Abstract
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”.
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Questions
Questions
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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?
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What is the relationship between work related stress and job satisfaction? And between job satisfaction and engagement?
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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?
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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?
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De Simone, S., Giustiniano, L., Pinna, R. (2018). Case 9: Stressed and Demotivated Public Servants… Looking for a (Motivational) Miracle at Paywell Agency. In: Malik, A. (eds) Strategic Human Resource Management and Employment Relations. Springer Texts in Business and Economics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0399-9_23
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