| Summary: | Employee surveys in public sector show a tendency for employees to be dissatisfied with change processes that are carried out in the sector. The public sector is facing demands for efficiency, digitization, and user orientation with a continuous need for development and restructuring processes. Almost 1/3 of all employees in Norway work in the public sector, and it will probably have a significant gain if public organizations succeed in change processes to a greater extent. Change management is widely discussed in the literature on management in public organizations. In this master’s thesis, I wanted to address a topic that has not previously been covered to any great extent: what are the prerequisites before changes take place in the public sector? This master’s thesis is a case study that sheds light on the extent to which the contextual features of public organizations influence their possibilities for change. Insight into this will provide an understanding of how change processes must be adapted to the contextual features to succeed better with change. Through a comparative case study of the University Hospital of Northern Norway (UNN), the Armed Forces and the Norwegian Patent Office, where I have carried out a document analysis in which I shed light on this issue. The case study shows that there are strong indications that the contextual features within which the public organizations operate make change difficult. The features that make change difficult are very dominant in the external context. Internal context has variation in the features, where some features can create opportunities for change. The analysis also shows that the cases have several characteristics of public organizations, and have many similar contextual features, which strengthens the assumption that public organizations operate in a unique context. publishedVersion
|
|---|