Coping During Public Service Delivery: A Conceptualization and Systematic Review of the Literature

“While there is a large body of literature on the coping strategies of SLBs, most studies concentrate on how SLBs use discretion to bend and break rules, routinize service delivery, or ration existing resources (Tummers et al., 2015).”

“Rule-bending thus becomes a way of proactively coping with rules that stand in the way of addressing clients’ needs (DeHart-Davis, 2007; Tummers et al., 2015).”

“They suggest that instead of being passively subjected to their superiors’ punishment, bureaucrats seem quite resistant to sanction and may manipulate controls and distort responsibilities to alleviate the risks of being blamed (De Bruijn, 2002; Tummers et al., 2015).”

“…is that their budgets and the organization of their services make it impossible to achieve the ideal of responding to clients’ individual needs and characteristics, leaving street-level bureaucrats to cope with the difficulties and ambiguities of their job (Lipsky 2010, 82; Tummers et al. 2015).”

“Therefore, quality and effectiveness of public services would eventually hinge on the productive behaviour of SLBs (Tummers et al., 2015).”

“…street-level bureaucrats are groups of public servants that interact directly with the public and have a formal task to enhance the welfare of society while also meeting the demands and priorities of the specific communities they serve (Lipsky 1980; Tummers et al. 2015; Cohen and Hertz 2020).”

“…workers decide to focus on a proportion of their clients), creaming (selecting clients with performance targets that are easy to realise), rule bending, and rule breaking (Tummers et al ., 2015; Van Berkel Knies, 2016; Freier and Senghaas, 2021; Gjersøe and Strand, 2021; Raspanti and Saruis, 2021).”

“Instead, they are expected to simultaneously handle administrative and client-related concerns (Jensen & Pedersen, 2017; Tummers et al., 2015) to ensure personalized and fully appropriate responses to individual clients and their situations (Lipsky, 1980/2010).”

“As such, they try to serve prominent demands from local communities well and try to minimize stress and thus conflict in their daily work (Tummers et al., 2015).”

“Research in streetlevel bureaucrats’ behavior has developed in several different ways; some scholars describe the behavioral patterns of these bureaucrats by relying on the term “coping behavior” (e.g. Kelly, 1994; Tummers et al., 2015), while others emphasize the street-level bureaucrats’ behavioral divergence in pra…”

“Second, most literature studying motivations and skills of public professionals focuses on reforms that are managerial in nature, and not collaborative (e.g. Tummers et al., 2015).”

“Under stress related to their work, some employees help citizens using personal resources, while others show aggression (Tummers et al., 2015).”

“…” research is full of examples of how police officers, teachers, caseworkers, and others occasionally bend or even break the rules to accommodate clients (Einstein and Glick 2017; Keiser, Mueser, and Choi 2004; Lipsky 2010; Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003; Schram et al. 2009; Tummers et al. 2015).”

“Furthermore, in the case of incapaci - tated policy accumulation, new policy directives may result in a negative tradeoff with the existing practices (Tummers et al., 2015).”

“Coping with these tensions was therefore done by rule bending and instrumental action (Tummers et al. 2015).”

“Rather, it is often a way of coping with either performance measures, large caseloads, or troublesome citizens (Tummers et al., 2015).”

“This gives them a higher level of tolerance of the enforced (Oberfield, 2010; Tummers et al., 2015).”

“…street-level bureaucrats usually have three forms of coping tendencies in policy implementation: utilizing personal resources to meet the public’s needs; implementing according to the policy regulations; and adding new administrative barriers to existing regulations (Tummers et al. 2015).”

“Tummers et al. (2015) identi fi ed three distinct families of coping: moving towards clients, moving away from clients, and moving against clients.”

“…1993; Wright and Barker 2000) and career members may cope with such stress (Davidovitz and Cohen 2022; Schott, Van Kleef, and Noordegraaf 2016; Tummers et al. 2015) by adopting their lay collaborators’ opinions even if they do not fully agree with them (Keulemans and Van de Walle 2020;…”

“For instance, the high motivation of public employees to contribute to society despite difficult working conditions has been demonstrated in multiple studies of street level bureaucrats’ coping behaviour (Tummers et al. 2015).”

“Reviewing the public service delivery literature, Tummers et al. (2015) conclude that front-line workers are driven by public service motivation (PSM) to perform job tasks that require interaction with citizen-clients in stressful situations.”

“At the street level, solving unpredicted situations and making ad hoc decisions when confronted with diverse demands and restricted resources commonly manifests in specific coping mechanisms that enable bureaucrats to manage workloads (Lipsky 1980; Tummers et al. 2015).”

“However, patrol o ffi cers do not always ‘ move towards ’ civilians (Tummers et al. 2015).”

“A dominant focus in the street-level bureaucracy literature is on what stressors street-level bureau-crats must cope with while implementing policies (e.g., Schott et al., 2016; L. L. Tummers et al., 2015).”

“While prior research has examined structural dimensions of discretion (e.g. Destler 2017; Hinterleitner and Wittwer 2023; Tummers et al. 2015), only recent studies have explored PSM’s effects on preferences regarding policy instruments (Song et al. 2017), prosocial rule-breaking (Weißmüller, De…”

“Unlike other studies (Lipsky, 1980; Maynard-Moody and Musheno, 2023; Riccucci, 2005; Tummers et al., 2015; Gofen et al., 2019), however, teachers ’ individual characteristics do not clearly emerge as decisive contextual elements behind discretionary mechanisms – at least not for the teachers…”

“…of interactions they come across (which entail, for instance, reduced emotional proximity and the absence of non-verbal cues, see Bambling et al. 2008), their broader administrative tasks (Tummers et al. 2015; Breit et al. 2021), and risks of vicarious traumatisation (Furlonger and Taylor 2013).”

“Sanctions and punishments are most often used by street-level bureaucrats such as the police, who are responsible for law enforcement (Tummers et al., 2015).”

“In the best of times, public service can be stressful and employees often battle high workloads (Nguyen & Tuan, 2022; Tummers et al., 2015) and emotional burdens (Guy & Newman, 2004; Henderson & Borry, 2023).”

“There is a robust, multidisciplinary literature that examines how and why bureaucrats respond to rules designed to shape or alter behavior in accordance with non-mission-based values like transparency and lawfulness (e.g., Brehm & Gates, 1999; Martin et al., 2013; Tummers et al., 2015).”

“…of coping mechanisms have been distinguished by SLB research, such as routinizing some tasks, i.e., providing identical services to all citizens (Tummers et al., 2015); rationing some services, for example, by reducing the effort allocated to face-to-face interactions as well as the duration of…”

“86) and about the expected and dysfunctional effects of PM, especially in relation to street-level bureaucrats’ perceptions of and behavior in their work (Dias & Maynard-Moody, 2007; Heinrich & Marschke, 2010; Soss et al., 2011; Tummers et al., 2015).”

“…on bureaucratic coping provides a useful theoretical lens for studies of representation since it explores the behavioral mechanisms which bureaucrats employ to manage, tolerate, or control their demand and job uncertainty (Dubois 2010; Folkman and Lazarus 1988; Lipsky 1980; Tummers et al. 2015).”

“Although these three types of coping seem equally important, most scholarly attention has been paid to research on moving toward and away from client strategies (Tummers et al., 2015).”

“Street ‐ level bureaucrats often cope with complex situations under stress when providing welfare services to clients (Lipsky 1980; Tummers et al. 2015).”

“In practice, however, frontline professionals do not give all clients equal time, energy, and resources (Lipsky 1980; Tummers et al. 2015).”

“This aligns with the concept of “performance coping,” where agents prioritize visible and achievable goals to demonstrate effectiveness (Tummers et al. 2015; Tummers 2017).”

“These coping mechanisms can include prioritizing which clients they serve, minimizing contact with the public, or even rigid rule-following (McCrea, 2022; Tummers, 2017; Tummers et al., 2015).”

“…and resources necessary to respond to all individual cases properly, SLBs may develop various coping strategies to address their heavy workload and stress and to balance various policy requirements and goals (Chang & Brewer, 2023; Hupe et al., 2015; May & Winter, 2009; Tummers et al., 2015).”

“…at implementation, during which street-level bureaucrats and their supervisors interact with and make decisions about clients based on client characteristics and the social origins, values, and lived experiences of the bureaucrat (Maynard-Moody et al., 2003; Tummers et al., 2015; Zamboni, 2020).”

“This burden can force implementers to make critical decisions about which rules to enforce and which to neglect (Limberg et al., 2021; Tummers et al., 2015) – a phenomenon known as ‘policy triage’ (Knill et al., 2023).”

“When SLBs find a client credible, they tend to serve as citizen-agents , using their discretion on behalf of the client, but when SLBs do not find a client credible, they act more as state-agents , and may even end up working against clients (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2000; Tummers et al., 2015).”

“” This sentiment concerning a violation of social equity is echoed widely in the literature (see, e.g., Guul et al., 2021; Hansen, 2023; Keiser, 1999; Koven, 2019; Lipsky, 1980; Lowi, 1969; Tummers et al., 2015).”

“…task to grant rights to certain persons and may try to meet the demands of their clients, but they nevertheless have to meet their internal demands (Tummers et al., 2015): they have an incentive to keep, first, the administrative costs, and second, the financial costs low (Feldman, 2003, p. 281).”

“Here, the coping mechanism is one where the street-level bureaucrat is moving towards the client by temporarily breaking the rules to adjust the rules to the client’s demand (Evans 2013; Tummers et al. 2015).”

“The public domain is a complete system of users’ rights and liabilities, a system that dynamically shares public resources based on individuals’ equity and voice (Tummers et al. 2015; Bartels 2013; Fainstein 2005).”

“…in street-level bureaucracy (e.g. Hupe and Hill 2007; Maynard-Moody and Craig Musheno 2003) and existing review work on implementation studies (e.g. L. L. G. Tummers et al. 2015), we identified two main topics as predefined coding themes: determinants of discretion, and consequences of discretion.”