Caught Between Duty and Disruption: A Psychosocial Model of Civil Servants’ Adaptation to Forced Digitalization.

Résumé

Abstract

Digital transformation has become a governance imperative for public administrations the world over, yet its implementation keeps running into the same overlooked paradox: the civil servants asked to carry the change forward are also the people most exposed to its psychosocial strain. Scholarship has examined technology acceptance and organisational change management at length, but rarely together, and the compound psychosocial pressures that forced digitalization produces inside bureaucracies remain thinly theorised. This article proposes an original framework — the Psychosocial Adaptation Model for Forced Digitalization (PAM-FD) — that draws on three complementary traditions: the Technology Acceptance Model (Davis, 1989), the Transtheoretical Model of behaviour change (Prochaska & DiClemente, 1983), and institutional theory (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). The model turns on four constructs: Psychosocial Readiness (PSR), the Institutional Pressure Index (IPI), the Psychosocial Double Bind (PDB), and Change Management Leverage (CML). Taking Morocco’s public sector as its anchoring case PAM-FD maps five sequential stages of adaptation: institutional shock, cognitive dissonance, negotiated compliance, adaptive internalisation, and transformative engagement. For each stage it sets out the dominant psychosocial barriers, the isomorphic pressures at work, and the change-management interventions most likely to help. The framework links individual psychology to institutional dynamics, brings the Transtheoretical Model back into organisational scholarship, and introduces “performative compliance” as a meaningful intermediate state between surface adoption and genuine transformation. The article closes with a structured empirical research agenda and practical implications for those leading public-sector digital change.

Keywords : digital transformation; change management; public administration; civil servants; psychosocial adaptation; Morocco;