Giovanni Valotti

Public management reform in Italy: explaining the implementation gap

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to outline the sets of factors influential on the implementation of public management reform in the politico‐administrative context of Italy.Design/methodology/approach – Provides a combination of different research designs, multiple case studies on regional governments.Findings – Some broad sets of factors affecting implementation of public management reform have been identified They include: characteristics of the administrative tradition and features of the politico‐administrative context; the design of the reform package and the coalition of interests sustaining the reform; behavioural triggers; and the building over the time of management capacity at the level of individual public sector organisations.Research limitations/implications – Research limitations include the availability of empirical evidence given the width of the phenomenon under investigation, as well as the broader caveats that apply to researching vast and complex problems like those concerning manag...

Public sector leadership: new perspectives for research and practice

In this article, we aim to portray the state of the art in public sector leadership in order to recommend directions for research and training practice. To this end, we review the scattered strands of literature on public sector leadership (PSL) and classify them in a single framework. The results of the study suggest that public sector leadership is emerging as a distinctive and autonomous domain in public administration/public management studies, although the debate is still underdeveloped compared to business administration studies. Leadership skills truly do matter in improving the performance of public sector organizations, and it is highly likely that the optimum leadership style is an integrated one: Public sector leaders should behave mainly as transformational leaders, moderately leveraging transactional relationships with their followers and heavily leveraging the importance of preserving integrity and ethics in the fulfillment of tasks. Points for practitioners This study on public leadership suggests that administrative leaders in the public sector behave differently from their counterparts in the business world, and as a result there is a great need for leadership development programs which focus on these differences instead of merely mimicking programs designed for leaders in the private sector.

Assessing Transparency in Government: Rhetoric, Reality and Desire

Transparency in government is a highly regarded value and a critical ingredient for efficient and well-functioning economic and political markets. Many countries, including Italy, refer to transparency as a tool to enhance government accountability, as a principle to promote in order to reduce corruption in public administration and as a means for circulating information on government performance. However, transparency is preached more often than it is practiced in many cases (Heald 2006). Conversely, not all of the information disclosed is easily accessible or accessed by external stakeholders. The purpose of this paper is to assess the degree of transparency of governments and to ascertain the type of information that can be accessed by external stakeholders, especially the general public, in order to evaluate the performance of their government. In particular, the paper focuses on the information disclosed through government websites and assesses the case of larger municipalities in Italy. The paper presents the findings of the analysis and suggests some recommendations for academics and policy makers.

Assessing Public Preferences and the Level of Transparency in Government Using an Exploratory Approach

Any information disclosed by governments should serve the purpose it is meant to fulfill. This is an underlying pillar of transparency. Our article assesses whether the information citizens consider to be most relevant for interaction with the authorities is actually disclosed. Our research was conducted on the population of the 117 Italian provincial capitals. A sample of 500 Italian citizens were interviewed with the purpose of understanding which type of information they consider most relevant, given the choice of institutional, political, financial, and service delivery–related information. The results indicate that Italian provincial capitals currently fail to publish the information that citizens consider to be most relevant: Despite differences in opinions among users, the sample we analyzed tends to rate the importance of service-delivery transparency and financial transparency higher than institutional or political transparency, whereas most information disclosed by Italian provincial capitals is associated with data they are obliged to disclose in order to comply with transparency regulations.

Coming Back Soon: Assessing the Determinants of Absenteeism in the Public Sector

Abstract This study explores how different factors influence absenteeism in the public sector. In particular, it investigates whether absence rates at work vary as a result of the individual personal traits of civil servants, some organizational features of governments and the context where public agencies operate. The study elaborates on the data on self-reported days of absence for all civil servants working for Italian regional and local governments. Our analysis of the Italian case shows that factors linked to the community where these governments operate influence the absence trends of civil servants; cultural differences in particular (that is different political cultures) are reliable predictors of absenteeism. We then assess the potential areas for research and suggest policies for countering absenteeism in the public sector based on our analysis.