Compassion, bureaucrat bashing and public administration

Abstract

How citizens behave toward public sector workers is crucial for the well-being and performance of workers. Scholars have mainly focused on understanding negative citizen behaviors, such as aggression. We study a positive behavior, namely compassionate behavior. We study real compassionate behavior in the form of writing positive encouragement messages that are distributed to social workers in the field. We test if showing difficulties faced by public sector workers results in citizens writing more encouragement messages. We also test if bureaucrat bashing results in less encouragement messages. Using a preregistered experiment among a representative sample of Canadian citizens (n = 1,264), we find that showing public sector workers' struggles and imperfections makes citizens almost twice as likely to write an encouragement message. Hence, showing your weakness can be a strength. Bureaucrat bashing, however, has no effect. Results show that citizens can be stimulated to act more positively toward public sector workers.