Jean is Professor of Organisational Analysis.  Her research is on public leadership, and on innovation, improvement and organizational change in public service organizations.

Jean has undertaken a range of research and development projects concerned with public leadership.  She has researched and produced a self-assessment and 360 degree feedback toolkit for elected member development in local government: the Warwick Political Leadership Questionnaire.  Research on national politicians has led to a number of publications and also a leadership development tool for ministers – the Warwick Ministerial 360, produced jointly with the National School of Government. 

Jean led the Warwick research team, working with the Chartered Management Institute on leadership with political awareness for managers – the contexts and the capabilities needed by managers across the private, public and voluntary sectors to lead across diverse and sometimes competing interests with multiple organizations and stakeholders, and in the context of polycentric governance. A cross-national comparative study with Australia and New Zealand is now under way.  

Jean’s other strand of research concerns innovation, improvement and organizational change.  She won a national Public Sector Fellowship in the ESRC’s Advanced Institute of Management (AIM) to research innovation and improvement in public services and was also the AIM Public Service Lead Fellow for the group of 12 Fellows.  She led the research team monitoring and evaluating the Beacon Scheme, which researched how improvement occurs through inter-organizational learning and sharing good practice in local public services.  She has also written on innovations in governance with Mark Moore of Harvard.  

Jean has published six books, the two most recent being Leadership for Healhcare, (2010) with John Benington and Managing to improve public services (2008) with Cam Donaldson, Chris Skelcher and Mike Wallace, Cambridge University Press.  She has published a wide range of articles and reports on leadership, innovation and improvement, and organisational and cultural change and improvement in public services. 

She was also the Founding Academic Director of the Warwick MPA (the innovative MBA for the public sector) and is a Fellow of the Sunningdale Institute. 

For more information on her publications, click here.