Public sector employees in a challenging work environment
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| Author | Trui Steen,Carina Schott |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12572 |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
SYMPOSIUM ARTICLE
Public sector employees in a challenging work
environment
Trui Steen
1
| Carina Schott
2
1
Public Governance Institute, KU Leuven,
Belgium
2
Utrecht School of Governance, Utrecht
University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Correspondence
Carina Schott, Utrecht School of Governance,
Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Email: c.schott@uu.nl
Funding information
Research programme ‘Double Bind’VIDI grant,
project number 452-10-001, awarded by the
Netherlands Organization for Scientific
Research (NWO).
Public sector employees are expected to perform well in a work
environment that is characterized by a variety of challenges. This
Symposium aims to shed light on how environmental changes
impact the shared identity, attitudes and behaviour of public sector
employees; how public sector employees take charge of continu-
ous change and deal with challenges in their work environment;
and how organizations can help employees to tackle such work-
related challenges. We identify four specific gaps in literature—
some methodological and some more substantive in nature—and
explain how this Symposium helps to address these gaps.
1|INTRODUCTION
This Symposium is devoted to public sector employees working in a demanding work environment. Public sector
employees are expected to perform well in a work environment that is characterized by a variety of challenges,
some already long known and some related to more recent trends. Most challenges apply to the whole public
sector, but there are also challenges that are more dominant in particular areas of public sector work where the
environment is changing more rapidly. For example, think of the teachers who have to teach students with differ-
ent cultural and language backgrounds at a time when teacher shortage is high. A challenge traditionally identified
in public administration research concerns employees in public organizations being confronted with high levels of
red tape (Bozeman et al. 1992; Davis 2013). Furthermore, public sector organizations are characterized by con-
flicting values and goal ambiguity (Hood 1991; Rainey et al. 1995). Employees in public organizations are chal-
lenged to balance ‘traditional’public values such as integrity, neutrality, and legality, on the one hand, with
‘business-like’values such as efficiency, effectiveness, and responsiveness on the other hand. As society gets
more diverse, representativeness is increasingly difficult to realize, thereby adding to the already ‘complex set of
objectives that public managers and organizations must pursue’(Rainey 2009, p. 108). In addition, challenges are
associated with the growing expectation to serve citizens and to act in a responsive way. For example, in the
field of inspection services we detect a recently intensified shift from command and control based inspection
practices to responsive regulation (Rutz et al. 2017). This trend leads to changed inspector–inspectee relation-
ships in which inspectors do not simply enforce rules and regulations, but are also expected to take into account
inspectees’needs and demands (Vigoda 2002).
Received: 25 September 2018 Revised: 19 October 2018 Accepted: 13 November 2018
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12572
Public Administration. 2019;97:3–10. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 3
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