Karen Baehler

Stress, Minister: government policy advisors and work stress

Purpose – The public management and the occupational stress literatures are both silent on stressors associated with the work of government policy advisors. This paper aims to fill that gap with an exploratory study to identify the potential work stressors for this occupation.Design/methodology/approach – In‐depth interviews with 13 policy advisors/managers in a single government department and a focus group with 11 policy managers from 11 government departments are reported.Findings – The stressors experienced can be clustered under the well accepted labels of role overload, control, culture, and interpersonal relationships. However, results indicate that the practical reality of these stressors in public sector policy advice environments is different from the generic concepts associated with the labels.Research limitations/implications – This paper underlines the importance of occupation‐specific understanding of stressors, and has implications at a workplace level for human resource management, and at ...

Demonstration and evaluation strategies

Abstract After summarizing the papers in this volume, which were prepared for an American Enterprise Institute conference on “Child Welfare Experiments, ” the authors present 11 strategic principles for evaluation design. The principles address social context, treatment technology, systemwide reform, decision making, goal clarification, outcome measures, process evaluation, random assignment, case assignment, treatment variables, and client variables.

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

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.