Impact of leadership theories on the perception of human resource management: A research conducted on human resource managers in local governments

Transition from personnel administration to human resource management (HRM) in public administration and specifically in local governments started in the beginnings of the 1980s. HRM functions adopted by metropolitan municipalities in which this thesis focuses on after the local government reforms of the 2004 and 2005 in Turkey. The aim of this study is to examine how human resource managers' types of leadership effect their HRM perception and their organization's transition to HRM in practice and reveal which HRM functions are effectively implemented in municipalities. For our analysis, we addressed transactional and transformational leadership as a prominent typology in the literature. Depending on the complexity of the aim of this study, we designed a mixed method research depending on both quantitative and qualitative methods. The research process separated into two stages due to the explanatory sequential mixed design. In the quantitative research stage, we conducted Multiple Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) to both HR managers and HR experts working in the departments of HRM in metropolitan municipalities to find out their types of leadership. After evaluating the data and results of the first stage, we designed a qualitative research. A questionnaire composed of open-ended questions is delivered to HR managers to gather information about their HR perception and how effective HRM applications function in their organization. The data gathered from the second stage is analyzed through qualitative content analysis method. This thesis concluded that transformational leadership plays an important role upon HRM perception of the HR managers and their organization's transition to HRM as a facilitating factor in metropolitan municipalities in Turkey. However, we have also explored that this argument does not address a regular pattern in that various factors affect the perception of HR managers, transition of their organization to HRM and implementation of HRM functions effectively in municipalities including political interventions, legal regulations, and conventional implementations. We argue that transitional leadership might also be adopted in various cases for improving the perception of HR managers and ensuring the transition of their municipalities into HRM. In this context, we concluded our study by offering certain policy recommendation for metropolitan municipalities.