Abstract
Street Level Organisations (SLOs) draw from employees’ Public Service Motivation (PSM) to generate Public Value which involves overcoming the gap between available resources and service demand (public service gap). We examine whether PSM and Psychosocial Safety Climate (PSC) are antecedents of Street Level Bureaucrats’ (SLBs’) discretionary power. Second, we examine pathways from PSM and PSC to discretionary power, work stress, wellbeing and the subsequent Public Value generated by SLBs. The structural equation modelling results from 195 Australian police, fire, ambulance, and emergency services workers indicate that PSC had a more significant role in explaining SLBs’ delivery of Public Value compared with PSM. The implication is that SLOs cannot rely on intrinsic drivers, such as PSM, in isolation to ensure SLBs deliver Public Value. Instead, SLOs’ management must ensure a psychologically safe and supportive workplace conducive to building SLBs’ wellbeing, because that is the pathway for generating Public Value.