Bartuševičienė, Ilona

Different Digital Governance maturity models are established; however, limited research has examined their applicability at the local government level, particularly concerning the interrelations among dimensions such as Strategy, Employees, and Processes. Understanding these connections is vital for municipalities striving to enhance resilience through Digital Governance amidst uncertainties. This study aims to develop, justify, and empirically test a Triadic Model capturing the relationships among its dimensions, assessing Digital Governance maturity in local governments during crisis response. To achieve this, a quantitative survey was conducted across all 60 Lithuanian municipalities, and the collected data were analyzed using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) to validate the factor structure and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to test the hypothesized relationships among variables and latent constructs. The findings reveal significant interrelations among the model’s dimensions in enhancing municipal resilience. Research proposes a comprehensive framework for assessing Digital Governance maturity at three levels—Digital Consistency, Digital Adaptation, and Digital Transformation—and examines their interactive influence during crises. The results highlight how the dimensions of the Triadic Model collectively reflect municipal responses, emphasizing the importance of an integrated, staged approach to digitalization. This validated framework advances understanding of Digital Governance in local authorities and underscores the relevance of interrelated key dimensions for fostering resilience in uncertain contexts. In addition to model validation, the study also explores practical variations in Digital Governance maturity among Lithuanian municipalities, demonstrating the model’s applicability as a diagnostic tool for local governments.

By highlighting municipal capacity to cope with adversities, this study raises important questions about how the maturity of digital governance interacts with various resilience strategies and how that interaction influences municipalities' crisis response. Although most of the existing research (Shen et al., 2023; Profiroiu and Nastacă, 2021; Carlsson et al., 2023) reveals that digital transformation serves as a facilitator that enables the transition from recovery resilience to transformative resilience, others (Gangneux and Joss, 2022) argue that the pandemic was a major driver for digital transformation. Thus, this study attempts to reveal the interconnections between digital governance and organizational ability to cope with adversities through their resilience. Using different levels to explore digital maturity, that is, digital consistency, digital adaptation, and digital transformation, and different levels to explore resilience, that is, bounce-back, bounce-forward, and bounce-beyond, we analyze these interconnections to find out whether higher digital governance municipalities demonstrate higher resilience levels and vice versa. Methodology/methods. Systematic literature review and nonparametric structural equation modeling (SEM-PLS) methodology. Results (preliminary). The systematic literature review results allowed us to conclude that digital governance has been pivotal during the pandemic, enabling organizations to continue to function during crises across different contexts. However, we observed that most studies address resilience from a general perspective, such as resilience, capacity to change, or crisis. The same was concluded about digital governance. We found that most articles examining organizational capacity to cope with adversities by enhancing digital governance capacity approached it from a general perspective or used the concept of digital transformation, which in some cases was used to signal separate elements of digitalization instead of true digital transformation. Thus, these findings suggest exploring the municipal capacity to cope with adversity from the perspective of different levels of digital and resiliency maturity. Further, using the data collected from all sixty municipalities in Lithuania, we will explore the interconnectedness amongst different levels of digitalization and resilience, which could provide insights into whether higher levels of digital governance enhance municipal resilience. Originality. In seeking to understand more about the resilience development patterns in municipalities through the different maturity levels of digitalization, we have turned our attention to the interactions that provide more profound knowledge about the development patterns of municipal capacities to cope with adversities through the enablement of digital governance. This project has received funding from the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT), agreement No. S-VIS-23-10.

Previous studies have revealed that organizational resilience can be characterized by their intrinsic ability to maintain and regain a dynamically stable state, enabling them to successfully continue their activities after various shocks or function effectively in an environment of continuing threats. Scholars also highlight the prominence of employee engagement, trust, and commitment to strengthening organizational capacity. However, empirical evidence demonstrates that organizational resilience development patterns are commonly explored from the managerial level rather than the employee viewpoint. Consequently, this research aims to analyze the extent to which perceptions regarding the levels of organizational resilience are perceived equivalently from the standpoint of both management and employees. By gathering the data from 591 respondents and applying the structural equation modelling technique, this study elucidated that different dimensions of organizational resilience are positively interconnected in both groups and that perceptions regarding organizational resilience are similar (CMIN = 3.010; CFI = 0.924; TLI = 0.904 and RMSEA = 0.0041). Meanwhile, exogenous effects confirmed no direct effect of network dimension on change-ready & learning in the group of managers. In this group, we only confirmed the direct effects of the network on leadership & culture as well as leadership & culture to change-ready & learning.

Public sector organisations are increasingly tasked to adapt and evolve, dealing with shocks and disturbances without compromising their role as wealth generators. However, as complex adaptive systems, they do not manifest equal capacity for adaptation and evolution in response to complexity. This article explores the role of resilience in public sector organisations and sheds light on the interactions between different elements of resilience that enable these organisations to navigate complexity. The study combines a systematic literature review and a quantitative empirical investigation to propose and test a framework of organisational resilience in the public sector. It identifies planning, adaptation, and enhanced learning as critical phases to explain organisational resilience and how they intervene dynamically when dealing with adversity. The empirical investigation analyses the Lithuanian public sector organisations and explains the relationships among the model dimensions. The paper offers a model for theory development to understand the dimensions of the resilience of complex adaptive public sector organisations and how they interrelate with each other. For practice, it suggests which aspects are relevant to help public sector organisations develop their capacity to build resilience and overcome adversity.

Purpose – This paper aims to model organizational resilience structure. Based on the central insights of the scientific literature, organizational resilience is modelled as the result of an organizational capacity to bounce- back and bounce-forward. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on a quantitative empirical study to support the structural perspective of organizational resilience and investigate the relationships among the dimensions to test the above hypothesis by applying confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modelling (SEM) methods. Findings – The results confirmed three models that could be adopted to assess organizational resilience. The first model endorsed endogenous positive interrelationship among all three dimensions. The second model indicated that bounce-back dimensions, i.e. network and leadership and culture, have endogenous effects. Only the leadership and culture dimension is positively associated with a bounce-forward, i.e. change-ready and learning dimension. And the third model demonstrated that the network dimension is linked to leadership and culture, which is linked to the change ready and learning dimension. Originality/value – This study attempts to provide empirical evidence identifying the links between the bounce-back and bounce-forward stages of organizational resilience. These results contribute to the development of organizational resilience theory, confirming the conceptual statements that resilience is the ability to return to the routine and to adapt to the changing environment by overcoming dynamic events, stressing the idea of the importance of enhanced learning capacity, which allows for growth by constantly learning from oneself by gaining unique experiences.