The Role of Integrative Leadership in the Transformation Process of Public Services Delivery: From the Perspective of IS Strategy Triangle Theory

In the era of Government 2.0, the government should transform into a citizen-centric and service-oriented government. In the terms of public services delivery, more innovative IT-based methods are pursued. However, on the perspective of organizational management, leadership plays a major role in using IT to make public services delivery efficient. Therefore, this paper presents a conceptual framework for understanding how integrative leadership influence the transformation of IT-based public services delivery. From the perspective of IS strategy triangle theory, we define integrative leadership as bringing diverse leaderships strategy leadership, organization leadership and IT leadership in an organization together with a close-coupled association to accomplish the complex and public issue and archive the united strategic goal. The framework is illustrated with a case of a local government, Pingfang District of Harbin in China, a pilot unit of Smart City providing more convenient and effective public services under the guidance of the District Mayor, the Organization Department Minister and the Informatization Office Director that are responsible for the coordination of strategy formulation, organization restructuration and information construction respectively. The framework is, to our best knowledge, the first of their kind in the new research field of key component elements of intra-organizational integrative leadership and provides significant insights for future exploration.