Balancing Workplace Demands Against Employee Wellbeing for Street Level Bureaucrats: The Intricate Interrelationships Between Psychological Capital, Burnout, Discretionary Power, Work Harassment and Wellbeing

This study integrates Behavioural Public Administration (BPA) and Conservation of Resources (COR) theories to undertake a deep dive into understanding the personal, contextual and organisational complexities correlated by the discretionary power of Street Level Bureaucrats (SLBs). Survey panel data at two time points, with a 4-week time lag, were obtained and included 259 healthcare SLBs in Australia. SEM was used to analysis the data. The results show that burnout and institutional work harassment fully mediate the relationship between PsyCap and employee wellbeing, with the variance explaining more than half of SLBs’ wellbeing. The implication for SLBs research is that combining BPA and COR theories provide a useful platform for examining the previously hidden psychological impacts on SLBs outcomes. The implications for those who manage SLBs is that training and performance managing implemented to achieve increased wellbeing will require a change towards reducing employee burnout , and a fundamental redeveloped of the resourcing models that assume institutional work harassment is ethically, legally or prosocially appropriate.