How client characteristics cause extra-role behaviours in public service: uncovering invisible frontline work

ABSTRACT

Frontline workers have the discretion to extend public services beyond their formal job requirements, yet little is known about the influence of client characteristics on this behaviour. Using a large-scale conjoint design with 1,507 Danish high-school teachers, we uncover how teachers willingly exceed their job expectations when encountering students who demonstrate effort (e.g. handing in assignments) or low well-being (e.g. feeling lonely). However, their willingness diminishes as requested behaviours deviate further from job expectations. Our study highlights the factors driving extra-role behaviours and underscore the importance of recognizing ‘invisible frontline work’.

KEYWORDS:

• Extra-role behaviours
• client characteristics
• frontline work
• deservingness
• conjoint experiments

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2023.2270557

Notes

1. A likely explanation for this omission, we suspect, is the fact that most of the research investigating extra-role behaviours is found in the neighbouring fields of organizational psychology and business administration, focusing on employees in more general terms and customers, respectively.

2. All data, syntax, and materials are publicly available through the Open Science Framework at: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/A3KNW

3. In addition to the information of direct theoretical interest to our study, we provided each student with a randomly assigned name to ensure realism. To avoid any confounding with the experiment, we picked the 10 most popular names in Denmark within four strata: Danish-sounding male names, Danish-sounding female names, ethnic-sounding male names, and ethnic-sounding female names. Because we assigned names randomly and with equal probability, information about gender and ethnicity could not contaminate the experiment.

4. For well-being, we also added one cue stating that the student”seems to be having trouble at home”. Arguably, this cue is more difficult to rank in terms of ‘well-being dose’ but was included because their close and long-term relationship with students means that teachers are sometimes confronted with out-of-class well-being problems as well (see, e.g. Davies and Berger 2019).

5. The survey went out to teachers during April 13 2022. At this point, the COVID-19 pandemic still affected the extent to which high-schools could provide in-class teaching. At April 13, all teachers were allowed to work from their shared offices. Further, all students were allowed to meet-in at least 50% of the time. The particular implementation varied from school to school but one prominent way of organizing teaching was to have one half of the class come in one week and then following the classes from home the next (i.e. classes took place as hybrid format). Additionally, from April 21^st, students outside the Capital Region, who were in their final year could meet in 80% of the time. For all students, a number of precautionary measures still applied, including the frequent use of hand sanitizers