A large number of empirical studies have shown a wide range of positive effects of transformational leadership, which is arguably the dominating leadership paradigm in the last two decades. In this study, we ask whether this type of leadership is as common in public as in private organizations. Through a survey, the leadership style of 2488 leaders in Norwegian organizations with more than ten employees was mapped out. Focus is set on whether the occurrence of transformational leadership varies according to an organization’s publicness. It is hypothesized that the effect of publicness on transformational leadership will be mediated through bureaucratization, centralization, professionalization, pro-social motivation and gender composition. The study controls for organization size and task, variables often missing in comparisons of public and private organizations. The main finding is that publicness has no direct effect on transformational leadership when controlling for main task, organizational size and the leader’s gender. However, it does affect transformational leadership indirectly through bureaucratization, professionalization and gender composition. Based on the findings, more general implications for comparing public and private organizations are discussed.

Points for practitioners

It is often claimed that leadership in the public sector is different from leadership in the private sector. This study shows that such a claim is an oversimplification. First, there should be an awareness that leadership does not take place only in the private or public sector, but also in a myriad of hybrids between the public and the private sectors. Second, various challenges for leaders may be more strongly linked to basic features such as task and organizational size, rather than to whether an organization is public or private.