Change Management in the Public Sector: A Preliminary Analysis

This paper presents a literature review of 64 studies published in the Journal of Organizational Change Management, aiming at examining the current state of research on organizational change and public sector management, with a focus on the use of change management and process optimization in public administrations. The discussion focuses primarily on a keyword analysis, based on the results obtained with bibliographic and bibliometric tools. The keywords were divided into four categories based on their frequency and persistence: intermittent, trendy, core, and emerging topics. The VOSviewer software package was used to identify the relationships between the keywords. The review highlights the importance of organizational change and change management in the public sector, emphasizing the need for careful planning, effective communication, employee involvement, and a supportive organizational culture. The results of the review provide valuable insights into the current state of research in these areas and can inform future research on change management in the public sector. This literature review focuses on change management practices with a specific focus on the public sector, which is rarely investigated in the literature. Also, it provides a detailed analysis of the existing knowledge about this topic. In addition, the use of multivariate statistical techniques provides an in-depth understanding of the relationships among keywords, thus providing an original contribution to the literature on the theme.