Well-Being of Public Servants Under Pressure: The Roles of Job Demands and Personality Traits in the Health-Impairment Process

• Author: Rick T. Borst,Eva Knies
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0734371X211052674
• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Date: 01 March 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0734371X211052674

Review of Public Personnel Administration

2023, Vol. 43(1) 159 –184

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/0734371X211052674

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Article

Well-Being of Public Servants

Under Pressure: The Roles of

Job Demands and Personality

Traits in the Health-

Impairment Process

Rick T. Borst1 and Eva Knies1

Abstract

The health-impairment process from job demands to lower well-being among

public servants is still understudied. This article therefore uses the Job Demands-

Resources model and answers the following question: What is the relationship

between sector-specific job demands and public servants’ work-related well-being, and

which of the Big Five personality traits ensure that either the hindering effect of these

demands is lowered or the challenging effect enlarged? Four public sector specific

demands are studied including organizational restructurings, technological

innovations, aggression from citizens, and integrity pressure. The analysis of two

representative subsamples of the Dutch public sector show that all job demands

negatively relate to well-being. Organizational restructurings is the strongest

hindering job demand, while technological innovations is the least hindering

demand. Moreover, some personality traits turned out to be demands instead

of resources, opening new doors for future research in the health-impairment

process of public servants.

Keywords

well-being, public servants, health-impairment process, job demands-resources-model,

big five personality traits, burnout, work engagement

1Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Corresponding Author:

Rick T. Borst, Utrecht School of Governance, Utrecht University, Bijlhouwerstraat 6-8, Utrecht, 3511

ZC, The Netherlands.

Email: r.t.borst@uu.nl

1052674ROPXXX10.1177/0734371X211052674Review of Public Personnel AdministrationBorst and Knies

research-article2021

160 Review of Public Personnel Administration 43(1)

Introduction

Employee well-being—defined as the overall quality of an employee’s experience and

functioning at work (Warr, 1987)—has been gaining increasing attention among pub-

lic organizations (Borst et al., 2020). This is a consequence of public organizations

facing several challenges that potentially impair public servants’ well-being, such as

rising societal expectations that public servants will perform better with fewer

resources (Hesketh & Cooper, 2017; Liu et al., 2015; Tummers et al., 2015), and the

changing nature of their work. Examples of the latter are the rapidly changing work

environment that results in organizational restructurings and the increasing number of

collaborations with citizens and non-profit and private organizations in designing and

providing public services (Voorberg et al., 2014). These challenges require substantial

psychological capabilities and adjustments by public servants to maintain their well-

being (Hesketh & Cooper, 2017; Schaufeli, 2013).

While various multidimensional conceptualizations of work-related well-being

exist, most share the idea that work-related well-being can have both a pleasant ener-

gizing side, often framed as work engagement,1 and an unpleasant energy-sapping side

known as burnout (Schaufeli & Salanova, 2014). Engaged public servants are vital,

proud, and enthusiastic, whereas burnt out public servants are exhausted. This emo-

tional exhaustion is often caused by the high emotional demands from customers or

clients (Maslach & Jackson, 1981). The growing challenges facing public organiza-

tions raise the question as to what extent public servants are becoming exhausted and

losing their pleasant, engaged side (Schaufeli & Taris, 2014).

These increasing challenges can result in various job demands. Four context-spe-

cific job demands in the public sector are: organizational restructuring (van der Voet &

Van de Walle, 2018; van der Voet & Vermeeren, 2017; Wynen et al., 2020), technologi-

cal innovations (de Vries et al., 2018), aggression (Tummers et al., 2016), and the

increasing complexity to remain integer (van der Wal, 2019). However, to what extent

these demands decrease the well-being of public servants is unknown. For example,

Tummers et al. (2016) call for research that examines whether workplace aggression

is indeed a job demand that negatively affects the well-being of public employees

using the widely applied Job Demands-Resources model (JD-R). More generally,

many public administration (PA) and HRM scholars call for a contextualized approach

in studying the relationship between job demands and resources, and the well-being of

public servants, to better grasp the health-impairment process, understood as the grad-

ual draining of mental resources that may occur due to job demands (Audenaert et al.,

2019; Bauwens et al., 2021; Fletcher et al., 2020).

Using the JD-R model, this study responds to these calls by studying the relation-

ships between four contextual job demands and public servants’ well-being. This arti-

cle makes two important contributions to the HRM knowledge base. First, it not only

examines four contextual job demands as such, but also studies whether public ser-

vants perceive these as hindering or challenging. While several PA scholars have

focused on job demands in the public sector, they have studied either general job

demands (Bauwens et al., 2021) or red tape as the classic public sector job demand