Ms. Wolf is the Director of a large Agency, a branch of a national public administration dealing with formal compliance and respect of the law. Her “military branch”
is made of civil servants working as inspectors. Ms. Wolf has recently noted a growing level of absenteeism, conflicts at work and rising employee turnover. Not being an expert in the field, she has started reading a book on people management but what she reads does not look totally convincing to her. She read: “Happy employees ➔ happy customers ➔ happy employees”.
Such an employee-customer-employee sequence is the underlying behavioral mantra for many for-profit firms, especially in the service sectors or, more in generally in the front-end customer contact activities. This applies both to profit-oriented organizations, in which higher customer satisfaction could mean higher prices, therefore higher affluence and eventually the possibility to compensate the productive/
effective employees via monetary rewards. The same applies also to non-profit organizations – such as public hospitals or volunteering associations – in which the satisfaction of the patients or those being served may be the ultimate trigger and act as a powerful implicit incentive for the employees. Unfortunately, for the enthusiasts of the happy-customer-happy-employee supporters, there are institutional and organizational barriers which prevent this from happening. This is especially the case of employees working for organizations whose mission serves a higher, overarching aim and clashes with the “satisfaction” of the very “customers” they interact with –the public audience or citizens. This case focuses on the judicial police officers of inspectors. Such jobs, compared to private employees, are generally performed by public servants, often presenting high levels of dissatisfaction with their job (Baldwin and Farley 2001; Rainey 1989; Steel and Warner 1990). These jobs also offer consideration of great(er) level of bureaucracy and they have to deal with the limited opportunity to realize their professional satisfaction (i.e. because of the lack of measurability of their actual performance, limited career opportunities, public awareness and recognition and so on). In fact, relative to other types of organizations, these public administrations appear to be problematic in terms of work engagement, job satisfaction, and work-related stress (WRS) (De Simone et al.
2016b). Notwithstanding, such employees appear to be infused with an institutional mission they wish to pursue. A mission that often relies upon altruistic or higher order needs, characterizing the so-called “public servant motivation”. When the possibility to offer “traditional” external incentive is limited, and the likelihood to leverage upon implicit incentive (i.e. customer satisfaction) is practically impossible, can organizations such as these still aim at enhancing the employee motivation?
This very question that is perturbing Ms. Wolf’s mind.....

Questions 

1. Does the work setting of the Agency (external, internal with/without the public)
affect the perception of stress? Why/why not? Would it be possible to mitigate its effects in any possible way?
2. What is the relationship between work related stress and job satisfaction? And between job satisfaction and engagement?
3. Is it possible to identify some typologies of inspectors? For example, considering the quotes, to analyse any gender- or age-related themes in relation to work stressors?
4. If the organization can offer a good quality of working life, can managers rely on that? Would that be enough to mitigate the work-related stress and trigger employee engagement in a sustainable way?