Avoiding repetitive change injury in the public sector. Can leadership behaviour reduce the damaging effect of repetitive reforms?

Abstract

In the four years spanning this PhD project, ample evidence arose of the turbulence characterising the environment of government organizations. Cyberattacks, climate change, foreign conflict and large-scale citizen protests are indicative of the complex challenges confronting the public sector. In response to this turmoil, governments attempt to modernize through various initiatives to reform. For individual civil servants, this creates high rates of workplace changes as they need to adapt to new legislation and regulations, new procedures of service delivery, digital modes of working and other organizational changes. Recent evidence shows that this multitude of change creates pressure on employees, as civil servants lack time to adapt to new procedures and recover from organizational transitions. Negative side-effects of organizational change can accumulate and outweigh the intended positive effects of the changes. This dissertation attempts to gain deeper insight into this phenomenon, by empirically studying the link between high rates of workplace changes and chronic stress. Further, acknowledging the need for public organizations to remain adaptive to their environment, this research also studies leadership conditions that can mitigate these stress-related side-effects of high rates of organizational changes. These research ambitions were tackled by introducing an innovative measure of chronic stress. By measuring the concentration of the stress hormone cortisol in hair samples gathered at local governments, we linked subjective perceptions of organizational change and leadership to a biological indicator of chronic stress. Results underlined the central role of uncertainty during change processes as a key antecedent of chronic stress. Further, employees’ psychological bond with their organization and task-oriented leadership were identified as potential stress buffers. Therefore, this dissertation contributes further to our knowledge of the individual stress-related effects of organizational change in the public sector, but also identifies conditions that could be targeted by change management amid turbulent periods of organizational transitions. The dissertation also contains a reflection on the use of neurobiological measures to study organizational phenomena in public administration research.