Robert Denhardt

Robert B. Denhardt (born 1942) was a professor of public administration theory and organizational development. He has also worked as a consultant. He was a past president of the American Society for Public Administration.

Early life and education Denhardt was born in Kentucky in 1942. He completed his Ph.D. at University of Kentucky in 1968.

Denhardt was a past president of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), a nationwide organization of academics and practitioners in the field of public administration at all levels of government. He was the founder and first chair of ASPA's National Campaign for Public Service, an effort to assert the dignity and worth of public service across the nation. He was also a member of the National Academy of Public Administration and a Fellow of the Canadian Centre for Management Development. He received the Dwight Waldo Award for lifetime achievement in scholarship from the American Society for Public Administration in 2004.

Publications Denhardt has published more than 100 journal articles, and 21 books.

Scholarship Denhardt has advanced the arguments that public organizations are part of the government process; that public and private organizations are similar; and that public administration is part of a larger multidisciplinary perspective.

In Public Administration Review, his book, The Pursuit of Significance (1993), was commended for "filling void in the public administration literature" by demonstrating that "public organizations have been every bit as successful as those in the private sector, often deploying roughly equivalent change strategies".

Death Denhardt died on March 19, 2025, in Chandler, Arizona.