Understanding transversal leadership in public organizations: conceptualization and development of a measurement scale

Public value creation often relies on collective efforts across organizational jurisdictions with leadership playing a central role. However, concepts and measures for understanding whether and how public leaders can influence their own employees to engage in behaviours that support work across organizational boundaries are lacking. As response, the authors propose transversal leadership, which refers to a leader’s attempts to direct, align, and commit staff towards collective efforts with actors outside their own managerial jurisdiction, and develop a useful, valid, and reliable measurement scale that discriminates from existing leadership measures and correlates with expected outcomes.