Rejecting Innovation: How Italian Public Health Employees Are Killing Creativity and Digitalization in the Post-COVID Era?

Within the general context of new ideas generation, a gray area still concerns the organizational design of solutions related to creativity. In fact, if personal characteristics and other community-related issues have been quite explored so far, some organizational mechanisms still need to be deepened. In this chapter, we aim to investigate the impact of professional networks on Innovative Work Behavior in the local government to achieve public value. We investigate the contribution of creativity in the digitalization of Italian public administration considering the contribution of public health employees on developing knowledge management. Moreover, we inves-tigate a community of 190 employees of local healthcare presidiums (ASL) divided into three macrocategories: Deputy employees, Managers, and Senior Managers. An OSL regression model has been used to understand the degree of collaboration and advice among employees and their propensity to adopt digitalization in ordinary prac-tice considering social capital variables. Our results show that despite accelerating the ordinary work, the leverage of digitalization, and knowledge management, there is still a low application of process re-engineering, thus continuing in what literature defines “the comfort zone.” Our results consolidate the current literature about the creation of public value showing the resilience of public employees to change their state of mind denying any kind of innovation.