Interaction styles of street-level workers and motivation of clients: a new instrument to assess discretion-as-used in the case of activation of jobseekers

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes a re-conceptualization and a measurement instrument for street-level workers’ interaction styles. Interaction styles are a relevant lens giving insight into how discretion is used and how street-level behaviour affects clients’ motivation and engagement. The re-conceptualization builds on a revision of May and Winter's interaction style concept from the perspective of the psychological self-determination theory. Data from 349 caseworkers of the Flemish employment service were collected via an online survey and analysed with factor and latent class analysis. Findings support a four-dimensional interaction style concept and reveal seven types of caseworkers along these dimensions.

KEYWORDS:

• Street-level bureaucracy
• interaction styles
• active labour market policies
• latent class analysis
• self-determination theory

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the reviewers for their thorough and pertinent feedback. The authors are grateful to Aurélien Buffat, Hal Colebatch, Gitte Sommer Harrits, Michael Hill, Peter Hupe, Steven Maynard-Moody, Marie Østergaard Møller, Frits Sager, Lars Tummers, and Bernardo Zacka for their feedback on ideas in development presented at conferences, at seminars, in the PhD manuscript, and on draft versions of this paper. A warm ‘thank you’ goes out to psychologists Anja Van den Broeck and Maarten Vansteenkiste for their valuable feedback at different stages of measurement instrument development.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Next to controlled and autonomous motivation, the self-determination theory also distinguishes ‘a-motivation.’ This state implies that the individual has no intention to act (Ryan et al. 2011).

2. To be sure, SDT does not suggest that caseworkers apply a supportive interaction style in order to elicit compliance as a way of manipulation. A genuine need supportive style implies that the choice to engage or not is ultimately left to the client but that the client is well informed about the consequences of each option. However, it is expected that clients will be more autonomously motivated to engage if they experience choice, competence, and respect.

3. Like Cronbach alpha, the Raykov rho test compares the share of true score variance to the total observed variance in the set of measures (Raykov 2004). The Raykov test is chosen here because an important assumption of the Cronbach alpha test – that the factor loadings of the indicators on the latent factor are equal (tau equivalence) – is violated in the case of these data.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [PhD Fellowship] and VIONA – the Flemish Interuniversity Research Network for Labour Market Reporting [Research and Development Assignment].

Notes on contributors

Liesbeth Van Parys

Liesbeth Van Parys is a senior researcher associate at HIVA – Research Institute for Work and Society at KU Leuven. She holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the KU Leuven. Her research focuses on the design, implementation, and evaluation of labour market policies which she approaches from a political scientist perspective with special interest in linking up with social psychology. She is acquainted with different quantitative and qualitative approaches to data collection and analysis.

Ludo Struyven

Ludo Struyven is a professor in Sociology of Work and Education at the KU Leuven and head of the Research Group on Education and Labour Market at HIVA – Research Institute for Work and Society at KU Leuven. He is also a visiting professor at Université Saint-Louis, Brussels. His research areas include labour market dynamics, employment services, labour market institutions and reform, organizational sociology, and governance studies.