Public service happiness and morale in the context of development: the case of Bhutan

Abstract

This article comprises the first detailed study published on the attitudes of civil servants in Bhutan. From the data collected under the 2015 gross national happiness (GNH) survey, an index of public service happiness (PSH) emerges, highlighting changes since 2010, with significant differences in happiness between female and male bureaucrats, and also between officials working in rural and urban areas. The findings highlight the importance of measuring public service morale. This topic that has been neglected over the last 25 years, in favour of public service motivation (PSM), due to a Western cultural bias for prioritising individual productivity over collective effectiveness. Attention to bureaucratic morale as measured by a PSH index could offer a more appropriate approach to public service performance in non-Western settings.

Keywords:

• public service happiness
• public service morale
• public service motivation
• development
• Bhutan

Acknowledgments

The generous help and support of Christina Carlson, the UN Resident Representative in Bhutan, and Karma Wangdi of the Centre for Bhutan Studies in Thimphu, are gratefully acknowledged. Shakeel Ahmad, Michelle Gyles-McDonnough, Kwadwo Frempong, Nigel Goh, Assel Mussagulova and Peter van de Pol provided invaluable comments on early versions of this article. The article is written by the authors in their private capacities and the opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the official views of either the Government of Bhutan or the UNDP.

Notes

1. Bhutan’s 2008 Constitution states that Buddhism is the country’s “spiritual heritage” and commits the government to fund the monastic system.

2. Then known as “The Southern Land of Medicinal Plants”.

3. The current king’s great-grandfather was held to be the reincarnation of Namgyal’s mind: Dorji (1994).

4. Between 1651 and 1906, Bhutan was ruled through a diarchic form of government, with power divided between the temporal ruler, the Druk Desi, and the spiritual ruler, the Je Khenpo. Both were chosen through reincarnation, thus giving great political influence to the monastic body which oversaw the selection. The result was usually a frequent succession of weak rulers, leading in the 19^th century to regular civil wars (eg., in 1853 and 1865), assassinations, and early retirements to monasteries of both the Druk Desi (with no less than 35 incumbents between 1803 and 1903) and the Je Khenpo, until the hereditary monarchy was created in 1907. The Je Khenpo remains the head of the monastic order and titular equivalent to the monarch; the 69th was consecrated in 1990.

5. PSM refers to “an individual's predisposition to respond to motives grounded primarily or uniquely in public institutions and organizations” (Perry & Wise, 1990, p. 368).

6. SWB differs in detail from GNH (eg., Moynihan, DeLeire & Enami, 2015), but resembles it in encompassing people’s perceptions of what is important in life, including non-material aspects of a fulfilling life such as community engagement, caring and altruism. The Government of Bhutan argues that GNH has a broader conceptualisation than SWB, with more indicators and greater differentiation of degrees of happiness, applying thresholds of “unhappy”, “borderline happy”, “happy”, and “deeply happy”. The GNH framework also offers a vision for addressing climate change concerns by moving beyond the development paradigm as primarily an unrelenting quest for economic growth.

7. The 33 criteria have a happiness threshold of 66% sufficiency qualifying as happy, with unhappy being below 50%, borderline happy as 50% to 65%, and deeply happy at 77% and above. The methodology is explained in detail in Ura, Alkire, Zangmo & Wangdi (2015). Pilot surveys were conducted in 2007 and 2008.

8. The survey was not originally designed to be representative by occupation. The 355 valid responses from civil servants (who make up some 3% of population total) represent around 5% of the survey results. This larger sample size, therefore, increases confidence in the validity of the views expressed by profession. Percentages in the text are rounded up or down, but the precise percentages appear in Table 1.

9. The GNH index for civil servants was 0.893 in 2010 (n = 466), dropping to 0.862 in 2015 (n = 355).

10. The share of sufficiency in weighted indicators dropped from 60.0% in 2010 to 59.5% in 2015.

11. Half of civil servants claimed to be not at all anxious, compared to only 36% of the general public.