Coping Resources for Public Employees: An Examination of Instrumental Leadership

In recent years, public service has confronted the challenge of decreasing employee well-being, evidenced by increased burnout and turnover. One of the threats to employee well-being is the challenge of balancing increasing job demands and decreasing job resources. The imbalance between public servants’ job demands and resources has been exacerbated during a time of heightened stress due to a global pandemic. This perfect storm of imbalance along with the stressors from a global pandemic offers an opportunity to examine how public organizations and leaders can help employees maintain or improve workplace well-being. One way public employees can handle this imbalance between job demands and job resources is by relying on coping resources. Coping resources are personally and environmentally produced assets that work in conjunction with coping mechanisms to increase employee well-being. All job resources can be considered coping resources, but not all coping resources are job resources. Public organizations can leverage certain types of coping resources to reduce the impact of job demands and job resource imbalances, including resources that emanate from the organization itself, like leadership. Instrumental leadership helps employees address stressors by monitoring the environment, facilitating goal achievement, offering constructive feedback, and providing visionary leadership. To investigate the relationship between coping resources and employee well-being, I examine the relationship between coping resources and employee well-being, focusing on the relationship between instrumental leadership and burnout. In Chapters 1 and 2, I discuss my dissertation and review the theory behind this relationship. Chapter 3 examines the different types of coping resources (instrumental leadership, affective organizational commitment, self-efficacy, and social belonging) and the connection between each of the coping resources and markers of employee well-being (i.e., burnout and stress) as well as the mediating role of two coping mechanisms (self-distraction and planning). In Chapter 4, I review the dataset, which is a repeated measures design with two data points from city employees working in a large city in the southwest United States. Chapter 5 presents the analysis of these relationships. Chapter 6 summarizes my findings, shares the limitations of this research, and presents future ideas for research.