Antecedents of Organizational Innovation: The Diffusion of New Public Management Into Danish Local Government

Abstract

The relation between leadership, the context in which it takes place and the adoption of organizational innovations associated with New Public Management (NPM) is explored in an empirical analysis of Danish local government. Two different strategies for conceptualizing NPM are contrasted: (1) treating NPM as one phenomenon; and (2) acknowledging important differences between organizational innovations associated with NPM. Management's preferences and perceptions of work relations, role in change processes, daily work priorities and rejection of traditional bureaucratic roles as well as the electorate's ability to formulate clear goals are found to be significantly related to the adoption of NPM innovations. Organizational size is found to be the most important contextual antecedent for the adoption of NPM innovations. Distinctions between marketization-type NPM innovations and generic managerial-type NPM innovations and the timing of their introduction are made, unveiling significant differences between the antecedents of different types of NPM innovations.

Innovation in public services: The case of Spanish local government

“…The present paper considers the level of innovation existing in Spanish local government and attempts to identify the most common innovation types using the innovation model of Walker (2006). As in previous studies (Akgün, Keskin, and Byrne, 2012;Hansen, 2011;Reginato, Paglietti, and Fadda, 2011), this paper will try to determine whether the level and/or type of innovation relate to certain internal characteristics of organizations such as their size.…”

“…NPM have links with four administrative megatrends (Hansen, 2011): an attempt to slow down or reverse the growth of government or of the public sector; a change towards the privatization or quasi-privatization of basic public sector institutions; the incorporation of automation, particularly of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) into public service production and distribution; the development of a more international agenda that prevails over the individual traditions and peculiarities of each country in public management matters. Therefore, NPM involves introducing innovation into public management through the use of downsizing and other methods to bring administrations closer to the perspective of their users or citizens.…”

The Relationship Between Ethical Organisational Culture and Organisational Innovativeness: Comparison of Findings from Finland and Lithuania

“…Yet, in the public sector, clarity induces innovativeness through the knowledge of ethical principles and values, which one expects to be followed by all employees of a particular organisation or even sector. Hence, clarity 27 creates the basis for creativity and improvising in an ethically secure environment and ensures the individual's autonomy to practice her expertise, providing high-quality services to citizens at the same time. This finding is in line with suggestions made by Fernandez and Moldogaziev (2013a;2013b) and points out the need for clearly defined rules and consistent reliance on them in a public sector organisation.…”

“…According to Hansen (2011), the bureaucratic and symbolic power that the organisation's management usually possess has a crucial influence on the process of innovation: they can scan the external environment for new ideas 14 and bring them to the organisation to consider and decide to adopt them, thus, resulting in new strategic, market and product innovativeness. Moreover, they can encourage employees to be innovative by displaying role model behaviour, fostering a culture of learning and dialogue by giving feedback and asking for advice from specialists, hence, encouraging process and behaviour innovativeness.…”

“…This pressure has resulted in reforms of the public sector, many related to the concept of New Public Management (hereafter -NPM, Hood, 1991), and demand deliberate changes and renewals in the processes and structures of public organisations to ensure better provision of services and products to society and optimal organisational performance (Politt and Bouckaert, 2011). These changes have resulted in attempts to adopt benchmarking, quality management, management by objectives and other management ideas as NPM innovations for public organisation management (Hansen, 2011) with various rates of success, leading us back to the question of the factors influencing innovativeness and innovations.…”