Progressing toward Teal Organizations: An Assessment of Organizational Innovation in the Spanish Public Administrations

Abstract

Organizational innovation can be a promising path for public administrations to follow to become more supportive of the realization of sustainability goals. With the Teal Organizations framework as a reference, this study explores organizational innovation in Spanish public administrations by assessing the extent and patterns of the implementation of selected innovative organizational practices, with the aim to help them improve. This study performs multivariate and individual analyses of the variance and factor analysis of the responses given by Spanish public sector employees to an online questionnaire about the degree of implementation of certain practices in their organization. The results show that there are little differences in the degree of implementation of these practices among the national, regional, and local administrations and that this implementation does not seem to be guided by the three principles of Teal Organizations: self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose, but by five factors combining them, labeled as trust, task assignment, meetings management, hierarchy, and community and values. Because of the low degree of implementation of the practices under the community and values factor and the comparatively low effort required to introduce them, these practices appear as interesting options to explore when considering administrative reforms.