Peter Totterdill (p)

Craig Maher

Public sector organisations face unprecedented challenges in addressing complex social, economic and environmental policy demands within ever tighter financial constraints. Transformation is being discussed throughout the public sector. So why is it so difficult to achieve?
Public sector organisations are often repositories of accumulated practices, traditions, sub-cultures and interests. Inherited structures get in the way of the cross-functional collaboration needed to find innovative solutions to complex policy challenges and effective service delivery.
The challenge is to take a systemic view of organisational structures and practices, aligning them towards common yet fluid ends. Creating organisational and service innovation requires the ability to blend tacit knowledge and reflexivity at the front line with strategic thinking, agility and foresight. It means confronting deeply embedded attitudes and behaviours, and openness to learning from diverse public and private sector organisations.
The concept of workplace innovation offers a practical, participative approach to public sector transformation grounded in a substantial, expanding body of research. Workplace innovation was adopted by the European Commission’s EU2020 Strategy, is embedded in the economic strategies of several national and regional governments and is helping to enhance performance and working lives in a growing number of public and private sector organisations.
Methodology.SLR, case study analysis, and two action research interventions co-led by the author, one in an English municipality, the second in a Northern Irish hospital.
Results. Evidence extracted from wide-ranging literature and case studies identified bundles of workplace practices simultaneously associated with high performance and high quality of working life, especially when adopted systematically. Work undertaken as part of the European Commission funded European Workplace Innovation Network (EUWIN) enabled this analysis to be translated into a practically focused methodology for participative organisational change, including validated survey instruments.
A concurrent EU-funded project enabled its testing and further development through extended interventions in two public sector organisations. Results demonstrated the powerful leverage for change generated by reflection on day-to-day work experiences, and by multi-disciplinary, multi-level dialogue. Negative impacts of middle- and senior-management role conflict and status concerns were also demonstrated. Learning from interventions informed the subsequent development of the approach and its successful deployment in other settings.

Originality. Whilst the concept of workplace innovation emerged during the early years of this century, there are few studies of its translation into practical frameworks to support public sector transformation. This study demonstrates an early example of such an approach, and its subsequent evolution and wider dissemination.

Ilona Bartuseviciene (p), Mindaugas Butkus (p), Ona Grazina Rakauskiene, Lina Volodzkiene, Andrius Stasiukynas

Peter Totterdill

The aim of this study. Public sector organizations faced a major challenge in securing public services during the Covid-19 pandemic. Most public sector organizations were not prepared to function properly in a pandemic environment. That was mainly caused by the lack of resilience, which, to our belief, is not only the ability to return to a normal routine aftershock but also to use the gained experience for an organizational bounce forward and successfully adapt to a “new normal”. This view supports the idea that threats should be treated as an opportunity for organizations to gain the ability to learn continuously and use the lessons learned during crises for self-strengthening and growth.
By supporting this conceptual framework, we hypothesize that more resilient public organizations have the capacity to provide a service of a higher quality.
Methodology/methods. Systematic literature review (SLR), PSALSAR method, descriptive statistics.
Results. SLR allowed us to define the concept of the resilience of the public organizations, where resilience is considered to be more than just an ability to withstand difficult situations and return to pre-crisis levels, but also the ability to use the experience of crises as a driving force to become more competitive and stronger during shocks, as they gain unique experiences that strengthen their operational capabilities. After assessing a variety of methodologies for evaluating organizational resilience, we conclude that resilience of the public sector can be treated as a three-dimensional framework, i.e. (a) preparation, (b) adaptation, (c) enhanced learning capacity. We argue that indicated dimensions have a positive impact on the quality of service. The limitation of this study is related to the conceptual nature of our result, yet soon, we will focus on the empirical implementation of the suggested framework. In addition, we will introduce the results of the organizational resilience in the public sector based expert study. The data will be collected from April till May 2022.

Originality. The research has an ambitious goal that has so far been little researched. Firstly, we propose an original conceptual construct of the resilience phenomena in the public sector. Secondly, we suggest a methodology to assess the impact of the resilience of the public sector on the quality of the services they provide with the ultimate goal to apply the proposed methodology on empirical data.

This research project received funding from European Social Fund No 13.1.1-LMT-K-718-05-0032 under grant agreement with the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT)

Craig Maher (p), Liucija Birskyte (p)

Ilona Bartuseviciene

There are basic norms we consider when examining local government revenue systems, perhaps the two most important are efficiency and effectiveness. It is most often from these perspectives that scholars have considered intergovernmental aids negatively. For instance, there is an extensive body of literature on the effects of intergovernmental aids to local governments, coined the “fly-paper effect” by Arthur Okun in the 1960s. The empirical evidence quite often supports the proposition that “money sticks where it hits” meaning that intergovernmental aid payments increase expenditures and are, therefore, inefficient. Similarly, the financial management literature generally views intergovernmental aid payments as inefficient as it is a revenue source over which local officials have no control.
With this context, we propose to examine the question of whether sudden, episodic fiscal shocks such as COVID-19 force us to reexamine some of these perspectives on fiscal federalism. For instance, Park and Maher (2020) assert that it was the differences in intergovernmental structures that enabled South Korea to react more effectively to COVID-19 than the U.S. We propose to build on Park and Maher (2020) by empirically examining the effects of fiscal structures on local government fiscal condition during the COVID-19 pandemic. We propose to test the hypothesis that local governments with greater reliance on intergovernmental aids fared better than these local governments that were more reliant on own-source revenues.
Methods:
The period of study will be 2015-2020, thus providing several years of data leading up to the pandemic. The units of analysis will be cities. The analysis will focus on the financial condition of these local governments in the two countries. Panel data on fiscal and socio-economic facts will be collected on the 50 U.S. cities and 8 largest cities -municipalities in Lithuania for 5 years. The U.S. and Lithuania have very different central-local fiscal relationships, thus enabling us to study within-country effects as well as cross-national effects.
The tentative results are that cities with greater reliance on intergovernmental aids fared better than these cities that were more reliant on own-source revenues. Furthermore, cities in Lithuania overall, fared better than cities in the U.S. due to a greater central government support.
This article contributes to the existing literature on fiscal decentralization by re-examining the precepts on the efficiency of intergovernmental aid and the sustainability of local government finance when confronted with unexpected shocks.