The role of Post-New Public Management in shaping innovation: the case of a public hospital
| Author | Sara Melo,Lode De Waele,Tobias Polzer |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0020852320977626 |
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
The role of Post-New
Public Management in
shaping innovation: the
case of a public hospital
Sara Melo
Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Lode De Waele
University of Antwerp, Belgium and Utrecht University, NL
Tobias Polzer
University of Sussex, UK
Abstract
This article examines how the Post-New Public Management administrative
model adopted by a teaching hospital in Portugal shapes innovation processes.
We find that innovation is a multi-level organizational phenomenon that relies substan-
tially on the interplay of three factors: (1) trust-based professional autonomy at the
individual level; (2) an intra-organizational collaborative approach in innovation (re)
design at the team level; and (3) staff involvement/commitment towards the hospital’s
strategy in the implementation of innovations at the organizational level. Additionally,
innovation is facilitated by interconnected formal and informal processes that mutually
reinforce each other. The study contributes to the literature on innovation and admin-
istrative models by providing a nuanced understanding of how intra-organizational
innovation processes take place within a Post-New Public Management model.
As such, it is one of the first attempts to empirically analyse and link the administrative
model of Post-New Public Management with innovation.
Corresponding author:
Sara Melo, Queen’s Management School, Queen’s University Belfast, Riddel Hall, 185 Stranmillis Road, Belfast
BT9 5EE, UK.
Email: s.melo@qub.ac.uk
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
!The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/0020852320977626
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
2022, Vol. 88(4) 1032–1049
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
Points for practitioners
This research provides an account of how a Post-New Public Management administra-
tive model can foster intra-organizational innovation through collaboration across dif-
ferent hierarchies and professions. The article also helps to better understand the role
of organizational dynamics at individual, team and organizational levels on innovation, as
well as how these can shape and be shaped by formal and informal processes.
Keywords
innovation, intra-organizational collaboration, organizational commitment, Post-New
Public Management, trust
Introduction
Public sector reforms have been guided by administrative models, that is, ‘visions
of what the substance of public management reform has been (or, in some cases,
should be)’ (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011: viii). These models provide core ideas and
guidance for management in the public sector. This also includes the scope and
channelling of innovation processes (Hartley et al., 2013).
There is currently renewed scholarly interest in innovation in the public sector
(De Vries et al., 2018). However, echoing Rashman et al. (2009) and Torfing and
Triantafillou (2016), it remains so far largely unclear how innovation specifically
unfolds in different administrative models. The recent innovation literature often
looks at hybrid organizations, inter-organizational settings and the integration of
stakeholders (Bekkers and Tummers, 2018; Osborne et al., 2016; Torfing, 2019;
Van Eijk et al., 2019). Here, corresponding issues such as the role of innovation
drivers, networking and leadership (Lewis et al., 2018), technology (Lember et al.,
2018), or inter-organizational learning (Hartley and Rashman, 2018) are discussed.
With this, however, current research has somewhat lost sight of the traditional
processual perspective on innovation (Garud et al., 2013; Moore and Hartley,
2008), often targeting service-quality improvements (Damanpour, 2017).
Since the 1980s, reforms have mainly been underpinned by the models referred
to as New Public Management (NPM) and Post-NPM
1
(Hood, 1991; Reiter and
Klenk, 2019). While NPM envisioned increasing economic efficiency and results
through innovation fostered by competition, Post-NPM focuses on advancing
public value (such as social cohesion and enabling transparency) through innova-
tion encouraged by the strengthening of collaborative governance (Bryson et al.,
2014). In addition, as the main focus of these models is argued to be different, the
relevance of performance dimensions is contingent on the adopted model (Bryson
et al., 2014; Kuhlmann and J€
akel, 2013). For instance, key performance dimen-
sions emphasized by NPM include efficiency and market competition (Diefenbach,
2009; Fattore et al., 2012). However, NPM reforms have been criticized for paying
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Melo et al.
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