ILPC 2027

Explaining job satisfaction of public professionals: policy alienation and politicking in an organization

At the moment, there is an intense debate going on concerning professionals and professionalism in the public sector (Freidson, 2001; Noordegraaf & Steijn, forthcoming 2010). This debate is often focused on the pressures of those professionals who work at the front-line of public service, such as teachers and physicians. These professionals have to deal with numerous pressures, such as the emancipation of clients, the demands of politicians, and the (ir)rationalities of their managers. As a result of these pressures, public professionals may face declining morale, less motivation to work or a decrease in job satisfaction (De Ruyter et al., 2008).

One important pressure is that many new policies focus strongly on economic values, such as efficiency and client choice. Public professionals have problems in accepting the changing trade-off in values which become manifest when implementing such a policy programme. As a result, professionals often seem to be unable to identify with the policy they have to implement. This can be described using the notion of policy alienation (Tummers et al., 2009).

Another way to conceptualize the pressures facing contemporary professionals takes into account the degree of politics and conflicts in an organization. Here, the notion of politicking is often used, described as ‘the perceived level of political games within the organization’ (Bouckenooghe et al., 2009:598). In public organizations, some note that in recent years this degree of politicking has risen, due to an increasing conflict between managers and professionals. Possibly, this contributes to increasing dissatisfaction of public professionals.

In the first part of the paper we will show how recent policy changes in Dutch health care have affected the autonomy of health care professionals. We also show how this has changed the power relation between professionals and managers. Next, we aim to quantitatively explain job satisfaction of public professionals, by looking at policy pressures (using the policy alienation concept) and politicking pressures. In so, we a) combine the literature streams of policy implementation and organizational politics and b) quantitatively analyse this in a large scale survey of 1.300 health professionals.

Our findings show that policy alienation and politicking explain almost 20% of the variance in job satisfaction of these professionals. We see that the degree of autonomy in policy implementation is a major factor in explaining job satisfaction (β=.18, p<0,01). Further, a high degree of politicking in the organization does significantly decrease the job satisfaction of public professionals (β=-.13, p<0,01). This quantitative approach help in understanding the pressures public professionals face in service delivery.