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This article explores employee engagement by linking stress, motivation, and employee engagement theory and testing this across 30 countries and eight public sector occupations. First, it is argued that work stress will be negatively related to engagement. Self-determination theory is then used as a basis for exploring the positive link between basic needs satisfaction (BNS) and engagement. It argued that BNS will moderate the relationship between stress and engagement due to the impact that BNS has on coping strategies. These claims are tested using the 2015 wave of the European Working Conditions Survey. Results show stress and engagement are negatively related, whereas BNS and engagement are positively related. Moderation analyses revealed that the detrimental relationship between stress and engagement is lessened for individuals who have strong interpersonal relations at work. This suggests that social relationships play an important role in managing stressful work environments.

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Innovation is essential for our ability to overcome global issues such as climate change, natural resource depletion, and inequality. A central aspect of innovation is the scaling process. While an abundance of studies on innovation scaling exist in many different disciplines, there is a lack of shared understanding of what scaling means and how it can be successfully achieved. This systematic literature review addresses both these issues by reviewing 147 articles on “innovation scaling” making several contributions to research on innovations and innovation scaling. First, in outlining the ontological differences between “diffusion” and “scaling”, clear conceptual boundaries are established, which provide clarity and support cross-disciplinary consilience. Second, based on the analysis of articles, eleven common modal contextual factors that influence the outcomes of innovation scaling across contexts and disciplines are presented. Third, an initial theoretical framework of the innovation scaling process is developed, outlining four theoretical propositions. As a fourth contribution, the article establishes a research agenda for the future development of innovation scaling research across many research domains.

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Public servants are an important component of any functioning administrative system. However, a comprehensive, comparative analysis of public servants from a global perspective is rare. The purpose of this chapter and section is therefore to analyze the concept of the civil servant from a global perspective. In order to do so, the chapter examines the concept of the civil servant, who they are, how they are trained, what they do, how they are rewarded, and how political and institutional factors shape personnel systems. Special attention is placed upon comparisons between civil service traditions, international conceptualizations of civil servants, the scope of public service work, and the status of women in public service. The chapter concludes with a brief introduction to each of the subsequent chapters in this section.

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