Hester Paanakker

Engen, Tummers, Bekkers, & Steijn, 2016; Wynen et al., 2019), frontline workers may move away from clients (for instance by routinizing behavior) or even against clients (for instance by rigid rule following) (Lipsky, 1980; Maynard-Moody &Musheno, 2003; Tummers et al., 2015). Unlike well-known strategies of rule bending or rule breaking (Tummers et al., 2015) and the aforementioned indifference strategy, the second frontline coping strategy of bureaucratic flexibility is supportive of doing the work in the most loyal way possible, to the best of one’s ability. With this coping strategy, street-level workers put loyalty first in two ways. First, they display loyalty towards clients in terms of attending to the needs of inmates no matter how stressful or contrarian daily practice becomes. This resonates with the important notion of Public Service Motivation (Perry, 2000; Perry et al., 2010) that frontline workers want to perform meaningful public service (Tummers, 2013) and that high scores on public service motivation (especially on “self-sacrifice”) makes frontline workers less change-resistant (Wright et al., 2013). Second, prison officers are loyal in terms of performing executive tasks in line with penal policies, values, and mission as much as possible. This is in line with literature stressing the important of organizational mission in employee work motivation (Wright, 2007), and shows that, especially in command cultures, in addition to self-sacrifice, bureaucratic loyalty and obedience may be important in explaining compliance. The above findings on moral dilemmas lead us to formulate our final propositions: Proposition 7: Within a sector, value divergence between different public sector levels does not necessarily lead to moral dilemmas experienced at the frontline. Proposition 8 : The coping mechanisms of indifference by means of cognitive distancing and bureaucratic flexibility prevent the majority of street-level workers from experiencing moral dilemmas. Future research on these propositions is encouraged, specifically in other types of frontline public service delivery, such as the police, health and care, or education, to examine the 157 The Effect of Value Divergence