Silas Blomqvist Johansen defends his PhD thesis
Silas Blomqvist Johansen defends his PhD thesis "How Public Leaders Tackle Complex Problems at Multiple Levels: The Role of Social Distance and Trust".
The defense is public, and everybody is welcome; the defense is scheduled for a maximum of three hours and will be held in English.
Follow the defense online via Teams - Link to be uploaded
The Doctoral School at Department of Social Sciences and Business will host a small reception afterwards.
Supervisors and assessment
Assessment committee:
- Magnus Paulsen Hansen, Associate Professor, ISE, Roskilde University, Denmark (chairperson)
- Linda Höglund, Senior Lecturer, Mälardalen University, Sweden
- Lars Erik Kjekshus, Professor, University of Oslo, Norway
PhD Supervisors:
- Supervisor: Tina Øllgaard Bentzen, Associate Professor, ISE, Roskilde University
- Co-supervisor: Lena Brogaard, Associate Professor, ISE, Roskilde University
Leader of defense:
- TBA
Resumé
This dissertation examines how public leaders use leadership styles and trust-based practices to address complex organizational problems. Drawing on three complementary studies, it develops a multilevel perspective on leadership that integrates leadership styles theory, paradox theory, and trust and process perspectives. Empirically, the dissertation combines a quantitative meta-analysis of leadership styles in healthcare with two qualitative longitudinal case studies of leadership practices in a Danish public hospital.
The findings show that complex problems such as workforce retention, siloization, and organizational failure are interrelated and unfold across multiple organizational levels. Accordingly, they cannot be addressed through isolated interventions or single leadership approaches. Instead, leadership is enacted through distinct but interconnected practices at the vertical (leader–employee), horizontal (cross-departmental), and politico-administrative levels.
At the vertical level, leadership styles characterized by low social distance foster organizational commitment and reduce turnover intentions. At the horizontal level, leaders actively cultivate, test, and repair trust to enable collaboration across organizational units and manage paradoxical tensions. At the politico-administrative level, trust is restored through a dynamic and politicized process involving multiple actors balancing accountability and reform.
Across these levels, trust—or conditions conducive to trust—emerges as a key mechanism enabling coordinated action under conditions of uncertainty, interdependence, and risk. The dissertation shows that leadership in complex public organizations is less about controlling uncertainty and more about creating relational conditions that make action possible despite it. In this way, trust functions as a central, though variably enacted, mechanism for addressing complex organizational problems.
The dissertation contributes to public administration research by advancing a multilevel understanding of leadership, introducing social distance as a key dimension of leadership styles, integrating trust into paradox theory, and conceptualizing trust repair as a politicized and processual phenomenon. It also provides practical insights for public managers by highlighting the importance of distributed leadership, trust-building, and adaptive responses to complexity.
The dissertation will be available for reading at the Roskilde University Library before the defense (on-site use). The dissertation will also be available at the defense.