Public sector leadership: An emerging subfield with tremendous research potential Introduction Until the 1990s, public administration scholars had written very little about the concept of leadership as it applied to the public sector, principally be- cause of the belief that ascribing a leadership role to public servants under- mined democratic theory. The prevailing view was that public servants did not lead; they were followers, faithfully implementing the policy preferences of their political masters. This historic neglect of administrative leadership has been well documented (Van Wart 2003; Terry 1995), leading to a number of pleas to redress this glaring deficiency because administrative leaders are as critical as political leaders to the success of public sector organizations. This article makes the argument that with a proliferation of research studies over the past two decades public sector leadership has gained traction for recognition as a distinct subfield of public management and administration. Nonetheless, a number of important research lacunae remain. Therefore, even though Canadian public administration scholars have made modest contributions to our understanding of the theory and practice of public sec- tor leadership thus far, there are many opportunities for them to advance this frontier of knowledge. Administrative leadership in public organizations Even though historically it denoted political leadership almost exclusively, public sector leadership is a broad, all-encompassing concept. As ’t Hart (2014) notes, contemporary notions of public leadership include three dis- tinctive types—political, administrative and civic—to reflect the fact that it occurs in three distinct spheres, namely politics, administration and society. While all three forms of public leadership are critical to good governance, for this short article the focus is on how public servants exercise leadership. In that regard, the progress over the past two and half decades with re- spect to acknowledging and understanding how administrative leadership is manifest in the public sector has been dramatic. Although some scholars continue to recognize the difficulty of innovating and being entrepreneurial Tim A. Mau CANADIAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION / ADMINISTRATION PUBLIQUE DU CANADA VOLUME 63, NO. 1 (MARCH/MARS 2020), PP. 140–146 © 2020 Institute of Public Administration of Canada Tim A. Mau is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Guelph.