University of Twente Student Theses

Login

Consequences of the environmental legislation on the development of behavior, competences and leadership at municipalities

Jonker, E.H. (2017) Consequences of the environmental legislation on the development of behavior, competences and leadership at municipalities.

[img] PDF
835kB
Abstract:In the past period, research has been conducted into the impact of environmental legislation on the development of competences and leadership style among employees within municipalities. The reason for this study is that municipalities must match the current processes to the space that is provided by the environmental legislation. With the introduction of the environmental legislation, the current environmental legislation of 26 laws with 4700 articles, 117 orders in council and 120 ministerial laws are put into one environmental legislation with 349 articles, 4 orders in council and 10 ministerial regulations (VNG, 2015). Interviews have been conducted with best practice municipalities and the municipality Ooststellingwerf. The questions of the interviews are based on the EFQM model combined with the A3 methodology (Doeleman, 2013). From the results of this study it can be concluded that a change assignment of behavior and the development of competences and a different style of leadership is unavoidable. Testing of standards is no longer possible. The pursuit of more flexibility with environmental legislation gets a different form by creating opportunities to deviate from generally applicable rules. The municipality must be able to cope with tensions between custom and flexibility. The ability to deviate from set standards by means of, for example, flexibility instruments allows for negotiation between municipalities and citizens and will change the decision-making process within municipalities. This calls for another form of decision making in which intuition will play an important role. The change task for municipal actors is a major challenge for municipalities at both the administrative and the civil level. Working with the environmental legislation asks for different behavior and change in the way of thinking of mayors, aldermans and civil servants, they have to leave their comfort-zone. Next to that, specialists take place and there is a high need for generalist that are able to switch between the different domains of the municipality. To work integral and collaborate between the different departments the organizational structure must change. To realize this change, municipalities want to invest in the frontside of the process where the municipalities and the citizens meet and where there is room for negotiation and decision making about initiatives. The different employees of the municipality are going to work in project teams. Civil servants must learn to handle customized solutions and handle space. In the process of negotiation, they must learn to listen to the vision and ideas of citizens. Civil servants must come up with a solution for the realization of initiatives in consultation with citizens. This calls to adopt service oriented behavior and to enter into dialogue with the citizen. They have to develop competences to execute the process of negotiation. The change task of jurists is large because a large part of their work disappears. In the context of participation and integral work, municipalities must facilitate the collaboration between citizens, partners and civil servants. In this transition there is an increasing need for example behavior within the organization of the municipality. The results of this study shows that there is need for transformational, servant leadership and the use of theory U.
Item Type:Essay (Master)
Faculty:BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:85 business administration, organizational science
Programme:Business Administration MSc (60644)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/73094
Export this item as:BibTeX
EndNote
HTML Citation
Reference Manager

 

Repository Staff Only: item control page