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The purpose of this paper is to enhance understanding of the conceptualisation and operationalisation of public value in practice by applying Moore's (1995) strategic triangle as an analytical framework to study strategic management and management control practices in relation to public value.

The paper uses an interpretative longitudinal case study approach including qualitative methods of document studies and interviews between 2017 and 2019.

In the strategic triangle, the three nodes of authorising environment, public value creation and operational capacity are interdependent, and alignment is a necessity for a strategy to be successful. But this alignment is vulnerable. The findings suggest three propositions: (1) strategic alignment is vulnerable to management control practices having a strong focus on performance measurements, (2) strategic alignment is vulnerable to standardised management control practices and (3) strategic alignment is vulnerable to politically driven management control practices.

With the strategic triangle as a base, this paper tries to understand what kind of management control practices enable and/or constrain public value, as there has been a call for this kind of research. In this way it adds to earlier research on public value, to the growing interest in the strategic triangle as an analytical framework in analysing empirical material and to the request for more empirical studies on the subject. The strategic triangle also embraces political factors, government agendas and political leadership for which there has also been a call for more research.

The purpose of this paper is to explain how public sector accounting has changed and is changing due to public governance development.

This paper conducts a traditional literature review based on selected studies in the fields of accounting, public administration and management. The aim of the review is to explain how diverse forms of public governance influence the fate of public sector accounting, including accountability, performance measurement, budgeting and reporting practices.

Public governance is developing into more inclusive but also complex forms, resulting in network, collaborative and digital governance. Consequently, the focus and practices of public sector accounting have changed, as reflected in new types of accountability, performance measurement, budgeting and reporting practices.

Drawing upon literature from different fields enables a deeper understanding of the changes in public sector accounting. Nevertheless, the intention is not to execute a systematic literature review but to provide an overview and resolve the scattered body of knowledge generated by previous contributions. The areas of risk management and auditing were not included and deserve further attention.

This paper discusses the need to continually redefine and reassess public sector accounting practices, by recognising the interdependencies between different actors, citizens and digital technologies.

In recent decades, human resource management (HRM) in health organizations has faced several problems associated with employees' efficiency and happiness, which has been particularly exacerbated after the pandemic crisis. In this scenario, this study seeks to analyze nurses' turnover intention by comparing Portuguese public and private healthcare organizations. As determining factors, transformational leadership, perceived organizational support and organizational commitment were considered.

A survey was digitally applied to 277 nurses from Portuguese public and private healthcare organizations.

Results suggested that there are differences in nurses' turnover intentions: there is a greater likelihood of nurses in the private sector planning to leave the healthcare organizations the nurses work for when compared to public hospital nurses. Furthermore, nurses in public hospitals perceive lower levels of transformational leadership, organizational support and organizational commitment than those in the private sector. The underlying cause as to the intention of leaving the public sector resides in normative commitment. On the other hand, lower affective commitment explains the intention to abandon the private sector.

This study is relevant for human resource managers and administrators in public and private hospitals since it enables a diagnosis of the situation, as well as a definition of the most appropriate policies for each of the sectors as a strategy to attract and retain health professionals.

This study is significant as the study provides a better understanding of the reasons which lead nurses to consider leaving the organization where the nurses work and the difference between nursing professionals in public and private hospitals.

The purpose of this study is to examine the implementation of human resource management (HRM) practices that facilitate innovation in the public sector in a developing country.

Qualitative method was engaged whereby a semi-structured interview was conducted to get the responses of two groups of employees which are top management and executive in two types of public organizations which are awarded and non-awarded. The collected data was later analyzed thematically.

The results show that there are differences and similarities among the public agencies in terms of their implementation of HRM practices that facilitate innovation. Apparently, the awarded public agencies do follow HRM practices that really facilitate innovation such as local training, provide more types of rewards to their employees and set a higher minimum level of innovation in their performance evaluation.

This research confines only 10 public agencies in Malaysia. Future studies might want to include a larger sample size to make the findings more extensive. It also would be interesting to know different approaches in HRM implemented in the private organizations as well as to examine their influences on performance and other organizational factors.

Good and fair HRM practices such as training, reward and performance appraisal practices that focus on innovation facilitate and produce more innovative employees and organization innovation. Thus, public managers should implement them to a higher extent.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that aims to engage the qualitative method in understanding how HRM practices can facilitate innovation in a developing country.

Recently, the relationship between gender representation and organizational performance has been the focus of various studies. However, some research gaps still exist. First, in the healthcare sector, this relationship has been poorly explored. Moreover, in public management studies, researchers focusing on performance tend to focus exclusively on gender differences at the top and/or middle management level. This research aims at exploring the relationship between women's representation and performance in public hospitals at all organizational levels.

To achieve the research objective, 63 healthcare organisations were analysed through ordinary least squares regressions on panel data from 2012 to 2018.

Results show that, in the hospital setting, gender diversity and financial performance are related at every organizational level.

To the authors' knowledge, this is one of the first studies focusing on the link between gender and performance at every level of professional and employment category; avoiding focusing exclusively on top management, which was the case in previous studies on the topic. Moreover, it contributes to a poorly explored literature which is gender studies in public healthcare management.

Although previous studies have addressed the positive relationship between trust and performance, existing research has paid limited attention to management that shapes valued organisation behaviours important for effectiveness and wellbeing. This paper examines how organisational trust and performance unfold in the context of one private and one public sector case organisation in management change.

A multiple case study design using qualitative methods is applied to analyse textual data gathered from management and employee perspectives, juxtaposing private and public organisations.

Management change renewed decision-making in both organisations through role clarification. Through clearer roles, expectations were better managed in the collaborating units of a private organisation case and of the employees in a public organisation case impacting on organisational ability and predictability. Along with organisational communication, these develop trust which seems to be reflected in employee job performance at the organisational level.

This paper contributes to the gap in qualitative, empirical and contextual research by providing understanding about how intra-organisational trust is related to performance. Further, this paper sheds light on the vulnerability within an organisation during management change and adds to the somewhat scarce studies of relationships between trust and performance by juxtaposing the two contexts. Consequently, this enables one to reveal different approaches to trust and performance between the two sectors.

Healthcare organizations worldwide were badly hit by the “surprise” of the pandemic. Hospitals in particular are trying hard to manage problems it caused, searching for solutions to protect the health of citizens and reorienting operations. The implementation of resilience solutions in the coping phase and the ability to react promptly and redefine activities is essential. Integrating crisis management and resiliency literature, this paper discusses how health organizations were able to cope with adversity during the crisis.

The research is conducted through a case study of a large Italian hospital, the Gemelli Polyclinic Foundation, which was one of the leading hospitals in the Italian response to the pandemic.

The case reports actions taken in order to continue functioning and to maintain core activities despite severe adversity. The overall response of the Gemelli was the result of the three types of response: behavioral (effective leadership), cognitive (rapid resource reallocation) and the contextual reinforcement (multiagency network response). The authors highlight how an integrative framework of crisis management and resiliency could be applied to healthcare organizations in the coping phase of the pandemic. The experience of the Gemelli can thus be useful for other hospitals and organizations facing external crises and for overall improvement of crisis management and resilience. Responding to crisis brings the opportunity to make innovations introduced during emergencies structural, and embed them moving forward.

The paper focuses only on the coping phase of the response to the pandemic, whereas building long-term resilience requires understanding how organizations accumulate knowledge from crises and adapt to the “new normal.”

The paper responds to the call for empirical studies to advance knowledge of an integrative framework of crisis management and resiliency theories with reference to complex organizations such as healthcare.

The paper aims to understand how the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) influenced public employees' perception of smart working and how this approach was used during the pandemic. The authors asked about smart working's positive and negative aspects and how these changed during the pandemic.

The authors explored the strengths and weaknesses of smart working before and after COVID-19. The authors interviewed 27 Italian public employees who had experienced smart working before the pandemic. The questions and discussion aimed to broadly explore the strengths and weaknesses of smart working and smart working's impact on working performance, work relationships and work–life balance (WLB).

Smart working had a widespread and positive impact on organizational flexibility. Smart working improved the response and resilience of Italian public organizations to the pandemic. However, some critical factors emerged, such as the right to disconnect and the impact on WLB.

The authors suggest that the pandemic exposed the need for public administrations to consolidate work flexibility practices, such as smart working, by paying more attention to the impact of these practices on the whole organization and human resources management (HRM) policies and practices.

This study makes an important contribution to the literature on the public sector by discussing the positive and negative aspects of smart working. The study also provides managerial and policy implications of the use of smart working in public administrations.

Health-care systems around the globe share several pressing challenges – including increasing costs and patient outcomes. Innovative arrangements, such as public–private partnerships (PPP) can be adopted to help address these challenges. Although the promise of PPPs is great, so are its peril if the arrangements are not managed and regulated adequately through the contracting process. Yet, PPP arrangements can introduce their own unique set of problems. This paper aims to analyze how PPPs contracting accounts for three major problems identified reviewing the: performance measurement and audit; determination of compensation and risk management–related issues.

The authors used a case study approach to analyze contracting among health-care PPPs in two countries: Italy and the USA. With a structured review performed on Scopus database using a keywords Boolean research, the authors identified three recurring major issues to investigate in two selected cases, one per country. For each major issue, the authors defined several sub-issues retrieved from a widely used institutional framework. In each sub-issue, a documental analysis on all published information related to the signed contract has been performed identifying the approaches used by the two organizations.

The authors find that PPP contracting in the USA case seems to be oriented more toward managing institutional change as well as more flexibility in the deductibility and compensation determination for organizations and providers, suggesting this organization is more oriented to change in general. The authors find that PPP contracting in Italy more clearly delineate the allocation of risk between organizations that engage in PPPs, suggesting a more practical approach.

PPP is complex. Contracting helps manage the complexity of these arrangements. This case study approach to PPP contracting highlights the variation in contracting approaches across two different countries. Policymakers and health-care managers need to ensure that PPP contracting clearly delineates auditing and performance measurement, compensation and risk management.

The authors’ analysis sheds light on the different approaches to arranging health-care PPPs in two different country settings. More research should be done to connect these different approaches to important outcomes, such as patient and organizational finances, as well as expanding the scope of countries adopting PPP in health care.

Drawing on paradox theory, this study explores how ambidextrous sustainability relates to organisational performance in hybrid organisations represented by Swedish municipal housing corporations, and how this relationship is contingent on the organisational structure of these organisations.

The study relies on the data collected from Swedish municipal housing corporations. These data sources consist of a survey sent to the management team members in Swedish municipal housing corporations, financial and non-financial archival data on these corporations, interviews with the management team and board members, and observations of meetings involving the management team and board of directors at a Swedish municipal housing corporation. Quantitative data of the study were analysed using descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and linear multiple regression analysis. Qualitative data were analysed employing deductive thematic analysis and were used to illustrate and discuss the results of the quantitative analysis.

The quantitative findings show that ambidextrous sustainability, i.e. the alignment between an explorative orientation and an exploitative orientation towards sustainability, has a weakly positive relationship with financial performance and a positive relationship with social performance in hybrid organisations represented by Swedish municipal housing corporations. The study further shows that a high level of the structural element “connectedness” weakened the relationship between the ambidextrous sustainability and financial performance of the organisation in the study. In contrast, a lower level of connectedness reinforced and strengthened this relationship. Our qualitative material illustrates how the quantitative findings could be explained by the interaction between the board of directors and the management team of these hybrid organisations.

The study shows how ambidextrous sustainability, employed for conceptualisation of the sustainability strategy in hybrid organisations, represented by Swedish municipal housing corporations, can impact on facets of performance (i.e. financial, social and environmental) differently. The study further highlights the importance of organisational structures in these relationships in a hybrid context.