Shaping Public Professionals’ Perceptions: Building Support for External Interventions With Professional Development Leadership

Public managers implement various types of external interventions, such as documentation requirements that hold public professionals accountable to legal protocols. Motivation crowding research finds that controlling perceptions of external interventions may reduce motivation and negatively influence performance. Thus, the way that managers build support for external interventions is crucial. This article investigates whether professional development leadership (PDL) is part of the answer, distinguishing between general PDL and intervention-specific PDL. Associations between nurses’ perceptions of documentation requirements and their managers’ exercise of PDL are analyzed in a multi-level dataset with 177 head nurses and 598 of their nurse employees at Danish public hospitals. Results show that PDL is significantly related to nurses’ supportive perceptions of documentation requirements. This finding is only robust across both manager and employee-reported PDL for intervention-specific PDL, suggesting that PDL is relevant for support-building efforts and that we would benefit from distinguishing between general and intervention-specific leadership.