books on leadership, often extolling the virtues of charismatic, celebrity leaders or offering simplistic formulas for "inspiring the troops" to achieve "extraordinary results." However, empirical research and exploration of leadership and its many elements is in much less supply. Confronted by failures of leadership i...
Leadership is about change; but it is more useful to understand that change in three distinct ways, even three distinct opportunities, if we want to “do leadership” in any meaningful way. In so understanding change, we gain a better appreciation for leadership as something more than mere headship and we understand better that not all change, like l...
As leadership evolves from a topic of management interest into its own unique topic of study and practice, it has a natural place in MPA curricula. Professionals with MPAs usual enter public service as technical experts, but are then often called upon to fill management (or “leadership”) vacancies in organizations. They are looked to as people who...
When you think you are managing successfully, others may have different points of view that grow out of how they see and describe leadership success. Because managers’ descriptions of leadership might not agree with the public’s descriptions, reviewing some findings can help local managers get a better handle on the "leadership thing."
The way we look at leadership determines in many ways what we think leadership is. And how we approach leadership study influences us the same way. Taking a more holistic, philosophical approach to leadership research may offer us more encompassing and transcendent views of what leadership is as distinct from other social activities. This approach...
The Newtonian physics that formed the foundation of physical and social science for centuries is unwinding in the face of the new sciences. The principles of the new sciences shed needed light on the technologies of leadership in modern organizations. This paper links specific leadership technologies to four general principles taken from the new sc...
By concentrating on building leadership and management capacity in the middle ranks of the organization, government services will be enhanced and public trust increased. While this proposition makes intuitive sense, it is difficult to verify. However, the District of Columbia government offers an interesting case study in trying to achieve this goa...
New programs emerge, improved systems are developed, and teams and groups are continually refined in order to respond to new circumstances. But when agency heads plan formal, organization-wide change programs, success is often rare. Why is it that formal change efforts frequently do not achieve the intended results? It cannot simply be that organiz...
In today’s organizational climate it makes sense to focus on what is meant by leadership and management. “Leader" is a title an individual may have. It may connote someone who practices leadership or it may merely connote the head person of a group, regardless of the functions and role he or she performs. In other words, leader and leadership do no...
The leader’s role is a two-fold cultural and teaching enterprise: institutionalizing cultural principles in their organizations and then teaching followers to internalize these cultural principles in their actions. The specific features of an organization’s culture condition what leaders do and how they do it. However, leaders also condition the cu...
Newtonian physics formed the foundation of physical and social science for three centuries. However, the clockwork efficiency metaphor is unwinding in the face of the new science.The principles of the new science shed needed light on the technologies of leadership in modern organizations. This paper outlines four general principles taken from the n...
Projects
Project (1)
Abstract:
This work seeks to analyze the role played by informal work groups in the attainment of organizational goals and how organizational leaders should treat these groups. Many organizational leaders see informal work groups as threats instead of potential benefits, but this notion should be countered because these groups aim at not only benefiting its members but very often also the organization. Organizational leaders are encouraged to support and be a part of these groups because by doing so they will help to direct the objectives of such groups not to become hostile to the goals of the organization. “The Linking-Pin-Concept” of Rensis Likert will be used as an analytical tool to show how organizational leaders (managers) can effectively support informal work groups to become productive instruments of the organization. In the course of this study, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs will be addressed in relation to group members’ satisfaction and the attainment of organizational goals. The study will also look at the factors that led to the creation of informal work groups and traits that are common to such groups so as to enable managers to better understand what influences the creation of such groups and channel necessary resources required to cope with group members.
