Prof Wang Weijian Illuminates Leadership, Accountability and Performance for the “Collaborative Research Postgraduate Students' Seminar Series”
The School of Graduate Studies of Lingnan University and The Education University of Hong Kong co-hosted the "Collaborative Research Postgraduate Students' Seminar Series" in the 2024/25 academic year. The inaugural online seminar for Term 2, held on 4 March 2025, featured a compelling presentation by Prof Wang Weijian from the University of Missouri on “Do Public Leaders Have a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ Card? Accountability, Performance Signals, and Perceived Leadership”. The seminar attracted more than 100 online participants, including postgraduate students and academics from various institutions.
Prof Wang is an Associate Professor at the Truman School of Government and Public Affairs. His research interests lie in performance management, interorganisational collaboration, and personnel management. Prof Wang has published multiple articles in leading public administration and policy journals, such as the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and Public Administration Review. He won the Herbert Kaufman Best Paper Award from the Public Administration Section of the American Political Science Association in 2024.
In this seminar, Prof Wang highlighted the importance of understanding employees’ perceptions of leadership and the factors that influence these perceptions. He discussed how employees attribute performance outcomes to leaders, introducing two perspectives: romanticising or demonising leadership. The research gap regarding the mechanisms influencing leadership perception in public organisations was emphasised. Since most causal evidence published comes from experiments, the generalisability of these findings to real-world settings has been questioned.
Prof Wang then introduced a quasi-experimental study using a regression discontinuity design to examine the effect of performance grades on employees’ perceptions of leadership in New York City public schools. The study focused on elementary schools, which constitute the largest group among New York City’s school types, and collected 2,278 elementary school-year observations to provide greater statistical power.
Prof Wang shared study results showing that high-performance signals significantly improved employees’ perceptions of leadership effectiveness. Interestingly, receiving a poor performance grade did not have the same impact—poor performance did not cause a widespread decline in perceived leadership effectiveness. The findings suggest that leaders in public organisations are praised for high performance but are not penalised for poor performance. Prof Wang further explored possible explanations for this dynamic, such as leader prototypicality and the prevalence of political interference or goal ambiguity in public organisations.
In conclusion, Prof Wang discussed how performance influences accountability and leadership perception in public organisations. He suggested that future studies might explore how performance feedback affects employee attitudes and behaviours, particularly from a comparative perspective. At the end of the seminar, Prof Wang led a fruitful Q&A session with participants, discussing publication experiences and skills for conducting qualitative studies.
The “Collaborative Research Postgraduate Students' Seminar Series” will continue throughout March to June 2025.
About the Collaborative Research Postgraduate Students' Seminar Series
The collaborative seminar series aims to provide a platform for research postgraduate students to share their work, engage in insightful discussions, and foster interdisciplinary collaborations across the two universities. By bringing together scholars and students from different backgrounds, the series encourages the exchange of ideas and the advancement of knowledge in key research areas. Since this semester, the seminar series is also supported by the Section on Chinese Public Administration (SCPA) of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA).
