Is the Crisis Over? Fostering Innovative Work Behavior in Response to the Constant Pressure of Resource-Deficiency for Street Level Bureaucrats: The Impact of Psychosocial Safety Climate, Teamwork, and Work Engagement

There is conflicting evidence about the pathways Street Level Bureaucrats’ (SLBs’) use to engage Innovative Work Behavior (IWB). This study uses Street Level Bureaucrat (SLB) and Conservation of Resources (COR) to examine the extent to which SLBs’ work engagement and/or burnout mediates the relationship between Psychosocial Safety Climate (PSC) and teamwork, and IWB. The methods comprised a sample of 259 healthcare SLBs (doctors, nurses, allied health) collected at two times, and analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results show that the variance of PSC and teamwork explained a third of engagement, and engagement-burnout mediated the impact of PSC and teamwork on IWB, explaining over half of their IWBs. This study contributes new information about the two pathways that SLBs use to initiate IWBs. Contrary to COR theory, this means that both work engagement and burnout are pathways for SLBs using IWBs. First, as per COR theory, SLBs use IWBs when they have sufficient organizational and personal resources to enhance their engagement to use IWBs. Second, as per SLB theory, some SLBs use IWBs as a coping mechanism to reconcile their professional/personal values and beliefs with their finite level of psychological capacities (especially energy).