Hester Paanakker

under the exact same conditions, to experience moral stress, whilst others do not. As such, the findings also provide a contribution to the exploration of coping in street-level theory. The fuzzy relationship with the experience of moral dilemmas particularly needs to be further explored. This, and as mentioned in the discussion of the limitations, together with a range of additional hypothesized effects, merits further examination and provides a fruitful ground for the development of a future research agenda on public value convergence and divergence and its effects. 7.4 Contributions to Policy Practice Besides their important theoretical implications, the findings of this thesis also carry implications for practitioners operating in the field of public sercive delivery. One of the most important insights public officials may derive from this thesis is awareness of how their commitment to, and involvement with, frontline craftsmanship is reflected in their value management. For middle-management and managing directors, it can create awareness that they may tend to disperse and demand different values from the ones they would ideally see shaping frontline behaviors in public service delivery. Willingly or unwillingly, they tend to be absorbed by the institutional logics of performance measurement, output control, and lean management at the expense of genuine attention to craftsmanship values, at the expense of the mental state of their employees, and at the expense of the quality of the service delivered to service recipients. And even when they do explicitly and consciously seek to address intrinsic values that support good public service delivery to clients, citizens, or patients, they should be aware that they are unlikely to be perceived as doing so. This can create different types of cognitive dissonance between apsired and enacted values, and behaviors, that is not to the benefit of the street-level worker, but also not to the benefit of managers themselves. Managers may feel caught between two fires: of “making the numbers add up” for the sake of their superiors, and of safeguarding intrinsic value realization at street-level, neither of which they can sufficiently satisfy. For policy makers, the thesis can raise awareness of the profound value gap that the policy department is perceived to create between themselves and management and street-level implementation in penal facilities. This perceived value gap of an elite team at headquarters 176 Chapter 7