In search of the enabling factors for public services resilience: A multidisciplinary and configurational approach

Abstract

This paper investigates public services’ (PSs) resilience during turbulent times, such as COVID-19, to contribute to relevant academic calls that aim at identifying which combination of factors might lead PSs to develop resilient approaches during crises, despite them suffering from intrinsic management and organizational flaws. Therefore, we adopt fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis on 19 resilient Italian PSs and we test for possible effective configurations of enabling factors emerging from a literature review of: Crisis Management, Resource-Based View, Organizational Theory, Stakeholder Theory, Digital Innovation Management, which typically the main PSs’ flaws are intercepted in. Our results show that the three configurations of enabling factors for resilience stem from human-based and continuous learning processes to be addressed through knowledge-based adaptive approaches. In this way, our research proves its usefulness by providing a set of insights to PSs’ practitioners on the need to invest in collaborative learning processes that, by combining specific enabling factors, might innovatively mitigate the typical PSs’ managerial and organizational flaws during crises.

Keywords

• Public services
• Crises
• Resilience
• FsQCA
• COVID-19