Hester Paanakker

because different public sector levels attach different meaning or different priority to them. This is how we view value divergence in this study. Value conflict, in itself, is not a problem; value conflicts, including the ones that originate from differing interpretations at different organizational levels, can bring forth change for the better by prompting alertness and innovation. However, value conflict may also give rise to moral dilemmas, which arise when (a) two or more values cannot be realized at the same time (De Graaf, 2015, 2016) and (b) actors are forced to opt for the realization of one value at the cost of other value(s) (Vink, Tummers, Bekkers, & Musheno, 2015). As can be learned from Lipsky’s seminal (1980) study or later the work by Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003), value conflict is unavoidable in public service delivery. Even when value conflicts present street-level actors with a moral dilemma, this is a fact of life in response to which street-level workers develop a wide variety of coping mechanisms (Loyens & Maesschalck, 2010; Vink et al., 2015). Yet, there is a danger that value conflicts lead to a state of paralysis , to ineffective governance, and to undesirable outcomes where important public values are lost. This covers moral issues as well as possible practical constraints such as lack of time, or insufficient resources with which to adequately address values in implementation. Here, we study an empirical case to see whether these pathologies, of thorny moral dilemmas on the one hand, and practical implementation problems on the other, are indeed manifested when there is value divergence between different levels in the public sector. From other disciplines, such as psychology and organizational science, we can derive insights into the potentially large effects of value divergence. Organizational theory on personal and organizational (Kristof, 1996) – rather than public – values extensively shows that value congruence within organizations generates positive effects on, for instance, moral efficacy and moral voice (Lee et al., 2017) and job satisfaction, organizational identification and trust, and intent to stay in the organization (Edwards & Cable, 2009). For this reason organizations seek to actively socialize organizational members into their value system (Moyson et al., 2018). Conversely, value incongruence between the individual and the organization causes employees to experience stress, discomfort and a range of negative work attitudes and behavior, including higher turnover intention, and lower job satisfaction, lower engagement and lower productivity 136 Chapter 6