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Montgomery Van Wart is professor
of public administration at California State
University, San Bernardino. His work on
leadership includes the award-winning
book Dynamics of Leadership in Public
Service, as well as Leadership in Public
Organizations and The Business of
Leadership: An Introduction (with
Karen Dill Bowerman). His current research
focuses on examining leadership in different
cultural perspectives as well as looking
at global trends in leadership in both the
public and private sectors.
E-mail: mvanwart@csusb.edu
454 Public Administration Review • May | june 2012
Book Reviews
Public Administration Review,
Vol. 72, Iss. 3, pp. 454–458. © 2012 by
The American Society for Public Administration.
DOI: 10.111/j.1540-6210.2012.02576.x.
Sonia M. Ospina and Rogan Kersh, Editors
Montgomery Van Wart
California State University, San Bernardino
e Role of Trust in Leadership
Terry Newell, Grant Reeher, and Peter Ronayne, eds.,
e Trusted Leader: Building the Relationships
at Make Government Work, 2nd ed. (Washing-
ton, DC: CQ Press, 2012). 448 pp. $45.00 (paper),
ISBN: 9781608712762.
John Brehm and Scott Gates, Teaching, Tasks, and
Trust: Functions of the Public Executive (New
York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008; released as
e-book, 2011). 182 pp. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN:
9780871540669; $24.95 (e-book and paper),
ISBN: 9780871540355.
While the task of leaders is indeed complex
and varied (Van Wart 2011), it is good to
periodically remind ourselves of the most
basic elements. Of course, leaders need competence;
for example, they need a series of managerial and
executive competencies ranging from basic inter-
personal and analytic skills to operational expertise,
organizational vision, and the wisdom that is achieved
by experience. But when asking followers what is the
most important element, no matter whether they are
inside or outside the organization, it is generally that
the leader is trustworthy. After all, what good is com-
petence if the leader is going in the wrong direction
or is more interested in self-aggrandizement of some
sort?
e two books examined here come at this issue from
very diff erent perspectives. e Trusted Leader: Build-
ing the Relationships at Make Government Work by
Terry Newell, Grant Reeher, and Peter Ronayne uses a
values-based leadership approach. is approach tends
to be favored by those in public administration and its
related disciplines, trainers, as well as many who are
interested in social change based on ethics, participa-
tion, and engagement. On the other hand, Teaching,
Tasks, and Trust: Functions of the Public Executive by
John Brehm and Scott Gates looks at leadership at the
supervisory level through the lens of principal–agent
theory. is approach tends to be favored by those in
political science and economics with a rational choice
and theory of the fi rm perspective. e two sets of
authors come at the same issue—the role of trust in
government—from nearly antithetical starting points,
and in the end, they come to some similar conclusions
about its importance.
e paths are as important, if not more important,
to readers as the fi nal points in the case of these two
books. Because e Trusted Leader essentially takes the
thesis that trust in government is important as an arti-
cle of faith, it spends little time making the argument
and the bulk of the time explaining how to accom-
plish trust in a variety of settings. Because economists
and political scientists are skeptical of normative and/
or vague concepts such as trust, they tend to want
proof that applied, micro-level solutions are as impor-
tant as the policy solutions that they are more likely
to advocate (e.g., shrink government, exercise contract
discretion, regulate the bureaucracy as much as pos-
sible, use tried and tools such as economic incentives,
etc.). On the other hand, the slimmer Teaching, Tasks,
and Trust uses all of its space making its case that
nonincentivized trust is vital. To exaggerate for clarity,
the path is more important than the destination in the
fi rst book, and the destination is all that matters in
the second.
e Trusted Leader was fi rst published in 2008 by
a core of people who have worked together at the
Federal Executive Institute. For those familiar with
the fi rst edition, the second edition adds two chapters
(on eff ective conversations and diversity) and cuts
one (a commentary by a state-level appointee). e
authors have added useful head notes and updated all
of the chapters to refl ect events since the fi rst edition.
e fi rst edition was good, but the second edition is
signifi cantly better.
Chapter 1 establishes the basic argument that trust in
government is important, but that it is in a long phase
of decline. It disaggregates trust in the political and
administrative branches, discusses the vicious cycle
of declining trust no matter what the original source,
Book Reviews 455
tive. It involves knowing and appreciating the perspec-
tives of many stakeholders, simultaneously emphasiz-
ing a strong personal ethical core and a sensitivity
to the constraints of democracy and public agency
practices and resources. It concludes by noting that
the job of the government leader is indeed very hard
and often complex. But that is what it is, and govern-
ment leaders must strive to do the best that they can.
In sum, e Trusted Leader is well written and has a
clear applied focus. It is not antitheoretical, as some
how-to books are, even though the theory is poorly
referenced normative theory, nor syrupy, as some
books with an applied ethical base sometimes are; it
simply has a pragmatic tone. Every content-oriented
chapter has concrete strategies and recommendations.
e fl ow of the book, from self-awareness to govern-
ance in a global world, works well. While it could
plausibly function as a primary text in classes on lead-
ership or ethics, it is more likely a powerful compan-
ion text. It could also be used as an auxiliary text in
an introductory survey class or management class. It is
the type of book that would be very popular with stu-
dents or trainees. I think it is the best book on applied
ethics that I have ever read. Its weaknesses are quite
modest. It is exclusively federal in focus and overuses
materials from the authors’ experiences at the Federal
Executive Institute. Because of the generic strategies
and concrete recommendations, the text could be used
with students in a program focused on local govern-
ment without apology. Also, more critically, the laud-
able values-based leadership framework is adequate for
the book, but it is more likely to be complemented by
texts with a broader theoretical scope in courses unless
it is primarily an applied class. For example, this book
would be an excellent supplement to a standard survey
textbook in either leadership or ethics, where a range
of theories and perspectives are introduced.
John Brehm and Scott Gates, the authors of Teach-
ing, Tasks, and Trust: Functions of the Public Executive,
have written a scholarly analysis of transactional and
supervisory-level leadership using an expanded prin-
cipal–agent argument. e central argument of the
book is that supervisors’ principle function in training
is to aid “their subordinates about what is allowed
and what is not; in exchange, the subordinates only
trust their supervisors when that supervisor shields the
subordinates from intrusions by others; in doing so,
the supervisor gains more leeway to assign tasks” (14).
After the introductory chapter sets up the problem
of controlling agents in ambiguous public sector set-
tings, the next two chapters provide evidence on the
importance of clearly defi ning job and role boundaries
for public sector workers and the “futility” of teach-
ing public service motivation (to those who were not
selected with it). Chapters 4–7 use diff erent data sets
to support the argument that the management (by
principals) of shirking of the unwanted, unpleasant, or
and establishes relationships based on trust as the
critical connection internally (as a performing system)
and externally (social capital).
e second chapter explains values-based leader-
ship from the authors’ perspective. ey point to the
competition of values that public service leaders at
all levels must navigate when constitutional, citizen,
organizational, professional, and personal values
confl ict. ey also point out fi ve skills that are neces-
sary in values-based leadership: integrity, listening,
tolerating dissent, involving others, and making moral
decisions. Values-based leadership has connections in
the leadership literature with servant leadership (e.g.,
Greenleaf 1977), authentic leadership (e.g., Avolio
2005), and transforming leadership (e.g., Burns
1978). It is also related to the relational leadership
theory school (e.g., Uhl-Bien 2006). It has numerous
public administration echoes as well, from leaders as
virtuous and dutiful (e.g., Aristotle and Kant, to the
founding fathers emphasizing character, to the public
service motivation proponents of today). A classic ex-
ample of a public sector version of values-based lead-
ership (via the vehicle of a strong professional culture)
might be Herbert Kaufman’s e Forest Ranger (1960);
a more contemporary example is Donald Phillips and
James Loy’s Character in Action: e U.S. Coast Guard
on Leadership (2005).
e second section looks at strategies for building
trust within government agencies. Leaders start by un-
derstanding themselves and becoming articulate about
one’s own values (chapter 2). e strategies that are
helpful to have eff ective conversations—e.g., deep lis-
tening—are the focus of the third chapter. e fourth
chapter is devoted to coaching, and it has a wonderful
subsection on diff erent types of intelligence. Team
skills are the focus of next chapter. e sixth and fi nal
chapter in this section focuses on high-performance
organizations; this discussion emphasizes the impor-
tance of trust in defi ning mission, standards, and the
shared culture that high performance requires.
e third part of the book focuses on building rela-
tionships across organizational boundaries. It starts
with diversity as an ethical imperative and manage-
rial opportunity. Various types of collaboration are
discussed in the following chapters: interagency,
career/political appointees, and executive/legislative
branches. A chapter on engineering experiences that
build trust provides an overall template for collabora-
tion. Two fi nal chapters look at the role of trust when
harnessing technology for e-governance and building
trust in the global arena. All of these chapters have
concrete recommendations that practitioners and
students would readily understand.
e fi nal chapter discusses the role of the government
leader today from a values-based leadership perspec-
456 Public Administration Review • May | June 2012
information to observe subordinate (agent) behavior.
Supervisors in production agencies have a large ad-
vantage because the products are fewer, standards are
more clearly defi ned, and the management function
is more easily measured. When public agencies have
a production mode, such as cutting social security
checks or providing garage collection, effi ciency is
generally high. However, most public organizations
are professional in nature (craft agencies as defi ned by
Brehm and Gates), which means that the outcomes
are multiple, complex, and sometimes almost impos-
sible to fully measure, as seen in social and police
work.
ird, public agencies have some critical limitations
in the tools available as incentives and disincen-
tives over their private sector counterparts. Coercive
tools such as demotion and fi ring exist, but they are
generally highly bounded by procedural protections
that make marginal shirking and passive-aggressive
sabotage almost impossible to eliminate unilaterally.
Reward tools are also largely limited to promotions
and recognition.
Brehm and Gates advocate expanding the principal–
agent model. To be sure, this has been done elsewhere
in the literature (Deming 1986; Eisenstadt 1989).
eir theoretical basis is game theory. ey assert that
cooperative game models show the importance of
trust in multiple iteration situations in which the ben-
efi ts are shared. is trust can be acquired from sev-
eral supervisory emphases. Supervisors must reinforce
prosocial behavior and work to increase role clarity.
is training is important not only for new employees
but also for continuing employees. Supervisors also
build trust by shielding subordinates from the intru-
sion of others when those others confuse objectives
or try to divert results for special-interest ends. is
increased trust means that supervisors have more
ability to assign tasks as needed, as well as to ensure
that less desired tasks (e.g., police paperwork) are not
neglected. Ultimately in this model, agents are more
controlled by their professionalism than by hierarchi-
cal supervision. Brehm and Gates do not abandon
the coercive or more baldly transactional economic
model; they simply assert that the alternative (also
known as professional and/or human relations) model
should be the primary model.
How does this comport with traditional transactional
leadership approaches—grid theory, situational
leadership, path-goal theory, leader member exchange,
and normative decision theory—and their policy
recommendations? Blake and Mouton’s grid theory
(1964) recommends a balanced task–people approach
that they call the “team management” approach;
Brehm and Gates’s approach, which grafts a human
relations perspective on hard-nosed principal–agent
theory, is highly similar. Hersey and Blanchard’s situ-
challenging parts of tasks is critical, and that supervi-
sors can improve compliance and organizational pro-
ductivity by protecting employees from inappropriate
intrusions. In other words, why do diffi cult things
if role clarity is not high? e fi nal chapter sums up
the argument, noting that traditional principal–agent
theory would not include trust of supervisors as an
important element in handling the “agent problem,”
more fully explained later.
Principal–agent theory asks the question, how do you
get employees to perform on the right mix of tasks
and to stay “on task” from an organizational perspec-
tive? e classical formulation of the answer allows a
relatively narrow perspective, resulting in what Brehm
and Gates refer to as the coercive approach. First, you
carefully select employees in the fi rst place for both
skills and temperament. en, you control employees
as much as possible to encourage working (on task),
discourage shirking (e.g., slothfulness or diverting
time to personal interests), and root out sabotage.
Strategies can include (1) monitoring more carefully
(e.g., cameras, electronic surveillance, work audits,
tardiness reporting), (2) measuring performance, and
(3) warning, demoting, and fi ring employees. Finally,
you pay according to output. Methods here might
include some that are diffi cult to use in the public
sector, such as piece rates, profi t sharing, bonuses,
effi ciency wages, deferred compensation, and pay-for-
performance management contracts. More possible
and more widely used are promotional opportuni-
ties, nonfi nancial incentives such as recognition, and
outsourcing when it is more effi cient and eff ective to
do so.
e challenges of implementing classical princi-
pal–agent theory are threefold, according to the
authors. First, there is the ambiguity problem, which
is particularly acute in the public sector. Just what
is the mission of the organization, what is the best
organizational structure to address these multiple
functional requirements, and how do you make sure
that street-level bureaucrats have suffi cient role clarity
so that they are not constantly asking for advice and
looking over their shoulders for fear of being second-
guessed? For example, to what degree is effi ciency
more or less important in relation to eff ectiveness or
due process concerns? is makes the selection of
employees, monitoring, and pay according to output
more challenging because the task array is complex
and the values are diverse.
Second, all organizations have resource constraints,
and rarely more so than public agencies, which always
have more responsibilities than wherewithal. In
particular, supervisory time to carry out monitoring
systems in complex professional settings is highly cir-
cumscribed. In conjunction with this, principal–agent
theory is concerned with the limits of managerial
Book Reviews 457
one-best-method approaches (e.g., Taylorism and its
extreme contemporary rational choice cousins) and
excessive reliance on the trait approach in selection.
Finally, I was appreciative of the dispassionate review
of public sector challenges and quiet acknowledgment
of diffi culty and importance of the job of managing in
the public sector.
ere are some considerable weaknesses, too. As
mentioned, this is a book for scholars and researchers,
not for practitioners. Its language is too dense and its
nomenclature too saturated in the language of prin-
cipal–agent and other theories such as theory of the
fi rm and transaction theory for lay readers. Second,
although the Brehm–Gates model is expanded to
include trust, it does so by game theory, and thus it
is still in the grips of a relatively pure form of rational
choice. Goodness, inherent virtue, compassion all
become by-products of selfi sh rational behavior. Hu-
mane, civic, and democratic values of individuals (the
stuff of ethics) are simply empirical elements in a sea
of non-normative data. Finally, although I give the
authors credit for fi nding data sets to support their
positions, those data sets are sometimes odd, very
old, and ultimately struck me as poorly amalgamated.
For example, integrating data from a 1977 police
services study, Offi ce of Personnel Management sur-
veys, a 2000 survey of North Carolina social workers,
and theoretical computer simulation modeling to
tease out diff erent elements of their model becomes
awkward, feels like a patchwork of data rather than a
cohesive study, and introduces its own leap of faith.
My fi nal quibble is about their subtitle, “Functions
of the Public Executive.” I understand and appreciate
that they are paying homage to Chester Barnard and
his book Functions of the Executive (1938). Barnard
warned against what Brehm and Gates call the
coercive model and anticipated the concerns of the
human relations school. Nonetheless, their approach
is not really about executives but about lower-level
managers, especially those in professional agencies.
So while the title is descriptive, the subtitle appears
anything but apt, as they self-consciously focus on
supervisors.
In conclusion, the two books on leadership and trust
come at the topic from very diff erent directions in
order to accomplish two diff erent goals. Other than
agreeing on the importance and centrality of trust for
leadership, they diverge on almost everything else.
Teaching, Tasks and Trust seeks to expand princi-
pal–agent theory using a variety of data sets and a
sophisticated statistical methodology in order to show
how important trust accrued from supervisory protec-
tion of subordinates is to the performance of good
public sector organizations. ere is little pragmatic
advice to be gleaned. It is an important contribution
to the scholarly debate, but it will have little cachet
with practitioners. e Trusted Leader has a lot to
ational leadership theory (1969) emphasizes observa-
tion, training (especially role clarity), and supervisor-
centered job and organizational acculturation; again,
the recommendations from their empirical analysis
are highly complementary. House’s path-goal theory
(1971) argues that leaders need to fi nd out what em-
ployees need and want to do their jobs in order to fur-
nish it. While Teaching, Tasks, and Trust complements
path goal theory, the authors’ concept is articulated
in more universalistic terms and is not operational-
ized as tightly in terms of the task–leadership fi t. e
important message in leader–member exchange or
LMX theory (Graen and Uhl-Bien 1995) is not creat-
ing “out” groups to the extent possible. Brehm and
Gates approach the issue diff erently, looking at group
conformity (“solidary attachments”) narrowly as a
supervisory reality. eir view is consciously dyadic,
whereas LMX theory pays much more attention to
group dynamics. Normative decision theory (Vroom
and Jago 1988) focuses on the importance of analyz-
ing situations in great detail to understand the degree
of inclusion and delegation that is optimal in deci-
sion making. Brehm and Gates’s fi ndings are more
universalistic and less sensitive to decision making
prescriptions. All in all, Brehm and Gates’s model is in
alignment with other transactional perspectives.
What, then, are the strengths of the research of
Brehm and Gates? First, revisiting the contributions
of transactional leadership of the 1960s through the
1980s from the more contemporary principal–agent
perspective is useful. e conscious focus on the
transactional, supervisory level is thoroughly wel-
comed. While transformational, ethical, and other
approaches are all important, transactional leadership
is a fundamental building block in organizations that
deserves attention in its own right. It has received less
attention of late than it should as the staple of our
organizational existence. Second, in using princi-
pal–agent theory, Brehm and Gates avoid a simplistic
econometric approach that strips out not only the
humanity of the management, but also the important
realities that surround professionalism and organiza-
tional integrity. By using cooperative game theory (in
order to maximize personal utility), they introduce the
noneconometric notion of trust, which is so central
in the management and leadership literatures. ird,
they use large data sets from a variety of sources to
provide empirical modeling opportunities. us, they
are looking at the real massed stated preferences of
individuals in making their conclusions. Fourth, their
references to the classical management literature (e.g.,
Follett 1996; Taylor 1911) and political economy
(Heclo 1977; Simon 1947) are well integrated. Fifth,
there is an avoidance of simplistic answers—in par-
ticular, abandoning the coercive approach altogether,
which realistically is an element of management, from
salary negotiations to the enforcement of rules and
laws. ey essentially repudiate excessive reliance on
458 Public Administration Review • May | June 2012
a Multi-Level Multi-Domain Approach. Leadership Quarterly
6(2): 219–47.
Greenleaf, Robert K. 1977. Servant Leadership: A Journey into the
Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness. New York: Paulist
Press.
Heclo, Hugh. 1977. A Government of Strangers: Executive Politics in
Washington. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Hersey, Paul, and Kenneth H. Blanchard. 1969. Life Cycle eory
of Leadership. Training and Development Journal 23(1): 26–34.
House, R. J. 1971. A Path-Goal eory of Leadership Eff ectiveness.
Administrative Science Quarterly 16(3): 321–39.
Kaufman, Herbert. 1960. e Forest Ranger: A Study in Administra-
tive Behavior. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Phillips, Donald T., with James M. Loy. 2003. Character in Action:
e U.S. Coast Guard on Leadership. Annapolis, MD: Naval
Institute Press.
Simon, Herbert A. 1947. Administrative Behavior: A Study of
Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization. New
York: Macmillan.
Taylor, Frederick W. 1911. Principles of Scientifi c Management. New
York: Harper & Row.
Uhl-Bien, Mary. 2006. Relational Leadership eory: Exploring
the Social Processes of Leadership and Organizing. Leadership
Quarterly 17(6): 654–76.
Van Wart, Montgomery. 2011. Dynamics of Leadership in Public
Service: eory and Practice. 2nd ed. Armonk, NY: M. E.
Sharpe.
Vroom, Victor H., and Arthur G. Jago. 1988. e New Leadership:
Managing Participation in Organizations. Englewood Cliff s,
NJ: Prentice Hall.
share about management, leadership, and the concrete
strategies in gaining trust in a variety of settings. Its
theoretical framework is explicit, but there is no real
eff ort (by design) to provide a signifi cant literature
review. When complemented by instructor resources,
however, e Trusted Leader is likely to be one of the
most valuable, organized, and deeply insightful books
to come along for some time.
References
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Deming, W. Edwards. 1986. Out of the Crisis. Cambridge, MA:
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