By addressing the above outlined research question and objectives, this study offers three central contributions to current debates in both BPM- and public sector-related research. First, we apply the BPM Culture Assessment to the public sector context. In doing so, we advance knowledge on BPM culture by offering an adjusted instrument, the BPM Culture Assessment for Public Administration. The refined instrument can be used by both researchers and practitioners to benchmark and investigate BPM culture in public administration. Second, the empirical analysis reveals insights that are specific for the public sector context addressed in this study. Inter alia, the results emphasize that many private sector logics cannot be applied one-on-one to public administration. Research on BPM in general and BPM culture in particular needs to consider the context in which organizations operate and treat public administration as an application domain of its own. Third, we derive an agenda for future research on BPM culture in public administration that can serve as basis for advancing knowledge in this still nascent research field.
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We start this article by summarizing existing research on organizational and BPM culture. In Sect. 2, we also take a closer look at the research into organizational and BPM culture in the public sector. Section 3 introduces the instrument and summarizes the research design and method (online survey). Results of the survey are presented in Sect. 4 and subsequently discussed in Sect. 5. We conclude this article with a short summary.
Only few scholars have actually measured organizational culture in relationship to BPM. Alves et al. (2018) tailored their research towards BPM and used interviews to analyze the extent of BPM values within an organization. In contrast to Alves, Hribar and Mendling (2014) used the Competing Values Framework (CVF), a very traditional and popular instrument to measure organizational culture in general. Additionally, they combined it with an BPM adoption analysis. Their findings show that of the four CVF culture types, the clan culture correlates best with a high level of BPM adoption. However, the hierarchy culture, which can be assumed to be dominant in public administration (Calciolari et al. 2018; Cameron and Quinn 2011; Grau and Moormann 2014), was found to be connected to the lowest level of BPM adoption. The study of Indihar Štemberger et al. (2018) followed a similar approach and also applied the CVF to analyze the relationship between different organizational culture types, introduction strategies and BPM adoption success.
The BPM Culture Assessment was developed with the goal of cross-sector validity. However, public administration differs from private sector organizations in many ways (Lyons et al. 2006; Marschollek and Beck 2012), for example with regard to BPM and organizational culture (Syed et al. 2018). While many private sector organizations have been surveyed for the instrument validation, only very few public servants found their way into the sample (Schmiedel et al. 2014). Thus, a perfect fit of the instrument in the public sector context is not per se given. This section gives a brief overview of how the eight BPM culture dimensions could be shaped in a public sector context and highlights major differences to private organizations regarding BPM culture.
We therefore conclude that all eight BPM culture dimensions are relevant to public administration as well. However, their manifestation may vary from that in private sector organizations. At times, these differences may be considerable as the discussion on the customer-orientation in public administration as a specific industry context (vom Brocke et al. 2016) exemplarily shows. The different manifestation of the eight BPM culture dimensions in public administration, as discussed from a theoretical perspective in this section, needs to be translated to the empirical assessment of BPM culture (see Sect. 3).
First, the forty original items were individually discussed with four experienced information systems and e-government researchers and furthermore with two public servants to better understand current realities in public administration regarding process management and organizational culture. In both cases, we went through the list of items and discussed each one. Additionally, we reviewed the overall structure of the survey. The feedback from both discussion meetings was recorded in form of protocols and subsequently qualitatively analyzed regarding the question of how representative and comprehensible the culture-related items and other questions are for the public sector context. Only then were results from both analyses compared and consolidated; the insights served as basis for the next iteration in our refinement process.
Finally, some respondents noted that many items are clearly geared towards structures of the private sector and reduced the understandability of the survey. Therefore, we decided to retain the informational texts on processes and process management and to also include the concept organizational unit in these texts. In Table 2, we provide examples of the information texts that were added and of how we adapted items.
To address these issues, instead of distributing the survey randomly across the whole public sector, we contacted chief information officers, chief digitalization officers and operations managers of various municipalities and asked them to distribute the survey within their organizations. This approach was based on reflections by King and He (2005) on how to overcome potential coverage errors that may occur in convenience sampling. This way, we were able to collect the opinions of employees of several organizational units, which we deemed necessary as we are interested in phenomena observable at the level of organizations and organizational units, wherefore having respondents from a few selected organizations is desirable (Pinsonneault and Kraemer 1993). Furthermore, the close collaboration with selected managers enabled us to gather a considerable number of responses from employees with various backgrounds and different levels of responsibility. As this research is rather explorative, we were interested in collecting perceptions and opinions of as many different employees as possible rather than creating a representative sample. The variety of administrative units, with a varying degree of responsibility and a varying degree of citizen contact is important to this study as organizational culture in general and BPM culture in particular refer to values shared and shaped by all employees.
By discussing the results of our analyses in the preceding sections, our study contributes to both IS and public sector research. These contributions are summarized in the following paragraphs in form of an agenda for research on BPM culture in public administration. We demonstrate that our study covered aspects that so far did not receive much scholarly attention and need to be addressed by further research. Thereby, we advance the original work of Schmiedel et al. (2014), first by proposing the BPM Culture Assessment for Public Administration as a means to benchmark and investigate BPM culture in a public sector context; and, second, by uncovering context-sensitive determinants of BPM culture in the public sector. While Schmiedel et al. (2014) focus their suggestions for further research on BPM culture as an independent variable influencing other phenomena, we offer insights into how BPM culture is shaped within public administration. Thus, this research can form the basis for both researchers and practitioners to better understand the formation and active management of process-oriented cultures. The contributions of our study are summarized in three central research questions that should be addressed by future research activities (see Table 8, research agenda).
Firstly, we propose to investigate the question What is the nature of BPM culture in public administration? Our research partially addresses concerns of prior research to better account for the characteristics of public administration in BPM research (Niehaves et al. 2013; Syed et al. 2018) by proposing the BPM Culture Assessment for Public Administration. Yet, there is a clear need for both more theoretical and empirical research in this area. Schmiedel et al. (2014) developed their original framework detached from any specific sector and subsequent research into this topic did not account for context-sensitivity either. However, our work suggests that at least the customer orientation dimensions of BPM culture are of less importance in public administration. The results of our research indicate that public sector employees have difficulties in unambiguously identifying the internal customers of their organizational unit and, more generally, expressed concerns regarding the fit of the customer concept with the public sector context. Thus, the two customer dimensions of BPM culture might not be the most appropriate for a public sector context, neither theoretically nor as operationalized in the BPM Culture Assessment. On the one hand, we see a need for further studies that shed more light on the characteristics of these two dimensions and their overall fit for public administration. These studies should be empirical, quantitative assessments of the actual shape of all BPM culture dimensions in public administration, i.e., benchmarking studies. On the other hand, there is a clear need for more theoretical endeavors that explore potentially relevant, yet unrevealed dimensions that could shape BPM culture in public administration (as opposed to process-oriented culture in for-profit organizations). For example, Syed et al. (2018) argue that with regard to BPM, the culture in public administration is more strongly shaped by its environment than in for-profit organizations, in particular by political decisions. Hence, environment-orientation could be a relevant dimension for BPM culture in public administration. 2ff7e9595c
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