Policy Alienation and Street-level Bureaucrats’ Psychological Wellbeing: The Mediating Role of Alienative Commitment

Abstract

In an era of New Public Management reforms, public sector policies often create a mismatch between social and economic values that can lead to public policy alienation – professionals’ feelings of disconnection from public policies. Policy alienation can create unrest among public professionals and carry several negative repercussions for their wellbeing and work-related attitudes. The negative repercussions of policy alienation are likely to inhibit public service delivery. However, existing research on policy alienation and its consequences for street-level bureaucrats’ wellbeing is scarce. Thus, it is unknown how policymakers can curb policy disconnect and counter its negative implications. To contribute to both general policy alienation theory and practice, our study hypothesized that the two dimensions of general policy meaninglessness – client meaninglessness and societal meaninglessness –are negatively related to street-level bureaucrats’ psychological wellbeing. We hypothesize this negative relationship is due to alienative commitment. A time-lagged survey data collected from 401 public professionals and analyzed using structural equation modelling supported our hypothesized relationships. The present study extends the nomological networks of the antecedents and consequences of alienative commitment and offers important implications that can help policymakers to counter the issues related to public professionals’ alienative commitment and psychological wellbeing.

Undermining alienative commitment through spiritual leadership: a moderated mediation model of social capital and political skill

“…Control variables. Demographic variables such as age, gender, experience and industry type can have potential influences on the social capital (Poortinga, 2006;Veenstra, 2000) and alienative commitment (Usman et al, 2021a) and thus can confound the results. Against this backdrop, the present study controlled for these demographic variables to enhance the understanding of the hypothesized relationships.…”

“…The present study extends the existing literature in many ways. First, by empirically testing the role of spiritual leadership in reducing employees' alienative commitment to the organization, the work at hand adds to the scarce pool of studies on alienative commitment Undermining alienative commitment (Hornung, 2010;Usman et al, 2021a). The finding has opened a new scholarly debate that would draw their attention to revisit a form of organizational commitment that has largely been glossed over in the conventional commitment literature.…”

“…Alienative commitment gauges individuals' negative affective bond with the organization that can lead to several destructive repercussions for organizations, such as it can impede creativity and organizations' learning and long-term success (Hornung, 2010; Usman et al , 2021a). It undermines employees' ability to work hard and restricts them to fulfill the minimum work standards to ensure their membership with the organization.…”

“…It undermines employees' ability to work hard and restricts them to fulfill the minimum work standards to ensure their membership with the organization. Furthermore, by limiting employees' effort to attaining minimal standards, alienative commitment hampers employees, learning, creativity and extra-role behaviors (Hornung, 2010; Penley and Gould, 1988; Usman et al , 2021a). Thus, by ignoring the negative form of commitment, previous studies (e.g.…”

Enforcement officials' coping strategies in a changing regulatory environment

“…Frontline officials are more likely to report anxiety and depression caused by work pressure. This is an understudied topic with significant policy and practical implications (Usman et al, 2021). Our findings has also revealed the trend that unrealistic societal demand increases the emotional cost of regulatory enforcement (e.g., stress and burnout).…”