K08017; Online publication date 12 February 2009
Received 25 June 2008; accepted 28 November 2008

Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online, 2009, Vol. 4: 5–23
1177–083X/09/0401–0005  © The Royal Society of New Zealand 2009

PDF file of entire paper: Print-quality (733K)

Kōtuitui

New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online

Behind the Beehive buzz: sources of occupational stress for New Zealand policy officials

Karen Baehler

Jane Bryson

School of Government and Victoria Management School
Victoria University of Wellington
PO Box 600
Wellington 6140, New Zealand

Abstract Described as quintessential knowledge workers and also practitioners of a public service ethic, policy officials generate vital inputs into good government. This article reports on sources of stress identified by 24 policy managers and senior advisers in the New Zealand State Service. Stressors were similar, but also different, to those commonly found in the stress literature. The differences were particularly noticeable in workload demands, which were not only quantitative (too much and urgent work) but also qualitative (technically difficult work), and these combined uniquely with role proliferation and complexity (multi-tasking), and a policy professional culture in which there was pressure to over-perform. These features provided both negative and positive stress experiences—the strain and the buzz of performance and occupational well-being.

Keywords work stress; government policy advisors; eustress; performance

INTRODUCTION

The negative effects of work-related stress are nearly as hard to deny these days as the negative effects of smoking. Chronic occupational stress has been shown to threaten not only workers’ well-being, but also organisational well-being as the individual effects of persistent stress, such as lower levels of mental and physical health and safety, manifest themselves in worker absenteeism, turnover, and reduced performance (Caplan et al. 1975; Perrewe & Anthony 1990; ILO 1996; Cooper et al. 2001; Spector 2003; Ferrie 2004; Gilboa et al. 2008; Park 2008). Growing concerns about workplace stress were codified in New Zealand law in the Health and Safety in Employment Amendment Act 2002. The 2002 Act officially classified occupational stress as a source of “harm” and, by implication, added stress to the list of potentially significant workplace “hazards” that employers must identify and eliminate wherever practicable (OSH 2003).^[1]

Work stress arises from the interaction of the person with their work environment and can produce either positive or negative outcomes. Most definitions choose to focus on the harmful dimensions of work stress (distress) and tend to identify some type of mismatch between the requirements of a job and the worker’s capacity to respond (NIOSH 1999; HSE 2001). New Zealand’s Department of Labour, for example, defines stress somewhat long-windedly as “An interaction between the person and their (work) environment and is the awareness of not being able to cope with the demands of one’s environment, when this realisation is of concern to the person, in that both are associated with a negative emotional response” (OSH 2003). Cotton & Hart (2003: 118) refer to such definitions as the “stressors and strain approach” and argue that this approach places too much attention on “discreet adverse work experiences and negative employee emotional responses.” They note that a worker’s perception of stress may be due to a lack of positive work experiences and positive emotions at work rather than the presence of negative factors.

Hans Selye’s original discussion of stress acknowledged both a negative (distress) and positive (eustress) component to the concept. However, in the subsequent 50 years, research attention has been almost solely devoted to distress, so much so that this negative component has become synonymous with stress (Le Fevre et al. 2003). Interest in more positive conceptions gained momentum when Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi (2000) advocated a move away from notions of disease and negative emotion towards a positive psychology. In an influential introduction to a journal special issue, they outlined a framework for a science of positive psychology in order to enhance human resilience and flourishing in communities. Similarly, in recent years there has been a call for stress researchers in particular to take a comprehensively positive approach (Nelson & Cooper 2005).

Most notably in this domain, the work of Simmons and colleagues (Simmons & Nelson 2001; Simmons et al. 2003; Little et al. 2007) places Selye’s positive component—eustress—within a more holistic model of stress. They identify eustress as a response that is separate and distinct from distress: when “an individual appraises a demand as positive or preserving well-being, he or she experiences eustress, the positive stress response” (Little et al. 2007: 244). They advance several potential indicators of eustress including: hope, meaningfulness, manageability, engagement, positive affect, and forgiveness behaviours.

Like distress/negative stress, the propensity for eustress (and occupational well-being) appears to depend on both features of the individual (e.g., hardiness, resilience, thriving) and features of the work (e.g., meaningfulness). In recent New Zealand-based research, McGowan et al. (2006) demonstrate individual precursors to eustress, such as seeing a demand as a challenge (not a threat) and the use of task-focused rather than emotion-focused coping strategies. With respect to meaningfulness as a feature of work, meaning in this context has been defined as (1) important and relevant work, and (2) experiencing events in the work that put the work in a broader contextual framework (Britt et al. 2001). McGowan et al. (2006: 93) describe meaningfulness as “the extent to which work appears to make sense emotionally and to be worth investing effort in.” Both eustress and meaningful work seem to overlap the familiar concept of morale—“the energy, enthusiasm, team spirit and pride that employees experience as a result of their work” (McGowan et al. 2006: 93).

Britt et al. (2001: 54) explored the relationship between the meaningfulness of work, personality hardiness, and deriving long-term benefits from a stressful event. Hardiness is defined as “a dispositional tendency to find meaning in events, particularly stressful events that challenge the individual.” Hardy individuals view stress as a challenge that can be mastered. Britt et al. report, and contribute to, a growing body of research which shows that people are better able to deal with stress when they feel what they are doing is meaningful or important.

Research strongly predicts that reducing chronic, negative workplace stress and promoting positive eustress will produce desired results for both employees and employers in the form of greater individual and community well-being and improved organisational performance. The remaining question is: how best to balance these forms of stress to optimise occupational well-being? Many authors on the subject tend to prefer prevention to treatment and organisation-level interventions to individual-level interventions, but the evidence base for identifying effective programmes is limited (Giga et al. 2003; Murphy & Sauter 2003). In the end, a mix of strategies may prove best, utilising the growing knowledge base around individual coping mechanisms (Lazarus 1993, 1999; Caverley 2005) as well as lessons from the wider management and human resources literatures (Lo & Lamm 2005). In addition to evaluating stress management interventions, more research is needed to understand the effects of particular job stressors on well-being and performance and to explore various factors that protect workers from stress, such as coping mechanisms and social supports (Park 2008).

Efforts are underway to promote a more holistic approach to stress reduction by understanding stress as one component of overall occupational well-being (Cotton & Hart 2003) and developing integrated approaches to intervention that involve both the individual and organisational levels (Arthur 2004). This approach, which includes transactional models of stress, acknowledges that some forms of stress can motivate improved performance and increase job satisfaction.

The holistic perspective also points to variations in the experience of stress and occupational well-being across different jobs, occupations, and organisations (Briner et al. 2004). It therefore makes sense to pursue the more holistic, integrated approach to stress by focusing on particular work experiences within specific occupations and organisational contexts. Stress levels clearly vary among occupations as well as between different types of jobs within occupational classifications (Johnson et al. 2005). Although some sources of stress are generic, others vary across occupations (ILO 1996). Within New Zealand, various studies have looked at stress among senior executives (McCormick & Cooper 1988), salespeople (Bhuian et al. 2005), “boundary spanning employees” of a telecommunications organisation (Meadows et al. 2004), farmers (Firth et al. 2007), nurses (Chang et al. 2007), hotel workers (Lo & Lamm 2005), and professional staff (King & Gardner 2006).

International researchers have studied various dimensions of negative work stress in the public sector. Most of these have focused on high-trauma occupations such as police, ambulance services, nurses and other health professions, social workers, and teachers; public sector managers (Widerszal-Bazyl et al. 2000); or civil servants in general (Ferrie 2004). In addition, international researchers have looked at stress in specific government departments (Cartwright et al. 2000; Dewe & Brook 2000) and with respect to public sector organisational change (McHugh & Brennan 1994; Sargent 1995; Robinson & Griffiths 2005).

This article seeks to open a broad-ranging discussion about occupational stress and well-being among a small^[2], but highly influential group of public sector workers known as policy analysts and policy advisers (also referred to as policy officials). Policy analysts and advisers support the government-of-the-day by identifying problems and opportunities for public attention, designing and testing policy options, and advising ministers about future courses of action. Because good policymaking depends on good information and wise counsel, governments are always looking for ways of improving the quality of policy analysis and advice (Canadian Task Force 1996; SSC 1999b; Wolf 2000; Bullock et al. 2001; Scott 2008). The search for such improvements, however, has tended to neglect the general arena of human resource management^[3], and, within that arena, the particular dimension of occupational stress and well-being has also been neglected.

As a small step towards reversing such neglect, this article analyses the findings of an exploratory study of self-reported sources of stress and pressure among policy officials in the New Zealand State Service.^[4] The idea for this study arose from a request by senior managers in a New Zealand government department who had detected signs of dangerously high negative stress levels among the department’s policy staff. Interviews conducted within that department to explore stressors were followed by a focus group involving policy officials from 11 other departments.

Policy officials occupy a strategic position within New Zealand’s Westminster-based governmental system and exert influence over decision-making well beyond their numbers. In addition to producing advice that is timely, practical, and responsive to ministers’ demands, they are expected to keep up to date with available scholarship and evidence and stay in close touch with the views of those whom policy affects directly—stakeholders and citizens (Behm et al. 2000). The work of policy analysis and advising incorporates a wide variety of activities from public consultation to data analysis to strategy formulation (Mayer et al. 2004). It may be said that policy analysts and advisers qualify as quintessential knowledge workers whose central purpose is to process and deliver information relevant to public policy decisions. Their experiences of stress can therefore provide insights into a subset of the workforce whose occupational well-being and performance is vital not only for good government, but also for innovation and economic growth (Buch & Andersen 2008).

The article proceeds as follows. The next section introduces seven categories of occupational stress widely found in the literature and discusses how each type of stress might be expected to present among New Zealand policy officials. The following sections describe the nature of the empirical study, report core findings, compare the empirical results with the expected results, and discuss what appear to be distinctive features of stress in policy analysis and advising. The conclusion points to management strategies for controlling and channelling policy work stress.

STRESS AND POLICY WORK

Public Service employment is often characterised as relatively well paid, secure from layoffs and dismissal (except in extreme cases), family-friendly, tedious at times perhaps, but not too taxing. Where is the strain in that? Policy officials don’t even have to front the public on a daily basis like other public servants do. Why would they be expected to suffer from negative stress?

Every occupation brings its own distinctive mix of positive and negative stressors, and in some cases, its own tendency to attract workers with particular individual characteristics which make them more or less susceptible to stress. Within occupations, some of these factors will vary over time, depending on conditions such as changing technology and business trends, as well as varying across countries and organisations. The interactions among individual, organisational, and wider contextual variables multiply complexity and make it diabolically difficult to isolate occupation-specific stressors without undertaking very large-n, multi-variate studies across multiple occupations. In the absence of relevant large-n databases for New Zealand, the study reported here triangulates across three more modest sources of information—existing literature on generic workplace stressors, a common-sense list of stressors that one might expect to see emerging from New Zealand’s policy advising arrangements, and policy officials’ own statements about their workplace experience. The first two of these sources—generic and common-sense stressors—are discussed together below. The third is discussed in the following two sections.

Based on extensive reviews of the literature, Palmer et al. (2004) identified seven types of occupational stressors which research has linked to both individual and organisational outcomes. These seven types, listed below, will manifest in different ways depending on the job, occupation, and organisation. Although the present study did not seek to test formal hypotheses about which stressors were likely to predominate in public service policy work, certain expectations might be ventured based on familiarity with the New Zealand policymaking scene. Most of these can be organised using Palmer and colleagues’ seven-fold framework, as follows:

1. Demands

When the calls made upon workers exceed the resources and capacities of workers to respond effectively, stress is likely to result, regardless of occupation. Workload and pace are clear markers of demands, but are not always easy to measure. Previous research in the public service generally has found high volumes of work and tight deadlines (Cartwright et al. 2000; Dewe & Brook 2000; Widerszal-Bazyl et al. 2000; Ferrie 2004).

On one hand, we might expect public service workloads in New Zealand to have eased up a bit in recent years due to efforts by the current government to rebuild the public service following cuts in the 1990s. On the other hand, there is a common perception in Wellington that the evolution of 24 h news cycles, combined with more intense political competition, has ratcheted up pressure on government policymakers. If true, this might be expected to raise demands on policy officials. Tight deadlines driven by media coverage are commonly reported by policy officials in informal discussions. Given their status as knowledge workers, policy professionals also might be expected to suffer from problems of information overload.

2. Control

According to the job demands-control model (Karasek 1979), excessive work demands result in higher levels of psychological strain, but these negative outcomes can be ameliorated if the worker has control over important aspects of the work environment. High strain occupations are characterised by high work demands and limited opportunities for the worker to control these pressures. Public sector workers generally have been found to have low job control (Cartwright et al. 2000; Dewe & Brook 2000; Ferrie 2004).

How much say do policy officials have in what they do and how they do it? Norms of Westminster governance are meant to preserve a large degree of intellectual independence for public service policy officials, but this type of autonomy applies more to the content of the products that are produced and the analytical techniques used and less to the agenda of issues to be addressed. Advisers arguably have precious little control over which issues they study and how their outputs are used by ministers and cabinet to make policy decisions. Since the arrival of the Official Information Act, control has also diminished over who sees and uses the formal and informal products of policy units.

3. Support

“[E]ncouragement, sponsorship, and resources provided by the organisation, line management, and colleagues” can reduce stress by making a job both more feasible and more enjoyable (Palmer et al. 2004: 3). Support is a potential source of eustress.

In the case of public service policy advisers, improvements in technology—such as database searching for purposes of literature reviews—may be helping reduce the problems associated with information overload. As noted above, however, technological support can also generate greater demands by exponentially increasing the volume of information which advisers are expected to cover.

With respect to organisational encouragement and recognition, New Zealand-based research clearly shows how a virtuous cycle of high-quality performance and work satisfaction develops when ministers express their appreciation for quality policy advice (SSC 1999c). Such recognition will vary from minister to minister, however, and the salutary effects of internal recognition may be eroded by long-term trends toward contracting out policy research and analysis. Constitutional traditions emphasise that accountability for policy outcomes lies with ministers rather than public servants, which means that policy officials should not expect public recognition (or blame) for their contributions.

4. Relationships

Internal and external relationships can generate either or both positive buzz (eustress) and distress.

The boundary-spanning nature of policy work means that policy officials must continually manage high-stakes relationships with ministers, interest groups, and public service counterparts in other government departments. In the current policymaking climate, one would expect stress-inducing relationships to include those with operational/implementation agencies following the structural “policy-operations” splits of the 1990s, and those with central agencies whose job it is to both assist and assess departments.

5. Role

Role stressors have received the most attention of any category in the recent stress literature (Jex 2002). The most commonly discussed are role ambiguity and role conflict, which are correlated with a variety of outcomes, such as anxiety, tension, low job satisfaction, and intention to quit (Jackson & Schuler 1985). When superiors have unclear or changing expectations of their employees, workers may experience stress from lack of role clarity. This is one of the stressors identified in previous public sector-based research (Cartwright et al. 2000; Dewe & Brook 2000; Widerszal-Bazyl et al. 2000; Ferrie 2004). Role overload is another important, but less researched, role stressor (Spector & Jex 1998; Beehr et al. 2000; LePine et al. 2004, 2005).

Role ambiguity and conflict are likely to be high among policy officials, who are expected to serve the government of the day without straying onto partisan political turf, and whose constitutional obligations include telling ministers not only what they want to hear but also what they need to hear (even when they do not want to hear it). Informal opinions are frequently expressed in Wellington to the effect that many ministers do not want real advice or real policy options; all they want is public servants who will quietly implement a predetermined set of policies. If true, this could create stress in terms of both role narrowing and loss of control.

Role overload is also likely to be high among policy officials whose work can cover a wide range of functions from broad, whole-of-government direction setting to detailed regulation writing, and from technically rigorous analysis to negotiation with peak interest groups or local communities (Mayer et al. 2004). It is also worth noting how the role of the policy official evolves in response to changes elsewhere in the system, such as the rise of ministerial (i.e., political) advisers and cycles of competition from outside advice providers such as consultants, think tanks, and universities.

6. Change

This category refers to organisational change, which is a well-known source of workplace stress, particularly when it occurs frequently or constantly and is associated with job insecurity and poor communication. Here again, public sector research has found change to be endemic (McHugh & Brennan 1994; Sargent 1995; Cartwright et al. 2000; Dewe & Brook 2000).

Types and rates of organisational change have fluctuated in the New Zealand policy world over the past few decades. Whereas policy officials in the hyper-reform period of the late 1980s and 1990s would have confronted massive, systemic changes in public-sector-wide structure and function, the rate of systemic change has slowed considerably. Nonetheless, departmental restructuring tends to be a frequent occurrence, with most new chief executives undertaking a major restructuring within 18 months. Change in government represents another important potential stressor (and/or refresher) for policy officials.

7. Culture

Palmer et al. (2004) include this as a sort of global factor with potential to influence all of the above categories of stressors. It can operate at the sub-organisational, organisational, or occupational/professional level and exerts a powerful influence over attitudes, expectations, and behaviours.

Is there an overall culture of policy work within the New Zealand public service? Casual observation indicates that lateral movement of policy analysts and advisers among departments is not uncommon, and role descriptions for policy jobs share common features across departments. This suggests some occupational consistency and identity. Evidence of a coherent professional identity among policy officials is scarce, however, perhaps due to the great diversity of activities that fit under the umbrella of policy work.

Beyond Palmer et al.’s framework, common sense also points to several likely sources of eustress in policy work. These include daily engagement with inherently challenging and interesting issues of national/international importance and the rush associated with being part of an insider game. In addition, public management research has confirmed long-held folk wisdom about the existence of a public service ethic among public sector employees (Wittmer 1991; Crewson 1995). Sometimes referred to as “public sector motivation”, this construct incorporates four dimensions—“attraction to public policy making, commitment to the public interest and civic duty, compassion, and self-sacrifice”—which could reasonably be expected to increase the meaningfulness of one’s work and thereby contribute to eustress and occupational well-being (Perry 1997: 181).

DATA AND METHODS

The study elicited perspectives on occupational stressors from a total of 24 policy managers and senior advisers in the New Zealand State Service. Data was first obtained from semi-structured, one-on-one, personal interviews with 13 managers/senior advisers (nine males) in the policy advice unit of a single New Zealand government department. Each interview lasted about an hour. The interviews were not taped but thorough notes were taken. The department in question contracted for this research in order to diagnose the causes of stress among its policy managers/senior advisers and develop mitigation strategies.

A focus group was held several months later to gather views from a wider sample of public servants in similar positions. Eleven policy officials (five males) from 11 different government departments, not including the department in which the interviews were conducted, attended the focus group. These participants, all of whom had line management responsibilities in their policy units, were recruited from a larger policy manager group convened by the New Zealand State Services Commission on a monthly basis for professional development purposes. The group’s convenor gave permission to seek volunteers to participate in the focus group and helped organise the session.

Participants in the focus group were posed a single research question: what are the typical pressures or sources of stress in your job as policy manager within a public service environment? The focus group was audio taped and transcribed. During the session, the points raised by the participants were noted on a large photocopying whiteboard, which enabled the group to see an immediate record of discussions. At the end of the focus group participants were asked to list their top two sources of stress on a written form. The decision was made not to fish for particular categories of stressors in the focus group because this was an exploratory study seeking people’s own representations of the phenomenon. We wanted to hear participants talk about their own sources of stress in their own words.

The questions used in the interviews were somewhat more structured than the focus group, roughly based around the common sources of work stress identified in the literature but with openings for interviewees to identify other sources as well. The question prompts explored work characteristics (role, workload, work pace, decision control, organisational culture, relationships at work, home/work interface, career development) and personal factors (enjoyable and pressured aspects of work, coping mechanisms, stress signs).

Transcripts from the focus group and interview notes were analysed by both researchers independently, with special attention paid to words, phrases, concepts, and themes that were repeated within and across the interviews and focus group. The researchers looked for apparent similarities and variations in the interpretations of key themes among participants. Emphasis was also given to concepts that participants identified as high priorities. Quotations were extracted to capture key themes in the participants’ own words.

All participants received a copy of an aggregate summary of results and were encouraged to give feedback on any perceived inaccuracies. Only a few participants provided feedback, all of it confirmatory. Individual confidentiality was maintained throughout the study.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Although most of the key stressors identified by the research participants fell into the categories identified in the general literature on occupational stress, they appear to take a distinctive shape in the policy environment and to interact with each other in important ways. In addition, several themes were raised that do not have clear counterparts in the existing stress literature. Both the expected and unexpected stressors should be of interest to those seeking to improve the workplace environment for policy professionals and the quality of policy advice.

For reporting purposes and to enable comparisons with the stress literature, the stressors identified by focus group participants and interviewees have been grouped into the seven categories of occupational stressors presented above.

Demands

Policy officials who were interviewed individually identified workload and pace as major stressors. They reported consistently busy days, with periods of extreme workload "when everything happens at once." Many managers worked through the lunch hour, many worked at the weekend, and most reported working on average a 9 h day. This is consistent with the results of two recent surveys of all New Zealand Public Service departments in which 75% (2002) and 68% (2006) of respondents reported working more hours than they were employed for, and heavy workloads were a recurring complaint (SSC 2002, 2006). For agencies engaged in a significant amount of policy work, the incidence of additional hours worked rose to over 80%.

The problem of workload volume is exacerbated by the extreme urgency of some government requests for major policy change: "and the government said right, we want this changed NOW, NOW, NOW." Participants did not discuss what drives this urgency, but their comments regarding the role of the media in setting policy agendas is discussed later, under Control.

Focus group participants were somewhat divided on the subject of overwork, but raised concerns about rising demands for productivity gains:

"I think the trend over the last few years has been towards doing more with less. Now that’s fine when there is fat in the system but I think we’re beyond that point where there is fat in the system of policy shops right across Wellington. And now we are at or very close to a critical point in my view. I guess when ministers ask you to do extra things, you certainly cannot say okay we will do that and drop something else. More or less they expect you to do things smarter and get them done. With this continuing pressure on our budgets and high expectations, that to me is the big difference managing now compared with 5 years ago."

The assertion of rising demands depends on one’s point of comparison. For example, one participant observed that current demands on policy staff pale in comparison to New Zealand’s intensely demanding reform period in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Alongside this observation, we expected participants to refer to the effects on workload of increasing public service numbers during the 2000s, but no one did.

Comparisons with the 1990s also encompass the nature of the work to be done. Participants agreed that policy advising becomes more stressful when government finances are tighter and decisions need to be made about what to cut (as in the 1990s) rather than what to expand. In one participant’s words, "the decisions now are about what more good are we going to do," and that is inherently less stressful than advising on what to do less.

Workload stress is not only a function of the volume and urgency of demands, according to study participants. It also flows from the complex nature of the issues that they are expected to address, which participants laughingly called "brain strain." One put it this way: "Some of the issues you deal with, there are only a few of your staff who you really think could get on top of it. And you’ve already given the last hard question to them!" This is the flipside of the expectation, noted above, that policy analysts and advisers would derive eustress-related benefits from the inherently interesting and intellectually challenging nature of their work.

The technical challenge and difficulty of policy work was consistently reported across the interviews and the focus group. The combination of heavy workload, urgency, and technical difficulty contributes significantly to work stress. As one participant observed, "The questions we have to deal with are really quite tough. I’m not asking my people to do things that I know the answer to. It’s not just if I had a bit of extra time, I’d be able to do it myself. It’s that I don’t actually have the answer and can’t figure out a really good answer." The examples of health and environmental policy were used to illustrate the point: "We’ve got a number of enormously complex areas to navigate through because science and technology have opened up things that the human could never envisage would be part of our reality."

Advancements in knowledge also increase demands for better policy solutions, which create stress: "[A]s our understanding gets better, the complexity and difficulty of the job gets harder. The expectations rise." Thus, it is not only the increased volume of available information that makes technology a potential stressor, as anticipated, but also the increased expectations that result from greater information and (presumed) understanding.

Some policy questions are not only technically difficult, but also inherently contentious. For example, focus group participants noted heightened stress around issues related to the long-standing grievances of indigenous people. Contentious issues increase workloads because of the additional efforts needed to manage conflict.

Control

This foundation stone of the stress and organisational behaviour literatures (Rotter 1966; Spector 1988) surfaced in several forms in the focus group. First, participants noted the problem of being "held accountable for decisions that you don’t make yourself." Statements such as this refer to the fact that policy officials do not make policy decisions; they merely seek to influence the decisions taken by others, particularly elected officials or their appointees. As noted earlier, long-standing constitutional traditions hold that public servants should receive neither public credit nor public blame for policy impacts. According to the doctrine of ministerial responsibility, accountability belongs to ministers; public servants should stay in the background.

Yet, several participants expressed the view that both policy units and, in some cases, individual policy managers, are increasingly being held responsible for choices made by elected officials. As one participant put it, "I think there is a pressure, and some of that is within departments as well, that policy teams have made these decisions, set these timelines, but also are actually making the ultimate decisions about what resulted. It’s partly because the policy teams are that much closer to ministers and their profession is to support ministers … so there is a kind of belief that they were actually making these decisions."

Regardless of whether they are held responsible for ministerial decisions, one might expect policy officials to experience stress when they watch their advice being ignored, and when they see what they consider to be bad policy choices being made. It is interesting to note, however, that none of the participants in this study cited lack of policymaking influence as a source of stress, although interviewees noted the importance of having "the ear of the minister". Thus, it would appear that policy managers have well and truly internalised the subtleties of the New Zealand Public Service code of conduct, which clearly states that public servants are to deliver free and frank advice, but then accept the minister’s final decisions and implement these as effectively as possible. Study participants did not appear to feel confused or aggrieved by this requirement, but by the same token, they were not willing to be held personally or organisationally accountable for ministerial choices which they had advised against.

Although study participants evidently did not feel the need to exert any greater influence on policymaking than they already do, they clearly felt frustrated by a perceived lack of control over their analytical agendas. They identified as a stressor the tendency for work programmes in policy units to be frequently reprioritised and reallocated in response to external pressure. One participant identified a "…total or apparent disjuncture between the planning process—in the statement of intent, the output plan, reports, etc.—and what we actually do. What we do is set on Monday morning by what was in the media over the weekend." This "isn’t just a challenge for policy managers; it’s also a challenge for the people who are having their priorities changed, from what they think they’re doing for the next 2 months to finding out that what was actually a key priority last Monday is down to number 16 on Tuesday and to 63 on Wednesday." Smaller policy units may experience this problem more acutely than larger units if the latter have "the ability to swing resources around and support people in changing priorities."

Support

Although the stress literature tends to treat demands and supports as separate categories of stressors, the present study found them to be closely linked in the minds of participants. The general theme of resource adequacy (organisational support) relative to performance expectations was raised early in the focus group and resurfaced several times. Not surprisingly, the key resource of interest to participants was skilled staff. The focus group and interviews surfaced concerns about chronic skill shortages, mentoring of junior staff, rising demands for productivity, overall volume of work, and the urgency of projects. For example, focus group participants noted the difficulties associated with competition for highly skilled staff.

The undersupply of top analysts also appears to have implications for on-the-job training of junior analysts. As one participant observed: "I think those people who are very good are usually so stretched that they are not particularly able to help others. And so that falls to the manager." It also takes time to discover if each new analyst can do the job, according to participants. A new hire may appear on paper to have the needed competencies, "but until they are there actually doing the work, you don’t know if they can cope particularly." This learning period puts stress on the policy teams: "Sometimes it is an individual who is discovering that they are not able to do things. They will have an impact on those around them." It also puts stress on the manager, who must be careful about "not giving too many of the things that are going to really panic people to the people who are likely to panic."

In addition to airing concerns about understaffing and skill shortages, focus group participants also commented on support in terms of being appreciated by one’s bosses. On the whole, focus group participants had few complaints about under-appreciation. Most indicated that they had positive support from senior managers. Others noted that "you don’t expect a heck of a lot from ministers. If you get a bit from ministers, that’s fine." Some went so far as to suggest that policy staffs enjoy something of a privileged position within government departments: "You probably hear much more from non-policy staff in organisations about how nobody values anybody but policy staff. That’s very common."

Relationships

Relationship management was reported as a core feature of the work of policy officials and a key source of stress. Relevant relationships span the operational areas of departments in which the advisers work, interest groups associated with a particular policy, central agencies like the Treasury, other government agencies, and of course the relevant ministers and associate ministers. The interview participants observed that a number of these relationships were conflict-ridden because competition for resources and/or influence expressed itself in assertive and occasionally aggressive interactions. They reported feelings of dread in anticipation of some meetings. Many of them felt frustrated by the difficulty of achieving outcomes from relationships between their department and other government policy agencies.

Some focus group participants felt that external groups were pressuring them inappropriately:"Because of the lack of understanding of what we are doing amongst the public, there is an expectation with them that we will have an advocacy role for them." Various stakeholders both inside and outside of government "have expectations that we are here to promote their interests," but "we have our credibility at stake. Therefore, we cannot seem to be biased in their favour in terms of our role." Clearly, resisting capture by interest groups requires a significant effort on the part of public servants.

Public servants in New Zealand, like elsewhere, are being strongly encouraged to consult the public and key stakeholders when determining policy, but the focus group results suggest that such expectations need clarification and guidance. Although participants generally agreed that they value consultation as "part of contributing to the quality of policy advice," one participant referred to consultation as the "bane of [his] existence" and indicated considerable confusion about how it is meant to be done: "It always seems to me that I am not being consulted on things that I should have been consulted on and I’m being blamed for not consulting people on things that they should have been consulted on."

With regard to internal departmental relationships, one might expect the policy/operations interface to be a source of stress. Interviewees confirmed this, reporting significant tensions between the policy unit and the operations unit in the department. This was often due to a mutual lack of understanding of the processes, priorities, and expectations of each group, as well as competition for organisational resources. Focus group participants were less concerned about their relationships with operational units, although one noted the stress associated with "being blamed by the operations side of my organisation for not having been consulted" about the implementation realities of proposed policy changes.

Only one focus group participant hinted at eustress-related benefits from healthy relationships: "I think the other side of it is that you can get really good relationships with stakeholders that just make your job so much easier."

Roles

External expectations of the sort described above may lead to confusion around roles, and if advisers respond to the pressure, they may experience role proliferation and conflict. In particular, the goal of "seeking to do the best for New Zealand"may clash directly with the narrower policy agendas of particular interest groups or fellow agencies. Several participants noted "conflict between professional aspirations"for long-term policy thinking and planning, for example, "and the government’s policy process",which often demands short-term fixes. A typical challenge is "trying to convince ministers of something which may not be important until they are out of office."

Related to this is the expectation, noted earlier, that policy officials would express concerns about a perceived narrowing of their role as ministers allegedly become less interested in hearing free and frank advice. This was not a strong theme in either the interviews or focus group, but it did receive a few minutes of attention from focus group participants, one of whom summed it up by stating that policy staff "don’t want to just implement what someone else said; they want to actually do the analysis."

Role proliferation also arises due to the New Zealand Public Service’s relatively flat hierarchical structures, in which a great deal of "multi-tasking" is required of policy managers "spanning both the management side and the policy leadership in particular", according to focus group participants. Tensions between the dual roles of manager and analyst are seen most starkly when organisational restructuring occurs simultaneously with "huge developments in the policy world." If the policy manager is expected to provide leadership in change management while also keeping abreast of rapidly evolving substantive issues, his or her ability to delegate analytical tasks will be diminished and the overall workload may become excessive.

Role proliferation and complexity have no clear counterpart in the stress literature, although they may contribute to quantitative and qualitative role overload. Quantitative role overload refers to a volume of work demands that are excessive or cannot be accomplished in a given time frame, and qualitative role overload to work demands that are too difficult relative to the skills and abilities of the employee. Both types of overload contribute to psychological and physical strain (Caplan & Jones 1975; Nandram & Klandermans 1993). However, as noted by Jex (2002), we know much less about qualitative overload. The experience of role overload among policy officials is relatively unusual in that it featured both quantitative and qualitative overload as a consistent attribute of the work. One could speculate, in the era of knowledge work, that qualitative overload may become more prevalent and thus deserving of further examination.

Concepts of eustress and the meaningfulness of work provide a different lens on role stressors. Many of the participants’ comments about their roles reflect not only frustration over inherent conflicts and ambiguities within the policy function, but also a deep, underlying desire to get on with the business of advancing the public interest:

"the decisions now are about what more good are we going to do"

"[policy] people have to come up with something that is going to work better" [to address serious social problems]

"many of us are very, very strongly of the view that there should be more whole of government"

"that personal conflict of wanting to do even more but knowing that it makes your job that much harder and that much more difficult"

"a personal commitment to do the job right"

"it’s all part of contributing to the quality of policy advice"

"I think ministers want to do things and policy people want to as well."

Change

Some focus group participants commented on the anxieties associated with frequent organisational restructuring: "[T]he constant reviews that are going on in the public sector" cause stress because "people are always worrying about whether they are going to have a job in 6 months or not." Others challenged this observation, however, on the grounds that policy staffs have been insulated from many organisational reviews. Either way, it seems clear that study participants see instability as a potential source of stress even if they do not agree on whether policy units tend to be more or less vulnerable to this particular stressor. No one spoke of restructuring or organisational change as a potential source of positive stress.

Culture

Organisational culture figures prominently in the stress literature, but it takes a somewhat different form in the policy setting, where pressure to over-perform appears high. This culture of over-performance cuts across the policy units of government agencies and departments, and appears to be attached more to the profession of policy analysis and advising than to the organisations in which analysts work.

According to focus group participants, policy managers and many analysts tend to be high achievers: "[W]e sometimes get caught up in our own double standards … encouraging staff not to work late, but bloody hard to role-model that yourself. Sometimes you end up being your own worst enemy." These "double standards" both flow from and reinforce the professional "culture of expectation" found within "high-performing quality circles". According to one participant, "People get a lot of stress from a product that isn’t as good as it could be hanging around looking like the product of that group for a long time. And so the temptation to over-perform is terribly high." Another participant vividly described over-performance: "You will polish something when all it needs is a light buffing. Some things come up on really short notice and people will put the high quality in when in fact, under the time constraints, something a little more factual and cut to suit the time would be better."

Organisational incentive systems further reinforce the culture of high- or over-performance. In the words of one participant: "We tend to reward initiative. We reward people who make new connections. It is very easy to take on new work. It is hard to say no and pull out or take a different angle."

The interviews revealed similar propensities for high achievement, which, when coupled with feelings of being indispensable, created a reluctance to reduce working hours or let pieces of work go.

At the same time, participants acknowledged that this culture of achievement was closely associated with pride in tackling difficult policy issues—all of which makes the job exciting. Focus group participants raised "the question of when stress is stress"several times. As one manager put it, "All of this is why we get such a buzz out of it." Another identified "a need to make a distinction between what is a reasonable level of stress for the job that we do and the responsibilities that we have and those that are excessive." In other words, policy officials seem willing to accept some stress as the price of doing interesting work that enhances the public good. The specific term "eustress" didn’t come up in these exchanges, of course, but the concept was heavily implied.

This finding points to the importance of distinguishing between the kinds of challenges that motivate and excite workers, on one hand, and those that generate stress (defined as a negative psychological state), fatigue, and burnout, on the other.

CONCLUSION

Policy advisers and managers who participated in this exploratory study painted a vivid picture of the ways in which chronic skills shortages, rising demands for productivity, urgent requests for solutions to complex policy problems, competing pressures from both internal government actors and external stakeholders, and diminishing control over the strategic work programme combine with a strong ethic of public service and professional culture of over-achievement to generate both exciting professional challenges and, potentially, work stress. One need not leap too far to make the additional connections from negative work stress to fatigue to diminished individual capacity and motivation, and from there to a potentially unhappy and unhealthy workplace climate that generates lower productivity and organisational performance. In the case of policy advice, this lower performance may translate directly into diminished capacity for good governance.

At the same time, the policy officials who participated also articulated real commitment to high-quality public service and came close to connecting up key concepts from the recent literature, including eustress, meaningfulness, and public sector motivation. Although the interview and focus group questions did not explicitly mention positive stress or try to elicit participants’ views on it, variations on this theme emerged spontaneously.

The usual categories of stressors from the literature (as in Palmer et al.’s (2004) seven-fold framework) are broad enough to encompass most of what we found in the New Zealand policy work setting, but the nature of these stressors varied somewhat from the conventional descriptions. Key points of distinctiveness include:

changes across governments in the intensity of policy demands

"brain strain" associated with trying to solve impossibly complex public problems, which competes with the eustress of a stimulating intellectual challenge

role of technology in raising expectations for policy solutions

role of the media in reducing policy officials’ agenda control

changing ideas of accountability for ministers versus policy units/managers and the stress of being held accountable for decisions that one didn’t make

flow-on effects of a systemic undersupply of skilled analysts and advisers

interest group pressure not only on MPs and ministers but also on public servants, and resulting stress

lack of clarity around consultation practices and expectations

tense relationships between policy and operations units within departments and between departments and central agencies such as the Treasury

role narrowing for policy officials as ministers demand more implementation planning and less comprehensive policy analysis

role proliferation and complexity—demands on policy officials for multi-tasking

apparent connections between the "buzz" of tackling tough issues, an occupational culture of over-achievement among policy officials (which appears to hold across organisations), and phenomena of eustress, work meaningfulness, and the public service ethic.

The authors hope that this article, and the exploratory study on which it is based, will encourage other researchers to delve deeper into the role of both positive and negative stress in government policy performance. Ultimately, the goal of such research should be to develop management strategies for converting negative stress into eustress and leveraging occupational well-being among policy officials into better government.

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^[1] According to the Act, significant hazards that cannot be eliminated should be isolated, where possible, or at least minimised for protection of employees.

^[2]Roughly 2500 policy advisers were employed in the New Zealand State Service in 2004 (based on personal correspondence with State Services Commission (SSC) staff).

^[3] SSC (1999a) is a notable exception.

^[4] The State Service refers to a grouping of organisations that includes all 36 public service departments plus crown entities, the Reserve Bank, and non-public service departments, which include New Zealand Defence Force, New Zealand Security Intelligence Service, Parliamentary Counsel Office, and the Police.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We extend our thanks to the anonymous referees, the focus group and interview participants, and Robyn Rendall (SSC) for her invaluable advice and assistance in this research.

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K08017; Online publication date 12 February 2009
Received 25 June 2008; accepted 28 November 2008

Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online, 2009, Vol. 4: 5–23
1177–083X/09/0401–0005  © The Royal Society of New Zealand 2009

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