Gender Still Matters and Impacts on Public Value and Innovation and the Public Reform Process

Abstract At present, in England there is little alignment between innovative work and government accountability frameworks. Innovation rarely catches on if it is driven from the top or through a system’s approach to change; its flow depends on networking and active relationships, which take time, are less predictable yet provide a much stronger anchor for sustainable institutional reform. In earlier stages of reform the divide was between those leaders who are actively driving change and those were more passive in their leadership role. Most public sector executives are now actively concerned with ‘public value ’ and transforming their organizations rather than merely making them more efficient. Keywords collaborative leadership, gender, innovation and public sector transformation Social outcomes and impact are the object of reform but they are too often delivered through business models that focus on productivity and system’s efficiency at the expense of innovation. There is real tension between leaders who seek to render existing systems more efficient and those adaptive or transforming leaders who view change and transformation as dynamic processes that demand staff engage-ment, given momentum by the public value agenda. While the majority of public sector managers and leaders adopt both transactional and transformational ways of working, most continue to have a preference for ‘planning and control ’ rather than for ‘collaborative practice’, which is a problem for government when the latter is the more congenial to innovation (Bentley, 2007). Until recently public secto