Over the last few decades, research has been focused on assessing organization’s ability to adapt to the changing global environment. For organizations to be successful, leaders must be able to facilitate appropriate relationships with their workgroups. The Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) theory provides insight to how these relationships affect outcomes. In the changing environment, the optimal outcome that organizations seek is linked to elevated levels of creativity and innovation. But, what if the push for creativity has a dark side? The purpose of this paper is to explore transformational leadership in the public sector and its application to organizational change by promoting employee creativity and innovation. In addition, this paper seeks to explore the dark side, or negative implications of organizational change orchestrated by creativity and innovation. The research questions for this paper are, what characteristics and behaviors of leaders have been observed in encouraging organizational change? What role does the relationship between leader and employee play in orchestrating change in organizational culture that encourages creativity and innovation? The authors argue that the personality traits of transformational leaders can be harmful to organizations.

This article describes the pedagogical experiences developed in the elective course "Body and Public Policies" of the Undergraduate Course in Public Policy Management at the University of Brasília, Brazil. Through this discipline, we seek to carry out pedagogical activities that provide the training of public managers who act as leaders in the dissemination of human rights and sustainability through active methodologies, based on theoretical discussions, group dynamics and theatrical games. The elective course was created with the aim of promoting the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda through teaching and university extension actions. To this end, a discussion based on modern and contemporary readings about the relationships between the body and politics, notably in bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Ramón Grosfoguel, Richard Sennett, among other texts, produced by indigenous and quilombola thinkers.

The course program includes the following themes: 1. Body and production of knowledge in Public Policies; 2. Contributions of social theory, in the sociological, political and epistemological dimensions, to understand embodiment in the management of public policies; 3. Production of knowledge and practices embodied according to knowledge situated and located in the global geopolitics and sustainable development; 4. Social markers (gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, generation, nationality, disability) in the production of public policies and management practices; 5. The body and provision of public services: analysis and evaluation methodologies; 6. From epistemology to university extension: research practices and on-site intervention in the dissemination of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Each unit of the teaching plan involves both a theoretical foundation, developed with the support of active methodologies, and extension practices. In the first unit, entitled "The body in social theory", extension practices are proposed to be the production of actions to disseminate knowledge about the relationship between the body, politics and public management, such as podcast episodes, cards for social networks and short videos to social media. In the second unit, called "The body in global geopolitics and local dynamics: possibilities for disseminating the 2030 Agenda", extension practices such as rounds of conversations with key actors (intellectuals, activists, artists) are carried out. In the last unit, called " The place of the body in public management", extension practices include visits to government agencies; workshops for the production and application of action research instruments; workshops on textual and image production in public policies and theatrical productions.

The discipline aims to promote analytical thinking, critical and reflective contribute to the construction of theoretical and practical foundations for carrying out course completion work; dissemination of the Sustainable Development Goals Classes are carried out using a set of methodologies, such as “problem-based learning” and. the “inverted classroom”, on the basis that in democratic societies public problems are constructed in contexts of social and embodied controversies.

Co-author: Catalin Vrabie, SNSPA Bucharest, email: catalin.vrabie@snspa.ro

There are already more than eight decades since scholars in politics and economics, lawyers, and philosophers have ground the study of public administration and argued in favor of its enduring identity crisis (Gulick and Urwick 1937; Simon 1946; Dahl 1947; Waldo 1948 and 1968; Mosher 1975; Ostrom 1989 and 1991; Raadschelders 2008 and 2011a; Rosenbloom 2013; Rhodes 2016). In the late forties, R. Dahl raised questions about the difficulty of constructing a science of public administration that was plagued by problems of values, behavior, and culture (Dahl 1947; Wright 2015), while D. Waldo spoke of an academic “sub-discipline” not meeting the challenge of providing a base of ideas, education, and skills “when government is called upon to perform prodigies of administration unparalleled in history” (Waldo 1948:443). In the seventies, V. Ostrom called for a new understanding of government to help public administration overcome its intellectual crisis (Ostrom 1974), while D. Waldo asked rhetorically, whether by becoming “everything in general”, public administration become “nothing in particular” (Waldo 1975:197).

This effervescent debate could be summarized in four intellectual traditions to the study of and discourse about government (Raadschelders 2008:928-929). In a chronological sequence, these were: the study for the development of practical wisdom (D. Waldo, R.A.W. Rhodes), practical experience (L.H. Gulick), scientific knowledge (H. Simon), and (eventually), the study of relativist perspectives or the postmodernism (R.C. Box, D.J. Farmer) (Raadschelders, 2005: 608).

This article builds on the literature dedicated to the development of public administration education and investigates the contexts leading to connecting theory and practice, balancing practical wisdom and experience with scientific knowledge and postmodernism, in the interest of developing skills relevant to “the real world” of public administration today. In doing so, it compares the Romanian expectations of public administration academics with those of the practitioners and suggests that a blended approach to teaching public administration, with more emphasis on applied research and development of soft, transversal skills is beneficial to preparing more adaptable and autonomous (future) civil servants. Two main questions are formulated: 1) what is the desired profile of a civil servant working in public administration in Romania? and 2) how are public administration academic programs accommodating it?

This article draws from several sources. Firstly, international, peer-reviewed reports (such as those drafted by SIGMA-OECD or The World Bank Group) provided substantial assistance in decrypting some of the general principles of civil service, as well as in underlining the main concerns of the national government and the European Union institutions for the process of reforming the public administration system in Romania. Additionally, the human resource management literature, as well as the research on competence-driven curricula provided the arguments for considering blended learning a possible tool for a more hands-on and “real-world” orientated public administration education.

Secondly, we used the Romanian legislation relevant to contractual employment in public administration, civil service career, organization of higher-education system, design of internship programs, as well as all connected regulations to these main areas of interest. Thirdly, to compile the desired profile of a civil servant working in public administration in Romania, we analyzed the updated standards for several occupations included in the general domain entitled “administration and public services”. Fourthly, the webpage of the National Agency of Civil Servants and that of the national contest for civil servants facilitated the collection of important data pertinent to the content of the recruitment tests and the expectations the system lays forward to its candidates. Two focus groups with professionals from central and local public administration were organized with the aim of better understanding the expectations at the “grassroots”.

Finally, to assess the profile of the Romanian public administration graduate, we analyzed the competencies the universities listed as outcomes of their bachelor programs as well as the syllabi of the bachelor programs on public administration. Thirty programs were investigated, of those available in the National Registry of Qualifications in Romanian Higher Education.

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