Italian Public Administration Research Articles

Enhancing Productivity at Home: The Role of Smart Work and Organizational Support in the Public Sector

In recent years, Italian Public Administrations (PAs) have swiftly adapted to flexible work arrangements due to the impact of COVID-19. The flexible work has led to addressing new challenges including the need to balance work demands with family commitments, a lack of social support, struggles with inadequate technology, and managing home interruptions that negatively affect home performance. Based on the job demands-resources (JD-R) model, the present study aims at examining the negative impact of home interruptions on smart working performance and the moderating role of two potential job resources: organizational support and perceived quality of the smart working. A convenience sample of 301 Italian public employees engaged in smart working completed an online questionnaire. Multivariate regression analysis results showed that organizational support plays a moderating role in reducing the negative effect of interruptions on home performance. However, the findings did not support a moderating role for the perceived quality of smart working. Overall, these findings highlight the critical role of social factors in buffering the negative effects of smart working, as compared to the quality of the technological arrangements. This information could be valuable for organizations looking to enhance the effectiveness of smart working by focusing on organizational support.

Problemi di policy e sperimentazione amministrativa: l'evoluzione dei processi di digitalizzazione e l'emergere degli ecosistemi di innovazione

The Italian public administration is confronted with two challenges peculiar to the current times, which share some common features: on the one hand, the use of ever-changing digital technologies; and, on the other hand, the role in social innovation processes involving multiple actors. In the first case, the emergence of public digital platforms calls for re-organization processes based on greater integration among internal departments, and stable relations between different administrative levels and between public and private actors. In the second case, the social demand for innovation in public services and policies leads to the development of ways of involving different actors in collaborative processes that are configured as innovation ecosystems. The thesis of this contribution underlines how the analysis of these modes of collaborative governance constitutes a relevant field for evaluation research, also because of the opportunity to integrate some significant elaborations developed by policy analysis.

Impacts of energy saving measures on IEQ, task performance and COVID-19 contagion risk in public buildings: analysis of a case-study in Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

The recent 2022 energy crisis has pushed several Italian public administrations to adopt solutions to reduce energy demand for space heating in public buildings. Reduction of HVAC system operation time, decrease of heating setpoint and changes to ventilation schedules are some examples of typically implemented measures. However, some of them are in direct competition with those adopted so far to limit the risk of COVID-19 contagion, such as higher ventilation rates. Furthermore, limited operation time and lower setpoints can lead to suboptimal thermal comfort conditions for workers in public buildings, with subsequent decrease of their task performances. In this framework, to assess the global efficacy of the most recent energy saving policies in public buildings, this research focuses not only on the quantification of energy savings but also on the analysis of increased COVID-19 contagion risk, as well as performance loss due to suboptimal building operation conditions. To investigate the impact of new building operation policies for energy savings, an intermediate storey of a public office building in Bolzano, Italy, was selected as a case-study.

Automation in public sector jobs and services: a framework to analyze public digital transformation’s impact in a data-constrained environment

PurposeThis study aims to estimate the value of the impact from digital transformation (DX) focusing on its automation effect, looking at the time and cost savings coming from the substitution effect with an adoption of digital technologies. For example, cloud and artificial intelligence technologies such as ChatGPT have the potential to change ways of working, substituting and replacing several of the tasks that are currently carried out by public administration (PA) employees and labor processes underpinning PA services.Design/methodology/approachThe paper outlines a new framework to estimate the potential impact of DX on the public sector. The authors apply this framework to estimate the value of the impact of DX on the Italian PA, defining the latter by the collection of the value of its labor (i.e. PA workforce salaries) and by the collection of the value of its outputs (i.e. public services’ costs).FindingsThis study ultimately maps out the magnitude and trends of how likely the PA occupations and services could be substituted in a wider process of DX. To do this, the authors apply their framework to the Italian PA, and they triangulate secondary data collection, from official accounts of the Italian Ministry of Economics and the National Statistical Institute, with methodological antecedents from the UK Office for National Statistics and experts’ insights. Results provide a snapshot on the type and magnitude of PA jobs and services projected to be affected by automation over the next 10 years.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper provides for the first time an approach to estimate the value of the impact of DX on the public sector in a data-constrained environment – or in the lack of the required primary data. Once applied to the Italian PA, this approach provides a granular map of the automatability of each of the PA occupations and of the PA services. Finally, this paper mentions preliminary insights on potential challenges related to equity in public sector jobs and implications on recruitment processes.

The Role of Techno-Stress and Psychological Detachment in the Relationship between Workload and Well-Being in a Sample of Italian Smart Workers: A Moderated Mediated Model

Well-being conditions at work are determined by the balance between the demands from the organizational context and the perception of people to possess resources concerning the ability to cope with such requests. The pandemic caused by COVID-19 has changed working conditions, and employees have had to adapt to smart working (SW) by bringing new resources into play to meet new demands. Many organizations are questioning how to implement SW after the pandemic. According to the JD-R model, the present study considered workload during smart working and Techno-stress (the perceived stress concerning the use of technologies) as new requests (i.e., demands) coming from the organization and Psychological Detachment (the ability to create psychological distancing from work) as a personal resource. We investigated the moderator role of Psychological Detachment in the relationship between workload in SW and Well-being, mediated by Techno-stress (in its three dimensions: Techno-Overload, Techno-Invasion, and Techno-Complexity). The sample is made up of 622 Italian public administration employees who completed a questionnaire containing the following scales: Quantitative Workload Inventory, Well-being Index, Psychological Detachment, Techno-stress Creator Scale. Mediation and moderate-mediation models have been tested with PROCESS Macro. Findings showed that Techno-Invasion and Techno-Complexity fully mediate the relationship between workload in SW and well-being. Psychological detachment moderates the effect of the workload on Well-being, which in turn is mediated by Techno-Invasion. Furthermore, findings suggest the importance of identifying protective factors that can mitigate the workload effects on the employees’ well-being in SW.

Rejecting Innovation: How Italian Public Employees are Killing Creativity and Digitalisation

Within the general context of new ideas generation, there is a grey area that still concerns the organizational design solutions related to creativity. In fact, if personal characteristics and other community-related issues have been quite explored, some organizational mechanisms still need to be deepened. In this paper, we aim to investigate the impact of professional networks on Innovative Work Behaviour in the local government to achieve public value. We investigate the contribution of creativity in the digitalization of Italian public administration considering the contribution of public employees to developing knowledge management. Moreover, we investigate a community of 190 employees of municipalities divided into three macro categories: deputy employees, Managers and Senior Managers. An OSL regression model has been used to understand to what extent the degree of collaboration and advice among employees and their propensity to adopt digitalization in ordinary practice considering social capital variables. What emerges from the OLS regression is that despite accelerating the ordinary work using the leverage of digitalization and knowledge management, there is the custom of not applying the enormous benefit of process re-engineering and continuing their work attitude in what the economic literature defines as “the comfort zone”. The results consolidate the current literature about the creation of public value showing the resilience of public employees to change their state of mind reflecting any kind of innovation.

Fiscal rules and the reliability of public investment plans: Evidence from local governments

We document that Italian public administrations systematically overestimate capital expenditures, and that the introduction of a cap on this spending item improves the accuracy of their plans. Our analysis relies on a unique dataset including budgetary figures (both planned and realized) for all Italian municipalities, and exploits a national reform which introduced a limit on realized capital expenditures only for municipalities above a given population threshold (5000 residents). One possible interpretation of our results is that by exploiting the imperfect knowledge of voters, policymakers benefit from promising overly ambitious investment plans. The introduction of some form of capital-expenditure limit makes these promises less credible, and helps to bring spending plans in line with reality. Furthermore, we find that capital revenues are also overestimated, and that the forecast accuracy of these revenues improves due to the reform. This is in line with our political-economy interpretation: as there is less room to inflate expenditures, politicians also have fewer incentives to indulge in window-dressing on the revenue side.

Implementing the NRRP from the Draghi government to the government of Giorgia Meloni: Italian public administration under the pressure of too large a volume of resources

ABSTRACT The Italian public administration was called upon to spend the largest proportion of the funds made available by the European Union within the framework of the post-pandemic economic recovery programme NextGeneration EU. At the end of 2022, implementation delays drew the attention of the new ruling coalition led by Giorgia Meloni to the lack of administrative capacity, a risk factor that the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan had foreseen – to the extent that it had included within it a number of reforms of the public administration. The article analyses the outcomes of the steps taken to increase administrative capacity in accordance with the Plan. It highlights that EU funds are out of all proportion to the actual capacity of Italian authorities to spend them.

An AI framework to support decisions on GDPR compliance

The Italian Public Administration (PA) relies on costly manual analyses to ensure the GDPR compliance of public documents and secure personal data. Despite recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have benefited many legal fields, the automation of workflows for data protection of public documents is still only marginally affected. The main aim of this work is to design a framework that can be effectively adopted to check whether PA documents written in Italian meet the GDPR requirements. The main outcome of our interdisciplinary research is INTREPID (artI ficial iNT elligence for gdpR compliancE of P ublic admI nistration D ocuments), an AI-based framework that can help the Italian PA to ensure GDPR compliance of public documents. INTREPID is realized by tuning some linguistic resources for Italian language processing (i.e. SpaCy and Tint) to the GDPR intelligence. In addition, we set the foundations for a text classification methodology to recognise the public documents published by the Italian PA, which perform data breaches. We show the effectiveness of the framework over a text corpus of public documents that were published online by the Italian PA. We also perform an inter-annotator study and analyse the agreement of the annotation predictions of the proposed methodology with the annotations by domain experts. Finally, we evaluate the accuracy of the proposed text classification model in detecting breaches of security.

Digital divide, e-government and trust in public service: The key role of education.

The Italian public administration (PA) has always had problems with slowness and inefficiency. In 2021, the Italian government made a massive investment in digitizing PA as part of an extraordinary recovery plan, with more than 200 billion euro to revitalize the country. This paper aims to investigate how educational inequalities affect the relationship between Italian citizens and PA in this phase of the digital transition. The study is based on a web survey conducted in March and April 2022 among a national sample of 3,000 citizens aged 18-64. The data shows that more than three-quarters of respondents have already used a public service at least once via an online channel. Few are aware of the reform plan, however, and more than one-third fear that the digitization of public services will make things worse for citizens. Through a regression analysis, the study confirms the centrality of the influence of education on the use of digital public services compared to the other spatial and social variables considered. Trust in PA is also correlated with education and employment status and is higher among those who have used digital public services. The survey thus highlights that the educational and cultural dimension is a crucial aspect as a lever to counter the digital divide and promote digital citizenship rights. It reveals the need to activate facilitation and accompaniment processes for citizens with less digital skills and experience who risk being excluded or penalized by the new arrangement and having their distrust toward the PA and state exacerbated.

Occupational exposure to work-related stress, a proposal of a pilot study to detect psychological distress in collar-workers.

Work-related psychosocial risks have been identified as significant occupational health and safety risks; the occupational physicians must assess and monitor the health status of workers in order to verify that work is not a source of harm to exposed operators. The aim of the study was to investigate the outcomes related to anxiety and depression traits in workers exposed to stress-related work. A questionnaire was administered to a large population of Italian public administration workers; the Centre for Epidemiologic Studies - Depression Scale questionnaire was used to measure depression, the Self rating Anxiety Scale was used to measure anxiety, the UK Management Standards Indicator tool questionnaire was used to assess work adjustment. A descriptive analysis, a multivariate analysis, as well as logistic regression models were used to assess the health outcomes related to stress. A total of 292 workers participated in the study; 100% of participants had a Centre for Epidemiologic Studies - Depression Scale score over the cut-off; 41.78% had a Self rating Anxiety Scale score over the cut-off; the results support a correlation between the Centre for Epidemiologic Studies - Depression Scale results and the UK Management Standards Indicator tool results; and a correlation between Self-rating Anxiety Scale results and the UK Management Standards Indicator tool results. The Demand, Management, Support and Relationship results were associated with mental health outcomes, and it could be a useful tool in occupational medicine, to identify workers at risk for negative mental health outcomes, becoming an essential tool in workers' health assessment and for prevention of mental health disorders.

Sustainable Management Practices for Urban Green Spaces to Support Green Infrastructure: An Italian Case Study

Traditional land-use planning models have proven inadequate to address contemporary issues in sustainable development and protection governance. In recent years, new ‘performance based’ approaches that integrate ecosystem services (ES) provided via green infrastructure (GI) into traditional spatial planning models have been proven to reach a higher level of environmental performance, necessary to improve quality of life for all people. In Italy, there are no mandatory planning instruments to design and manage GI, which still remains a component of the traditional land-use plan. Here, the development of urban green spaces (UGS) based on ‘quantitative assessment’ is not suitable for guaranteeing the supply of ES. In addition, the scarcity of financial resources to develop ‘green standards’, as prescribed in the land-use plan to strategically design the GI, is an issue for most Italian public administrations. The paper provides the results of a test case conducted in a public green area of the city of Ancona, where the experimentation of a diversified maintenance strategy of an urban lawn significantly reduced the management cost and improved the environmental performance of green spaces. The identification of a unified management strategy to be applied to all the public UGS can help to achieve better results in support of sustainability, to redesign the continuity of GI and to develop strategies for future urban green master plans.

The Impact of COVID-19 on Public/Third-Sector Collaboration in the Italian Context

The extent of the effects produced by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic on the collaboration between public administrations and the third sector is currently unclear. Undoubtedly, as in any other organizations, social enterprises and non-profit organizations have been severely affected by the spread of COVID-19, especially regarding their relationship with the public sector. Based on an analysis of 563 Italian third sector entities (ETSs) that responded to an online survey launched in March 2020, this study aims to explore the current state and extent of the potential change in the collaboration between organizations belonging to the third sector and the Italian public administration system in response to the COVID-19 emergency. The results have shown that only approximately one-third of the organizations have been asked to jointly contribute with the public sector to contain the negative effects of the pandemic. In other cases, spontaneous support initiatives have been undertaken to manage the crisis. The findings have also revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the internal operating and functioning mechanisms of the organizations operating in the third sector. The study concludes with a forecast of the potential exacerbation of the difficulties currently faced by the third sector and with the provision of future strategic paths to contain the health, social and economic effects of the pandemic.

Including Minorities Within Organizations. A Research on Cultural Diversity in Italian Public Administration

Including Minorities Within Organizations. A Research on Cultural Diversity in Italian Public Administration

Effects of the award of public service contracts on the performance and payroll of winning firms

Abstract We investigate the effects of an exogenous demand shock arising from the award of public service contracts by Italian public administrations in 2015 on a sample of 1782 winning small and medium firms that were not awarded any contract during the previous 3 years. Using a difference-in-differences model with continuous treatments estimated on a propensity score matched sample, our results reveal that higher awarded values enhance various performance dimensions of the winning firms as well as their average payroll per employee. Nonetheless, higher winning rebates moderate the positive effects of the award on payroll by inducing the winning firms to downward manage both salaries and social security contributions per employee to maintain their desired level of performance. The effects are mostly significant for smaller microenterprises. In addition, winning rebates negatively affect the performance of firms in the construction industry by leading these firms to downward manage the payroll of their employees more aggressively than firms in other industries. Our findings provide novel insights for the implementation of industrial policies aimed at achieving sustainable macroeconomic and social goals, within the business fabric, through the effective management of public service procurement.

A social struggle against Covid-19, crisis communication during the pandemic: trust and proximity of Italian public healthcare sector administrations

In the mediated construction of social reality, public institutions need to in-crease digital communication and build trust through proximity and relationality. During the crisis generated by Covid-19 this has become even more evident. In this paper we will explore some case study of social media communication in ten Italian Health Public Hospitals and Authorities, exploring them in the light of some key perspectives related to four dimensions related to space, time, relational-ity, digital communities and two objectives of public institutions: inclusion and popularity.

Organizational Capital: A Resource for Changing and Performing in Public Administrations

The aim of this study was to deepen our knowledge about the role played by organizational capital (OC) among public administration (PA) agencies. A questionnaire was administered to a gender-balanced convenience sample of 270 workers of Italian PAs. First, confirmatory factor analysis was performed in order to examine the measurement model. Second, a SEM model was performed, confirming that OC was both directly and indirectly positively related to performance, through the mediation of innovation. OC was also positively related to innovation through the mediation of clarity about change. Overall, the results supported the hypothesized model, providing initial evidence on the pivotal role OC plays, and especially for PA agencies, on organizational innovation and performance. The limits and practical implications of these results are discussed.

Multi-objective optimization technique: A novel approach in tourism sustainability planning

Strategic management of complex decisional problems in the tourism sector requires the implementation of proper planning procedures for sustainable tourism activities, due to either the number of actors involved, the presence of conflicting goals and the need of resource rationalization. Thus, the aim of the research is to implement a new approach for the selection of projects to be funded by public administration, in order to maximize the efficiency of public resource allocation. Furthermore, the proposed technique enhances the inclusion of the three dimensions of sustainability in tourism policy planning and implementation phases. The Multi-objective Optimization model accounts for environmental, social and economic impacts, to select tourism activities to be realized in order to maximize stakeholder utility. In order to test the model, we selected a case study: a call for tender drafted by an Italian Public administration, whose aim was to support the attractiveness of the urban areas. Findings illustrate that, in comparison with multicriteria techniques, the proposed model allows to achieve a better allocation of public funds, in both quantitative (i.e., amount of resources allocated) and qualitative (selection of projects with positive social and environmental implication) terms.

Insegnare gli usi dell’italiano istituzionale per la comunicazione pubblica

The Italian university system is organised in three cycles, according to the Bologna’s Process Structure. There are currently 57 Laurea (1st degree) courses in Scienze della Comunicazione (Communication Sciences), and 24 Laurea magistrale (2nd degree) courses in Scienze della comunicazione pubblica, d'impresa e pubblicita (Public and Corporate Communication, Advertising). A Laurea magistrale (2nd degree) in Public and Corporate Communication, Advertising or its equivalent is a requirement for anyone applying for Public Relations (PR) officer positions in the Italian Public Administration. Such jobs entail a full command of a new language variety, Institutional Italian, and yet only 24 out of 4 communication degrees include linguistics or language modules about this specific focus as part of their course structure. The aim of this article is to show why Institutional Italian should be included in the study plan of any future Public Administration (PA) communicator, and it does so by drawing on the experience of teaching two modules at the University of Salerno, Italiano istituzionale (laurea in Scienze della Comunicazione) and Comunicazione pubblica e linguaggi istituzionali (laurea magistrale in Corporate Communication and Media). It outlines the main features of Institutional Italian and it describes how it has been affected by digital innovation and transformation, by the impact of traditional and new media, and by an increased public awareness of plain language as a means of making communication more accessible. Furthermore, it shows that Institutional Italian works on different levels – syntactical, morphosyntactical, lexical, terminological, textual – which serve different pragmatic purposes for different PA communication tasks. Finally, the article provides practical examples on how Institutional Italian can be taught successfully.

Exploring Tools for Public Real Estate Enhancement in Italy: From Criteria to Decisions

The debate on public real estate enhancement is prominent and requires innovative strategies to assure economic and social sustainability. This article aims at systematizing the currently available methods and tools of public property enhancement in Italy, proposing a system of criteria to support the public administration (PA) in the decision-making process when managing public real estate enhancement oriented towards public utility. Namely, this article considers and assesses consolidated and innovative public real estate enhancement methods and tools currently available to the Italian PA according to the “endogenous criteria” of the real estate tools and “criteria of purpose” of the public administration promoting the enhancement process. The final aim is to support the decision-making process of PAs and help both public and private actors in grasping and managing the complexity of public real estate enhancement. An overview of the literature and of reference laws on public property enhancement builds the research framework, together with a path of research, dialogues, and fieldworks with the Italian State Property Agency (Agenzia del Demanio). The decision-making process of PAs for selecting a suitable enhancement strategy or tool should rest on endogenous criteria and criteria of purpose. Specifically: (i) the distinct technical features of each public asset; (ii) the public utility aim that the public entity intends to pursue; (iii) the needs of the community (i.e., the demand); (iv) the skills available within the PA that promotes the strategy.