Montgomery Van Wart

Montgomery Van Wart is an American academic, author and researcher. He is a professor of public administration at California State University, San Bernardino.

Van Wart has authored over 150 publications, has been cited over 10,000 times (see https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=6bSiMpwAAAAJ&hl=en for an up-to-date listing) and has a Google Scholar H-index of 36. He has worked on areas encompassing administrative and business leadership, e-leadership, training and development, human resource management, administrative values and ethics, organization behavior, and general management. He has also written eleven books including: Dynamics of Leadership, Leadership in Public Organizations, Human Resource Management in Public Service, Leadership and Culture, Building Business-Government Relations, Leadership Across the Globe, and Changing Public Sector Values.

Throughout his career, Van Wart has been associated with the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), and was instrumental in redesigning its Code of Ethics.

Education After receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree from Franklin and Marshall College, Van Wart went to Lewis and Clark College and obtained his Master of Arts in Teaching. He then enrolled at Arizona State University and earned his Doctoral degree in Public Administration in 1990. Van Wart completed the Senior Executives in State and Local Government Program at Harvard University in 1995. He also took graduate business administration course work at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He also tested the utility of the full range leadership theory of Bernard Bass by analyzing a very large government data set. Results of his study indicated the significance of transactional and transformational leadership in the federal government, and found transformational leadership to be slightly more important even after shifting one important factor, individualized consideration, back to the transactional model. He published a paper in 2013 focused on the overarching insights, particularly those of particular importance to leaders in administrative positions in the public sector, and provided a review based on the major findings of the organizational leadership literature.

Van Wart published a book in 2005 entitled, Dynamics of Leadership in Public Service: Theory and Practice, and discussed the competencies needed by organizational leaders at all levels. Furthermore, the book provides a comparative review regarding the theoretical literature on leadership from a public sector perspective.

One of his more recent research areas is virtual leadership. Virtual leadership examines the skills necessary for successful management in the virtual age in which he argues it is far more complex and challenging than commonly thought. A second more recent area is examining the various styles of political leadership. Human resource management With colleagues, Van Wart authored Human Resource Management in Public Service, and highlighted the issues in context of management in the public sector along with an emphasis on hands-on skill building and problem solving. He further explored the stages of the employment process, including recruitment, selection, training, legal rights and responsibilities, compensation, and appraisal.

Public sector ethics Van Wart focused on fundamental values in revising ASPA's Code of Ethics, and demonstrated five principles or decision-making sources upon which public administrators should draw, and how these are discussed in the literature. He also focused his study on the major contemporary varieties of ethical leadership in organizations, and provided a critique regarding these varieties. In a paper published in 2003, he contrasted the classical notions to the modern day context and usage in current codes of ethics, conduct, and regulations.

Online learning In 2020, Van Wart published an article with colleagues based on a large-scale dataset, using exploratory factor analysis to study critical success factors for online learning from the students’ perspective, and determined their hierarchical significance. In this study, it was found there are seven critical aspects of online learning for students: the basic online modality, teaching presence, cognitive presence, online social comfort, instructional support, online interactive modality, and social presence. In a paper published in 2019, he was part of a team who reviewed the online teaching effectiveness literature, and provided a synthesis regarding the state-of-the-field in the higher education context. He conducted a U.S. National Science Foundation grant investigating the best practices for various online modalities in STEM education in 2022-24.

Awards and honors 1993 - Governor's Award for Excellence: Individual Award, Arizona 2003 - Editor's Choice Award, Public Administration Review 2004 - Award for Outstanding Service to the Public Sector Human Resources Profession, Section on Personnel Administration and Labor Relations, American Society for Public Administration 2005 - Outstanding Academic Titles award for Dynamics of Leadership in Public Service 2009 - Outstanding Educator, Inland Empire ASPA Chapter annual awards 2011,2013, 2014 - Chester A. Newland Presidential Citation of Merit Award, The American Society for Public Administration 2012, 2014 - Outstanding Researcher, College of Business and Public Administration 2014 - CSUSB Outstanding Researcher Award, Cal State San Bernardino (university level) 2015 - Paul Van Riper Award for Excellence and Service, American Society for Public Administration 2015 - Sage Cornerstone Author Award, for a bestselling textbook, Human Resource Management in Public Service: Paradoxes, Processes, and Problems 2017 - Outstanding Teacher Award, CSU JHB College of Business and Public Administration 2019 - Chancellor's award for teaching: Faculty Innovation and Leadership Innovation Award (CSU system level), California State University, Long Beach 2023 - Outstanding Professor, CSUSB (university level).