Providing Safe Space for Honest Mistakes in the Public Sector Is the Most Important Predictor for Work Engagement after Strategic Clarity

Thais Gargantini; Michael Daly; Joseph Sherlock; Teddy Lazebnik

doi:10.3390/su14127051

Providing Safe Space for Honest Mistakes in the Public Sector Is the Most Important Predictor for Work Engagement after Strategic Clarity

Thais Gargantini, Michael Daly, Joseph Sherlock, Teddy Lazebnik

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

9 Scopus citations

Abstract

Multiple studies highlight the link between engagement at work and performance, influencing organizations to put more effort into improving employee engagement levels. In this study, we begin to examine the influence of multiple psychological parameters on employees’ work engagement (WE) within the public sector. The idea is to break the concept of WE down into eight individually measurable parameters that will allow for a better understanding and development of stronger interventions. Based on this analysis, we reproduce the outcome that strategic clarity is the most connected property to WE. More importantly, we introduce a new concept, honest mistakes, and show that having a safe space for making mistakes and learning from it is the second most important property of WE. This result is of interest, as allowing mistakes, even if they were made innocently, is considered taboo in the public sector. These outcomes are based on the reports of n = 7682 public sector employees from Brazil. In particular, the analysis shows that these outcomes hold for both professional and management positions across the health, administrative, justice, police, social work, and education offices.

Original language	English
Article number	7051
Journal	Sustainability (Switzerland)
Volume	14
Issue number	12
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.3390/su14127051
State	Published - 1 Jun 2022
Externally published	Yes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Funding

Acknowledgments: The authors would like to thank the individuals from the Lemann Foundation, República.org, Brava Foundation, Humanize Institute, the Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University, Kayma, the National Council of Administration Secretaries, the State Governments from Acre, Alagoas, Amapá, Ceará, Espírito Santo, Goiás, São Paulo, Santa Catarina, Sergipe, Tocantins and the municipality of Guarulhos in the State of São Paulo in Brazil for there help in the data collection, funding, and refining the research question. In addition, the authors would like to thank Tali Regev and Elizaveta Savchenko for critically reviewing the paper.

Funders	Funder number
Brava Foundation
Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University
Humanize Institute
National Council of Administration Secretaries
Fundação Lemann

Keywords

behavioral economics factors
dominance analysis
honest mistakes
public sector management
work engagement

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Access to Document

10.3390/su14127051

Cite this

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abstract = "Multiple studies highlight the link between engagement at work and performance, influencing organizations to put more effort into improving employee engagement levels. In this study, we begin to examine the influence of multiple psychological parameters on employees{\textquoteright} work engagement (WE) within the public sector. The idea is to break the concept of WE down into eight individually measurable parameters that will allow for a better understanding and development of stronger interventions. Based on this analysis, we reproduce the outcome that strategic clarity is the most connected property to WE. More importantly, we introduce a new concept, honest mistakes, and show that having a safe space for making mistakes and learning from it is the second most important property of WE. This result is of interest, as allowing mistakes, even if they were made innocently, is considered taboo in the public sector. These outcomes are based on the reports of n = 7682 public sector employees from Brazil. In particular, the analysis shows that these outcomes hold for both professional and management positions across the health, administrative, justice, police, social work, and education offices.",

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doi = "10.3390/su14127051",

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Providing Safe Space for Honest Mistakes in the Public Sector Is the Most Important Predictor for Work Engagement after Strategic Clarity

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Funding

Keywords

UN SDGs

Access to Document

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Cite this