Ph.D., Antioch University, 2020, Leadership and Change

Across the United States, each state has a public mental health system that is designed to support children and youth with emotional and behavioral challenges. This is critically important as recent estimates show that one in six children in the United States has a diagnosed mental health condition (Whitney & Peterson, 2019). The design and structure of these systems vary by state, but consistent across them is the presence of a state-designated leader who is faced with an array of constraining factors that influence their behavior and shape the resulting system. This study describes the experience of leaders in children's mental health administration and how they define, interpret, and perceive their current environments; the constraining factors that impact them, such as decline, instability, risk, politics, policy, and random events; and the strategies they engage in to achieve their goals. Using narrative inquiry, this study captures the experiences of ten leaders engaged in state-level children's mental health system reform. These stories paint a rich picture of the complexity of leading change in public sector environments where there is dynamic interplay across people, politics, and policy and offer new insights into effecting change in complex systems. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA: Antioch University Repository and Archive, http://aura.antioch.edu/ and OhioLINK ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/.

Committee: Jon Wergin Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Elizabeth Holloway Ph.D. (Committee Member); Sharon Hodges Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Behavioral Sciences; Health Care; Health Care Management; Management; Mental Health; Organizational Behavior; Public Administration; Public Policy; Social Research; Social Work; Systems Design; Welfare