Bricolage in bureaucracies: public leadership and bricolage behaviour in turbulent situations

Public employees increasingly face turbulent challenges in which principles such as foresight, planning, and consensus-seeking fall short. We examine bricolage as a robust governance strategy and conceptualize turbulence as a contextual moderator of the relationship between public leadership and bricolage behaviour. Based on survey data from 368 German public employees, the findings suggest that bricolage is less practiced under turbulent conditions. While rule-following leadership, contrary to expectations, becomes even more strongly and positively related to bricolage behaviour as conditions grow more turbulent, the positive association between accountability leadership and bricolage behaviour weakens substantially. Surprisingly, network governance leadership does not gain in importance. This study contributes to public administration research by further conceptualizing and exploring bricolage as a micro-level behavioural capacity in response to turbulence, by operationalizing turbulence as a graded situational stressor, and by demonstrating that turbulent contexts constitute a critical boundary condition for the exercise of public leadership.