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The current organizational environment in all sectors, including the public sector, has become increasingly volatile, difficult to control and completely uncertain. Globalization, restructuring and new technology developments have brought tremendous challenges marked by the short life of products, exacerbated competition and clients who are becoming increasingly more demanding. Thus, today, due to the influence of these multiple changes at all levels, organizations need to adopt a continuous readaptation process to survive in this changing world (Choi & Ruona, 2011; Reginato et al, 2016).
One of the major changes that took place in the public sector is digital transformation, such as technologies of e-procurement and online tax filing. In fact, currently, to communicate with a new generation of citizens who never knew a world without Wi-Fi and social media, public organizations have no choice but to incorporate new technologies into their operations and processes (Heinze et al., 2018). Digital transformation is also dictated by budget cuts and calls for more efficiency in public services. However, digital transformation entails a range of immediate and extensive impacts on public-sector organizations. The transformation remodels organizational processes, work tasks, job design, organizational structure, knowledge and skills, values, attitudes and the behavior of employees (Gurtoo & Tripathy, 2000; Hon et al., 2011). For these reasons, the success of digitalization projects is tremendously determined by their sincere and wholehearted adoption by an organization’s members (Gurtoo & Tripathy, 2000). Hence, public organizations need to pay particular attention to their employees’ support and acceptance of digital transformation (Choi & Ruona, 2011).
What are the determinants of the attitude of civil servants toward the adoption of digitalization projects? In this article, this research question is addressed with a case study on the digitalization of public procurement in Belgium.
Public procurement refers to “the purchase by governments and state-owned enterprises of goods, services and works” (OECD, 2017). Given that public procurement accounts for a substantial portion of taxpayers’ money, governments need to carry it out efficiently and with high standards of conduct to ensure high quality service delivery and safeguard the public interest (OECD, 2017). The dematerialization of public procurement is one of the most innovative public management initiatives in Europe today (Alomar & De Visscher, 2019). It can be defined as “ the integration of digital technologies in the replacement or redesign of paper-based procedures throughout the procurement cycle” (OECD, 2017). Given this definition, e-procurement represents a radical change for civil servants in charge of public procurement procedures (public buyers). Since governments want to accelerate the digital transformation of public procurement by minimizing public buyers’ resistance to change, it is important to identify and analyze the determinants of buyers’ attitudes toward accepting e-procurement.
The added value of this article is threefold. Theoretically speaking, on the one hand, the author contributes to the limited and scattered academic evidence about e-procurement adoption in the public sector. Although a rich body of literature exists regarding the organizational adoption decisions of e-procurement systems and their impact on organizational performance, little is known about the factors that affect the adoption of these systems by civil servants. Moreover, e-procurement digitalization is a type of digital transformation occurring in public organizations: by identifying the determinants of civil servants’ attitudes toward adopting e-procurement, the author contributes to the subfield of public administration and public management research that examines digital transformation processes.