Integrating digitalization opportunities into innovative public organizations' management process

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on public institutions management system which imposed a digital transformation of all processes. This study explores how integrating digitalization improves management processes within Romanian public organizations. It is based on a survey approach and on "snowball" sampling technique for collecting answers from 377 employees. The analysis was developed with structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), prediction-oriented segmentation (PLS-POS), and multigroup analysis (PLS-MGA). The obtained results show that the digitalization of public institutions has a positive effect on all five managerial functions, namely on planning, organizing, coordinating, motivating, and controlling. The findings revealed three distinct homogenous groups of respondents using a posteriori segmentation, presenting variations in tool usage and function execution. There are multi-faceted contributions of this study: (1) in terms of theory, as it contributes to the literature by reinforcing existing knowledge; (2) in terms of methodology as it employs triangulation, and (3) in terms of practical implications by offering insights for decision-makers aiming to enhance institutional dynamics in public administration, albeit within the limitations of its geographic focus. In the last part of the paper, future research directions for integrating digitalization within public institutions are presented.