The seventh article by Adare Mitiku, Annie Hondeghem and Steve Troupin provided an understanding on the leadership roles expected of managers in the Ethiopian Civil Service. This study was underlined by the concern that little attention has been given in the extant literature to how African public service is organized in its own contexts (Nkomo et al., 2015; Kuada, 2010), and especially, the smallness of the number of existing studies on Ethiopian public sector, which are mainly confined to issues related to reform. While acknowledging the existence of extensive literature on understanding the role of public sector leadership, Adare and colleagues shared Nkomo’s (2011) observation that these studies were predominantly conducted in Europe and the Americas; thus, raising arguments as to whether their deductions holds true for the public sector leaders operating in the African firm environment. Adare and colleagues’ therefore conceived administrative leadership as a practice strongly influenced by a much wider settings (Van Wart et al., 2015; Cox et al., 1994), which shapes an individual’s perceptual filter (Cox et al., 1994). Adare and colleagues supported this conception with the notion that transferability of management and leadership concepts and practices across nations are usually controversial (Hafsi and Farashahi, 2005), and the claims that western management and leadership models fit less in the context of developing countries (e.g. Sartorious et al., 2011; Jackson, 2004; Blunt and Jones, 1997; Blunt, 1978). Guided by the Q-methodological approach, which allows managers to conceptualize their definitions or preferences of leadership roles, Adare and colleagues obtained data from 51 managers working in Ethiopian Federal Civil Service organizations. Based on their analysis, they identified three distinct, but yet interrelated archetypes of managerial role preferences, which they classified as: change agents, affective leaders and result-oriented realists. Adare and colleagues concluded that though the ostensible echoes of each of these perspectives were professed, they were overlooked functions that are needed to be performed by leaders in their administrative practices.
In conclusion, the collection of papers in this special issue has provided us new insights, in terms of thematic learning and knowledge acquisition, that add to our understanding of the contemporary Afrocentric perspective on leadership and organizational development, especially, the dialogue of management activities that promote the relational, critical and constructionist perspectives on leadership and organizational development.
