Abstract
Public organizations widely use client satisfaction feedback to assess their employees, reflecting responsiveness and accountability to policy clients. Yet client satisfaction is inherently subjective and heterogeneous, and it often diverges from mission-relevant performance in ways that can compromise employees’ work motivation. This study conceptualizes this issue as a bottom-up democracy–bureaucracy dilemma and examines the role of leadership in mitigating it. Drawing on experimental evidence (n = 740) and open-ended qualitative responses (13,502 words) from frontline investigators in South Korea's National Police Agency, the study finds that low client (i.e., alleged victims) satisfaction despite high investigatory performance impairs officers’ work motivation. Notably, these demotivating effects are attenuated when the agency head explicitly acknowledges the weak link between performance and satisfaction and avoid treating low satisfaction as direct evidence of poor performance, even as client satisfaction remains a formal evaluative benchmark. This sensegiving approach appears to foster perceptions of interactional fairness, empathy, and understanding, thereby significantly improving officers’ experience ofsatisfaction feedback and their trust in the agency head. A broader implication of this study is that reconciling democratic impulses for policy clients and political stakeholders with administrative imperatives to empower the workforce is a unique challenge for public sector leadership.
Keywords
Introduction
In recent decades, a noticeable trend in the management of government organizations across democratic nations has been an increasing emphasis on the satisfaction of policy clients (Van Ryzin & Immerwahr, 2007). In the United Kingdom, one of the central reform agendas following the rise of the Labour government in the late 1990s was the Comprehensive Performance Assessment, which incorporated user satisfaction surveys as a tool to assess service delivery (Higgins, 2005). In the United States, the Biden Administration issued a 2021 executive order titled “Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery”, outlining key strategies to improve client satisfaction by reducing administrative burdens and increasing the accessibility and convenience of public services (The White House, 2021). Similar practices have been adopted in non-Western contexts as well. In South Korea, for instance, the National Police administer satisfaction surveys to all clients (i.e., alleged victims) engaging with investigative services. The survey results are integrated into agency-wide performance evaluations, which in turn influence investigators’ bonuses and promotions. These initiatives reflect a commitment to the principle that government bureaucracies should be responsive to democratic impulses from taxpayers (Redford, 1969).
Despite its normative value as democratic feedback, client satisfaction is inherently subjective and heterogeneous, and does not always align with public employees’ mission-relevant job performance. Even when public servants perform well by objective criteria, clients with distinct needs, priorities, and perspectives might still exhibit dissatisfaction or even outrage for various reasons that are beyond the public servants’ control (Van Ryzin, 2007; Yang & Holzer, 2006; Osborne, 2010). For example, clients with exceptionally high expectations may report dissatisfaction when their expectations are not met, even if the officials they interacted with performed to the best of their ability. Because client satisfaction often fails to capture the complexity of public service performance, relying on such measures for accountability purposes may entail administrative trade-offs, including diminished employee work attitudes (Van de Walle, 2016). Pursuing greater client experience may thus come at the expense of workforce work attitudes, a trade-off that receives little explicit attention in government management priorities. For example, the Biden Administration’s Management Agenda Vision 2021 lists empowerment of the Federal workforce and the delivery of excellent client experience as separate, co-equal priorities, without acknowledging that pursuit of the latter may undermine the former (Office of Management and Budget, 2021).
Against this backdrop, the study addresses the following questions: How do tensions between the democratic mandate for client satisfaction and the administrative need to sustain bureaucratic motivation manifest, and how can public managers effectively reconcile these competing imperatives? First, it argues that public servants’ work motivation is impaired when their mission-relevant performance fails to translate into increased client satisfaction, particularly in contexts where satisfaction serves as a formal evaluation criterion (e.g., performance indicator). This tension is conceptualized as a bottom-up bureaucracy–democracy dilemma, which has traditionally been understood from a top-down perspective as friction between elected officials and unelected bureaucrats (Meier, 1997; Meier & O'Toole Jr, 2006; Burke & Cleary, 1989; O'Toole Jr, 1984; Olsen, 2006; Waldo, 2006). This study suggests that the bureaucracy–democracy dilemma also emerges in everyday frontline citizen-state interactions, where client satisfaction feedback carries democratic value, yet its use for accountability purposes within public agencies may compromise employees’ work attitudes.
Second, this article argues that the key to reconciling client satisfaction and bureaucratic motivation, rather than sacrificing one for the sake of the other, lies in organizational leadership. Grounded in informal human relations, leadership provides a mechanism for sustaining public servants’ motivation without diminishing the formal role of client satisfaction (e.g., treating client satisfaction solely as reference information or discontinuing its collection altogether). For example, in feedback conversations with employees, public managers can clearly state that client satisfaction is not entirely driven by job performance and avoid treating low satisfaction as direct evidence of poor performance. Serving as an interpretive buffer, such a sensegiving approach can foster interactional fairness and convey understanding and empathy, enabling employees to remain resilient even when client satisfaction results do not adequately reflect their performance, further promoting trust in the managers.
These arguments are supported by experimental evidence (n = 740) and a qualitative analysis of open-ended responses (13,502 words) from frontline investigators in South Korea's National Police Agency, a setting that offers a compelling test of these arguments. The agency administers nationwide satisfaction surveys to all investigative service recipients for accountability purposes. These scores are integrated into formal evaluations, directly impacting officer promotion and compensation. However, a structural disparity exists between client satisfaction and officer job performance. Highly productive officers are often perceived as rushed or unsympathetic by clients who desire prolonged engagement, resulting in lower satisfaction scores despite superior productivity. Furthermore, officers cannot bypass legal protocols or expedite casework to appease clients, even when doing so would improve survey results. These frictions are exacerbated by the fact that individuals tend to have high expectations that police will act as their personal advocates (Skogan, 1989), rendering satisfaction difficult to achieve regardless of procedural correctness or productivity. As such, particularly in policing, satisfaction scores serve as an imperfect proxy for the actual job performance.
This study brings new theoretical and empirical attention to how using client satisfaction feedback for accountability can strain the work motivation of frontline public servants. It further shows that these motivational trade-offs can be mitigated through leadership without dismissing the importance of satisfaction itself. In particular, leaders can engage in sensemaking by carefully framing and communicating client satisfaction as an important yet imperfect proxy for performance, which improves how employees experience and interpret satisfaction feedback. A broader implication of this study is that a key role of leadership in public organizations is to reconcile democratic demands embedded in organizational processes with competing administrative considerations essential for capacity and performance.
Client Satisfaction as a Form of Democratic Feedback
A foundational rationale of modern democratic government is that authority and resources are delegated from the people and thus should be appropriately used for people's interests (Hampton, 1988). Ensuring that government bureaucrats work for the public interest in the absence of popular control–i.e., electoral processes that can replace them on democratic grounds–poses a major problem in the scholarship of public bureaucracy (Saltzstein, 1992; Vigoda, 2000; Stivers, 2018; Saltzstein, 1985; Chaney & Saltzstein, 1998).
The right of citizens to provide feedback on their interaction with the state is a cornerstone of democratic citizenship. It complements the limitations of voting as a method of political participation in a representative democracy. Client satisfaction provides a gauge of bureaucratic responsiveness and accountability in that regard (Chi, 1999; Vigoda, 2000; Mladenka, 1981; Thomas & Palfrey, 1996). Bureaucracy is requested to be “sympathetic, sensitive, and capable of feeling the public's needs and opinions” (Vigoda, 2002, p. 528), which are inherently heterogeneous, dynamic, and context-dependent (Vigoda-Gadot & Mizrahi, 2008). This view regained popularity in the advent of the New Public Management movement of the 1990s and early 2000s that promoted the slogan of “putting citizens first” (Caiden & Caiden, 2002). Government institutions are called on to accommodate the feedback from policy clients in a way analogous to private businesses being sensitive to consumer feedback (Hughes, 2012). As Vigoda-Gadot & Mizrahi (2008) stated, “Responsiveness to citizens as clients may be regarded as the Holy Grail of modern public administration” (p. 82).
Driven by this normative rationale, much scholarly attention in public management has been devoted to managing performance for increased client satisfaction in various domains (e.g., Grosso & Van Ryzin, 2012), such as parental satisfaction in education (e.g., Charbonneau & Van Ryzin, 2012; Lee et al., 2021; Kisida & Wolf, 2015). Indeed, client satisfaction, or citizen satisfaction 1 more broadly, is regarded as a higher-order outcome of government performance, as reflected in previous studies: “Theoretically, the relevant question for public managers is whether external measures of value creation – citizen satisfaction – are enhanced by efforts to improve performance.” (Kelly, 2005, p. 77), and “One of the key goals of performance management is to improve citizen satisfaction with the government” (Ma, 2017, p. 39).
Tensions Between Client Satisfaction and Employee Motivation in Public Organizations
Despite its intrinsic democratic value, client satisfaction is largely driven by subjective priorities, perspectives, and needs. As such, it is not always aligned with public servants’ job performance regarding the agencies’ mission and goals (Stipak, 1979a). Even when job performance improves, satisfaction may not increase accordingly or, in some cases, may even decline. For example, expectancy-disconfirmation theory suggests that satisfaction is a function of whether an individual's prior expectation is met or disconfirmed (Oliver, 1977; Oliver, 1980; Bhattacherjee, 2001), rather than merely the quality of the service. The theory originated in consumer behavior literature but has been widely tested in public sector contexts (e.g., Van Ryzin, 2004; Van Ryzin, 2006; Van Ryzin, 2013; Morgeson, 2012; Grimmelikhuijsen & Porumbescu, 2017; Poister & Thomas, 2011). Apart from prior expectations, a range of individual-level factors can enlarge the gap between client satisfaction and public employees’ job performance, including but not limited to partisanship (Jilke, 2018), anti-public sector bias (Van Slyke & Roch, 2004; Marvel, 2015; Marvel, 2016), attitudes about organizational politics and ethics (Vigoda-Gadot, 2006), cognitive shortcuts (Andersen & Hjortskov, 2016), and priming and context effects (Hjortskov, 2017). In extreme situations, public servants’ efforts to improve procedural rigor and productivity may come at the expense of their ability to maintain client satisfaction. Acknowledging this tension, some scholars even contend that the value of satisfaction surveys is largely symbolic, as their contribution to managerial rationality remains ambiguous (Dalehite, 2008).
The misalignment between client satisfaction and public employees’ mission-relevant performance—arguably inevitable to some extent—is likely to undermine their work motivation. Expectancy theory of work motivation argues that employees are motivated to work hard when they believe their performance will lead to a desired outcome–namely, when they believe in the “instrumentality” of their performance (Vroom, 1964; Lawler & Suttle, 1973; Reinharth & Wahba 1975; Klein, 1989; Steers, Mowday & Shapiro, 2004). This is particularly true when an employee truly cares about the desired outcome in question; in other words, when they feel a greater “valence” for the reward, either for intrinsic or extrinsic reasons (Galbraith & Cummings, 1967). In this respect, public employees’ work motivation is likely to decline when client satisfaction fails to align with performance achievements, as they may lose faith in the instrumentality of their efforts, particularly when satisfaction metrics are tied to extrinsic incentives and sanctions.
Theories of organizational justice offer insights into a potential mechanism from a different angle. They suggest that work motivation hinges on the fairness of organizational processes (Colquitt, 2001; Colquitt et al., 2001; Sheppard, Lewicki & Minton, 1992), which is comprised of three dimensions: distributive, procedural, and interactional fairness (Skarlicki & Folger, 1997). Employee appraisal systems, for instance, are central to the procedural dimension of organizational fairness (Greenberg, 1986). Early studies demonstrated that even after controlling for the substance of evaluations, perceived fairness of evaluations deeply influences employees’ work motivation (e.g., Landy, Barnes-Farrell & Cleveland, 1980; Dipboye & De Pontbriand, 1981). These observations from private business contexts extend to public sector organizations (e.g., Choi, 2011; Lewis & Emidy, 2021; Kim & Rubianty, 2011; Cho & Sai, 2013). In this regard, when client satisfaction fails to align with performance achievements, public employees’ are likely to perceive satisfaction-based accountability system as unfair, which, in turn, will undermine their work motivation.
The tension between client satisfaction and bureaucratic motivation represents a bottom-up bureaucracy-democracy dilemma that unfolds in frontline interactions between citizens and the state. Traditionally, bureaucracy-democracy dilemma has been understood from a top-down perspective, focusing on frictions between the priorities of elected institutions and those of unelected bureaucracies (Meier & O’Toole Jr., 2006; Meier, 1997). However, this study argues that this dilemma may also emerge in everyday encounters between bureaucrats pursuing agency missions and citizen-clients.
The Role of Leadership in Reconciling Client Satisfaction with Employee Motivation
Faced with the dilemma discussed above, managers in public organizations often reduce the weight assigned to client satisfaction metrics, treat them merely as contextual information, or discontinue data collection altogether. Others adopt the opposite strategy, using client satisfaction aggressively in employee evaluation while disregarding its demotivating consequences.
However, a more fundamental solution for reconciling the two, rather than sacrificing one for the sake of the other, lies in leadership. Research has long emphasized the distinction between formal structures or processes and informal human relations as foundational to understanding organizational administration. As Bendix (1947, p. 502) noted, “The analysis of large-scale organization in the modern world will be deficient, as long as it makes either the formal organizational structure or the informal human relations within that structure the vantage point of its observations”. Because leadership is grounded in informal human relations, it offers a key mechanism to safeguard public employees’ motivation without curtailing the formal role of satisfaction-based accountability. An example of this approach is carefully curated communication, where leaders explicitly acknowledge that client satisfaction is important yet imperfect indicator of job performance (i.e., sensegiving). Indeed, language and messaging used by leaders serve as subtle yet powerful tools for promoting and sustaining employee motivation (Mayfield & Mayfield, 2017; Sullivan, 1988), including statements such as: “I understand that client satisfaction is not solely determined by your performance. Let's keep trying as we have all along.” This message—anchored in the phrase “not solely”—acknowledges the challenge employees face (i.e., that client satisfaction outcomes are not a perfect reflection of employee performance) without entirely dismissing client satisfaction as a legitimate outcome employees should consider. This example aligns with extensive research on leader sensegiving, which examines how leaders help employees interpret ambiguous, confusing, or expectation-violating events (Weick, 1995; Maitlis & Christianson, 2014).
The suggested sensegiving leadership approach may promote a sense of understanding and perceptions of interactional fairness, which refers to “employees’ perceptions of the quality of the interpersonal treatment received during the enactment of organizational procedures” (Skarlicki & Folger, 1997, p. 435). Leader-follower relationship quality is a critical determinant of followers’ work morale and motivation (for example, see Dienesch & Liden, 1986). Widely employed measures of leader-member exchange quality such as The LMX7 scale (Gerstner & Day, 1997; Graen, Novak & Sommerkamp, 1982) includes items that ask whether employees believe their leader ‘understands’ their struggles: “My leader understands my problems and needs” is used in some important recent works on the topic (e.g., Vasquez, Madrid & Niven, 2021; Piccolo, Bardes, Mayer & Judge, 2008; Doden, Grote & Rigotti, 2018).
The proposed leadership approach may also raise a sense of empathy. Empathetic leadership operates via communication in the form of words or actions (Scott-Phillips, 2008) and helps followers feel emotional security and a closer bond with their leaders (Edmondson & Lei, 2014; Mayfield & Mayfield, 2012; Kock et al., 2019; Goldman, 2007; Kellett et al., 2006). The mutual support fostered by empathetic leadership enhances “the followers’ resilience by shifting a negative into a positive perception of events or circumstances” (Wibowo & Paramita, 2022, p. 6). This, in turn, helps public employees remain motivated in situations where client satisfaction is disconnected from their performance achievements, while also strengthening trust in their leaders (Kock et al., 2019; Thomas, Zolin & Hartman, 2009).
The outlined theorization of sensegiving leadership as an interpretive buffer aligns with the growing literature showing that leadership support can enhance public servants’ engagement with clients (e.g., Henderson & Pandey, 2013; Keulemans & Groeneveld, 2020). This buffering role is especially consequential in street-level settings because frontline public officials exercise discretion amid chronic resource constraints, situational ambiguity, and citizen pressure (Lipsky, 1980; Brodkin, 2011; Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003). Client satisfaction metrics can intensify these conditions by introducing a salient yet attributionally noisy evaluative signal—one that may be experienced as externalized blame and thereby invite coping responses such as withdrawal, routinization, or defensive behaviors. Conceptualizing leadership as an interpretive buffer clarifies how managers can shape the street-level meaning and acceptance of such satisfaction metrics: not by curtailing client satisfaction data, but by framing it in ways that preserve its feedback value (democratic and informational) while preventing it from being converted into a decontextualized judgment of public employees’ worth. In short, leadership becomes central to whether client satisfaction is incorporated into street-level practice as learning-oriented, democratic feedback or resisted as illegitimate managerial control.
It should be noted that the hypothesized effect of leadership approach applies not only to upper-echelon organizational leadership but also street-level managers (SLMs); namely, supervisors and middle managers who occupy an intermediary position between upper management and frontline bureaucrats (Meyers & Vorsanger, 2003; Hupe & Hill, 2007). Unlike top administrators who are removed from direct service delivery, SLMs are regularly exposed to both organizational pressures from above and the operational realities of frontline work below. This dual exposure positions them to moderate, translate, or reframe the institutional demands that flow downward before they reach the frontline (Buffat, 2015). In particular, Keulemans and Groeneveld (2020) demonstrate that supervisor influence over frontline discretion operates not only through formal directives, but through the interpretive frameworks supervisors provide regarding how street-level bureaucrats make sense of organizational expectations. The sensegiving approach theorized in this study constitutes precisely this kind of interpretive act, through which public managers help employees make meaning of an accountability arrangement that might otherwise be experienced as unfair or demoralizing.
Empirical Context: Street-Level Police Investigators in South Korea
Frontline police investigation provides a compelling context to test the hypotheses. Notably, the disparity between client feedback and the performance of public servants is particularly acute in frontline policing. Officers frequently encounter situations where they must prioritize productivity or procedural compliance over actions that would satisfy clients (i.e., alleged victims). Given time and resource constraints, high productivity often necessitates brevity, which clients may perceive as negligence or indifference. Furthermore, officers cannot bypass legal protocols or expedite casework to accommodate client demands, even when doing so would lead to higher client satisfaction. These structural tensions are exacerbated by citizens’ high expectations that authorities will act as their personal advocates (Skogan, 1989), rendering satisfaction difficult to achieve. Existing research acknowledges the salience of this friction in policing by viewing client feedback as a ‘noisy proxy’ for the actual rigor of officer job performance. Nevertheless, client satisfaction surveys are widely used in the practice of police administration as an evaluation metric (e.g., Brown & Coulter 1983; Kelling, Pate, Dieckman & Brown, 1974; Stipak, 1979b). More broadly, the consistent growth of policing research in the field that bridges street-level bureaucracy, organizational behavior, and client interactions to explore challenges in street-level jobs (e.g., Paoline III et al., 2021; Edri-Peer, Cohen & Gilad, 2025; Lavee & Cohen, 2025; Cohen & Golan-Nadir, 2020; Kang & Jilke, 2024; Lotta et al., 2024) supports the theoretical validity of this case selection.
The National Police in South Korea presents a compelling case where these domain-specific attributes are particularly salient. As a centralized, monolithic institution, it maintains a high degree of managerial uniformity nationwide. Crucially, the agency places a pronounced emphasis on the satisfaction of clients who utilize policing services. Satisfaction surveys are administered to all individuals receiving investigative assistance (i.e., victims or complainants), and the results are integrated into formal officer evaluations, directly influencing performance metrics, bonuses, and promotion opportunities. This reliance on satisfaction metrics stems from post-democratization reforms designed to dismantle a legacy of unchecked authority and corruption (Moon & Kim, 1996; Moon, 2004). These reforms have successfully shifted the agency toward service-oriented cultural norms, distinguishing it from the enforcement-centric ‘crime-fighter’ mentality. Accordingly, the South Korean case offers a theoretically informative setting for research in which “democracy” is the key explanatory frame: reforms after democratization explicitly aimed to redirect police operating philosophies from enforcement-first orientations toward citizen-facing legitimacy and accountability, with client satisfaction elevated as a central evaluative criterion in police institutions.
Drawing on Seawright and Gerring's (2008) typology of case studies, the South Korean National Police represents an extreme case, where the theoretical mechanisms of interest operate with unusual clarity and force. In South Korean policing, client satisfaction data are formally integrated into compensation, bonuses, and promotion decisions, raising the motivational stakes considerably. The severity of the performance-satisfaction gap makes the mechanisms particularly visible, which is precisely what an extreme case design is suited for: establishing with confidence that the mechanisms exist and operate in the expected direction. Importantly, the extreme nature of this case does not preclude generalization to other democratic states, including Western ones. The democratic impetus driving the use of client satisfaction metrics is also common across OECD democracies. Comparable arrangements appear in the United Kingdom's Comprehensive Performance Assessment regime, the United States’ customer experience executive orders, and a range of European public management reforms broadly inspired by New Public Management principles (Van Ryzin & Immerwahr, 2007). What varies across these contexts is the formal weight that satisfaction metrics carry in evaluation systems, and the present findings provide a theoretical baseline for understanding how the mechanisms at work here should manifest across that variation.
Cultural and religious context also warrants consideration. Golan-Nadir (2024) has argued that cultural and religious factors shape how street-level bureaucrats navigate professional responsibilities in democratic settings. More relevant in this analysis is South Korea's Confucian cultural heritage, which shapes organizational authority relations and instills a strong norm of deference to seniority and institutional hierarchy. In such a culture, frontline officers typically lack legitimate channels to voice frustration upward, even when they experience evaluation arrangements as unfair. This suppression of dissent makes sensegiving leadership particularly consequential. By explicitly validating officers’ experiences rather than simply asserting institutional demands, managers break from the cultural norm in a way that officers are likely to find meaningful. Rather than limiting the scope of the findings, this observation points to how cultural variation in voice norms and authority relations may shape the conditions under which sensegiving leadership is most impactful.
The theoretical population for this case analysis comprises frontline investigators at local police stations. These officers handle a broad range of cases involving ordinary citizens, including traffic accidents, physical altercations, interpersonal fraud, and sexual assault. Each case typically involves one or more alleged victims (i.e., the complainants), who constitute the clients, alongside one or more alleged suspects. Cases originate from either calls-for-service dispatches or direct filings. Based on the investigation's outcome, officers determine whether to close the case or refer it to the prosecutor's office, subject to line supervisor approval.
Methods
Vignette Experiment Based on Realistic Investigation Cases, Not Fabricated Fiction
The analysis was conducted through a vignette experimental design that collected both quantitative data and qualitative open-ended responses within a single design, resembling a mixed-methods experimental design (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2017). When qualitative data are collected during the experiment, they help uncover how participants interpreted and reacted to the experimental treatments. Adding supplementary qualitative data helps unpack the mechanisms that largely remain as a black box in an experiment-only design (e.g., Plano Clark, Schumacher, West, Edrington, Dunn, Harzstark, Melisko, Rabow, Swift & Miaskowski, 2013). The purpose of adding this qualitative component was not for triangulation but for a supportive, secondary role to help explain the experimental results in greater depth (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2017). The present study performed a factorial vignette experiment that included closed-ended questions for hypothesis testing, followed by a supplementary open-ended question to qualitatively capture respondents’ thought processes during their experimental participation.
The experiment was embedded in an online survey that acquired IRB approval and was distributed in May 2021 to the entire study population (N = 26,024). Three weekly reminders were sent out before the survey was permanently closed. A total of 850 investigators responded to the survey (response rate = 3.3%). Among them, 816 investigators participated in the experiment of which 76 dropped out before its completion (n = 740). Roughly two-thirds of the investigators who completed their participation answered the open-ended question that asked about their thought processes during the experimental participation (a total of 13,502 words from 495 respondents). In general, investigators are reluctant to open emails from unverified external sources, which may have led to a low response rate. Response rate is not automatically an indicator of bias since external validity of survey research depends on who responds, not how many respond. However, a low response rate may increase the risk of nonresponse bias because fewer responses must represent a larger population. While this is acknowledged as a limitation, it is worth noting that the primary intention of the present analysis was to generate internally valid evidence, complemented by contextually grounded qualitative insights into the subject matter.
While survey vignette experiments are limited by their artificial nature, this study's design presented the treatments in a policy-document format closely resembling the internal reports that officers regularly read (see Figure 1 for the full vignette). This substantially enhanced the realism of the task and mitigated common concerns about vignette studies relying on purely fabricated scenarios. The treatments were intentionally crafted to mirror the agency's established practice of distributing internal policy reports that summarize agency-wide performance results and convey messages or announcements from the agency chief. The performance indicators shown beneath the bar chart in Figure 1 are the actual metrics in use within the agency at the time of the experiment. It is important to note that the client satisfaction results presented in Figure 1 reflect the agency's real practice of administering satisfaction surveys to every client (i.e., alleged victims and complainants) who has received investigatory services in any capacity. These differ from generic resident satisfaction surveys, which often include respondents who may not have consumed the investigatory services being evaluated. A pilot test using a convenience sample of five investigators further confirmed the realism and credibility of the experimental vignette.
Experimental vignette and random assignment.
The vignette contained two treatments, resulting in a 2 × 2 between-subject design: Treatment 1 was the direction of the correlation between officer job performance and client satisfaction (Negative vs. Positive), which indicates whether high job performance properly translated into greater client satisfaction. Treatment 2 was whether the agency chief acknowledges that client satisfaction is not solely attributable to employee job performance (Yes vs. No).
As described above, investigators were asked three questions after reading the vignette. Single-item measures are often criticized for potential psychometric shortcomings, such as limited reliability, reduced sensitivity, and an inability to capture the multidimensionality of complex constructs (e.g., Kruyen, Emons & Sijtsma, 2013). However, they have pragmatic advantages, in vignette experiments in particular, such as reduced fatigue, satisficing, and negative reactions to repetitive or lengthy scales, all of which can threaten data quality (Credé, Harms, Niehorster & Gaye-Valentine, 2012). Based on this consideration, single-item measures were employed to measure the dependent variables and allow the respondents to allocate more time and attention to the open-ended question. The work motivation measure was based on its conceptual definition: “willingness to exert effort to perform well” (Van Knippenberg, 2000, p. 363), and trust in manager measure followed the conceptual definition of benevolence as a dimension of interpersonal trust: “assessment of a trustee's willingness to act in the best interest of the trustor” (Jones and Shah, 2016, p. 394), both of which are widely accepted in applied organizational psychology.
Results
Experimental Test of Hypotheses
The results presented in this section (summarized in Table 1) were derived using OLS regression, with the assumption that the dependent variables’ Likert scale was continuous. In a supplementary analysis for robustness check, the OLS regression was substituted with ordered logistic regression, treating the dependent variables as ordinal. The coefficients found in the robustness check were highly consistent with those from the OLS regression, with one exception: the coefficient for the interaction effect on work motivation, which was significant at the 0.05 level, dropped to being significant at the 0.1 level (see Table A1 in the Appendix for additional details). Prior to the regression analyses, balance tests were conducted and the results supported that the random assignments were properly executed; the groups receiving each of the two treatments were not statistically different in terms of age, gender, tenure, education, and rank (See Table A1 in the Appendix for a comparison of the experimental groups).
Linear Regression Results Summary.
Note: p < 0.1: *, p < 0.05: **, p < 0.01: ***, two-tailed test.
According to the results, when client satisfaction decreased despite improvements in the officers’ performance, it negatively affected their work motivation (b = -0.444, p = 0.000). This decline in work motivation, however, was mitigated when the agency chief's message encouraged good work while acknowledging that client satisfaction is not solely determined by officers’ performance, rather than attributing satisfaction directly to performance. This leadership approach had a positive main effect on investigators’ work motivation (b = 0.720, p = 0.000) and further mitigated the demotivating effect of the negative performance-satisfaction correlation (b = 0.484, p = 0.046). The positive main effect suggests that the leadership approach boosted officers’ work motivation, regardless of whether client satisfaction increased or declined as performance improved. In addition, the interaction effect indicates that the leadership approach created a buffer, helping officers remain resilient despite low satisfaction co-occurring with high performance. Lastly, the leadership approach had a significant positive effect on the investigators’ trust in the chief (b = 0.917, p = 0.000).
Taken together, these findings provide strong support for the three hypotheses. It is important to interpret these findings on the benefits of the leadership approach, considering the fact that client satisfaction continues to serve as an evaluative metric.
Exploratory Finding: Heterogeneous Effects by Officers’ Public Service Motivation
An unanticipated finding related to public service motivation emerged during exploratory analysis. Although this relationship was not hypothesized ex ante, it is reported here because it may provide insight into potential mechanisms underlying the experimental findings.
When client satisfaction declines despite an increase in objective investigation performance (i.e., Treatment 1), it had a greater negative effect on the work motivation of officers with higher public service motivation (PSM), which refers to “an individual's predisposition to respond to motives grounded primarily or uniquely in public institutions” (Perry, 1996, p. 6). 2 The interaction between treatment 1 and PSM was negative and statistically significant (b = -0.242, p = 0.042), which is visualized in Figure 2.
Visualization of the exploratory findings (interaction between treatment 1 and PSM)
One possible interpretation of this pattern is that bureaucrats with higher PSM are motivated by advancing the public interest, and therefore may be more sensitive to client satisfaction feedback as public-facing signals of impact and legitimacy. When high job performance coincides with low client satisfaction, this combination may suggest that effortful work has failed to generate publicly recognized value. For officers with high PSM, this perceived disconnect between performance and societal impact may be particularly demotivating, as it challenges the fulfillment of their normative commitment to serving the public interest.
Qualitative Results
To follow up with the experimental results, a qualitative thematic analysis was conducted on the open-ended responses to the question: “Please tell us about which parts of the report you paid special attention to, and the thoughts you had while reading the report”. As previously mentioned, the purpose of the qualitative analysis was strictly confined to the secondary role of adding nuances to the experimental results (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2017). In other words, the thematic analysis was designed to be complementary rather than confirmatory, aiming to expand the interpretation of the experimental results. Given this, it purposefully focused on responses that aligned with the statistically estimated treatment effects. The aim was to dissect how the participants experienced the vignette treatments and reveal potential mechanisms of the treatment effects in greater depth. Once the research team was familiarized with the dataset through repeated readings of the texts and note-taking, codes were assigned to major ideas and topics. Based on the codes, common themes that serve as an overarching framework for the codes are identified. The process of reviewing and identifying codes and themes was iteratively repeated until no further modifications were deemed necessary, meaning that No new codes or themes emerge from additional rounds of analysis.
For quotation purposes, each respondent was assigned an identification code ranging from i1 to i860 according to the temporal order of their survey participation. The common themes that emerged from the thematic analysis are summarized in Tables 2 and 3. The identification of themes was based on the depth and richness of insights related to the hypotheses and experimental findings. Numeric counts for each theme are not presented in the table, as they could misleadingly imply their relative importance.
Common Themes Supporting the Effect of Treatment 1.
Common Themes Supporting the Effect of Treatment 2.
Officers shared a range of criticisms in using client satisfaction metric to evaluate officers (Table 2). Many of them alluded to the mechanisms derived from organizational justice theory underlying Hypothesis 1. Three primary themes emerged from their responses: 1) “legal accountability” – i.e., officers must adhere strictly to procedural requirements that are seldom conducive to client satisfaction, 2) “extraneous factors beyond police's control” – i.e., clients’ expectations hinge on extraneous factors that are beyond the control of the police, and 3) “personnel shortage” – i.e., low client satisfaction is attributable to the personnel shortage rather than poor behavior of individual officers. These three themes are connected to the perceived unfairness of using client satisfaction as a formal benchmark for employee evaluation since they are all factors beyond the control of the officers.
Regarding the first theme, numerous officers said they are unable to override legal protocols to appease clients whose claims are yet to be sustained. They said they must consider the legal mandates when serving the clients and investigating the cases, which frequently go against clients’ preferences. Regarding the second theme, many investigators had comments which boiled down to exogeneous influences on client satisfaction, such as media propaganda or unreasonable expectations that clients bring into the case. Lastly, some investigators pointed out the shortage of manpower as a major cause of low client satisfaction which relates to the third theme. They highlighted that officers have too many cases in the pipeline which significantly limits their ability to engage in behaviors that please their clients.
The thematic analysis also revealed how the chief executive's understanding helped investigators maintain positive emotions (feelings) about their work as well as about their chief (Table 3). The results lend support to the theories of leadership underlying Hypothesis 2 and Hypothesis 3, given that leadership is intrinsically an emotional process of social interaction (Dasborough & Ashkanasy, 2002). Most notably, many officers mentioned that they felt a sense of duty and were able to maintain an emotional attachment to their work, primarily due to the chief's message that did not lay the entire blame on officers’ performance for low client satisfaction. Furthermore, investigators also said that the chief's understanding also encouraged them to feel positive about their chief. Many officers resonated with the chief's statement that does not attribute client satisfaction directly to investigatory performance and felt positively about the chief.
Discussion and Implications
The findings suggest that although the use of client satisfaction for accountability purposes reflects a democratic aspiration to “listen to clients,” it may diverge from bureaucrats’ mission-relevant performance and, in turn, undermine their work motivation. As discussed earlier, this dynamic represents an important yet understudied dimension of the democracy–bureaucracy dilemma, namely the tension between democratic impulses articulated by citizen-clients and bureaucrats’ efforts to fulfill agency missions.
Public managers often respond to the misalignment between client satisfaction and employees’ mission-relevant performance in one of two ways: (a) by ignoring potential motivational costs and continuing to apply satisfaction metrics rigidly for holding employees accountable, or (b) by reducing or eliminating satisfaction measures to protect their work attitudes. However, this study supports a more sustainable approach; Rather than retreating from satisfaction feedback or enforcing it without nuance, public managers can draw on leadership as a means of preserving both motivational integrity and the democratic value of client voice. By serving as an interpretive buffer, managers can frame and communicate client satisfaction as important feedback while clarifying that low satisfaction does not constitute direct evidence of poor performance or incompetence. This sensegiving approach fosters perceptions of understanding, interactional fairness, and procedural legitimacy. In turn, employees are better able to sustain positive affect toward their work and managers, remaining resilient even when client satisfaction results are misaligned with job performance. These results resonate with long-standing insights from human relations perspectives and contemporary relational leadership research: motivation is not solely an incentive problem but also a relational and meaning-making challenge, particularly in public management contexts where outcomes are not fully under employees’ control.
This study does not claim that ‘objective’ performance metrics are inherently superior or that client satisfaction should be discounted. It acknowledges that objective indicators—often favored because they signal agency productivity and success—tend to persist (Kelly, 2005) even when they are biased or misaligned with clients’ priorities or lived experiences (Hatry, 1980; Van Ryzin, 2007; Schachter, 2010). At the same time, a degree of divergence between objective performance measures and subjective satisfaction is almost inevitable (Van Ryzin, 2007). The practical implication, therefore, is not to place objective and subjective indicators in a hierarchy but to design performance systems and leadership practices that (1) clarify what satisfaction data are intended to capture (responsiveness and accountability to clients) versus what they should not be overinterpreted as (a complete proxy for competence, effort, or mission-relevant performance), and (2) translate client satisfaction feedback into sustainable organizational learning while safeguarding motivational integrity. To this end, agencies should consider more nuanced ways of incorporating client satisfaction; for example, pairing numerical scores with open-ended qualitative responses, or implementing supervisory calibration processes to prevent satisfaction results from becoming blunt disciplinary tools. More broadly, the field would benefit from deeper research on how different configurations of performance metrics—whether objective, subjective, or mixed—shape the morale and motivation of bureaucrats, and on what organizational interventions are necessary to mitigate these effects. This line of inquiry is as vital as understanding how and why performance information is used, or not used, once collected (cf. Kroll, 2015).
The finding that sensegiving leadership increases employees’ trust in their manager, not just immediate work motivation, carries profound implications from a practical, managerial standpoint. In public organizations, especially street-level agencies, trust in leadership is vital organizational capital, not merely a desirable affective state. Because street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) operate with high discretion and frequently outside the direct line of sight of their supervisors, managers rely heavily on SLBs’ discretionary judgment, compliance, and commitment to effectively navigate highly localized, situational demands (Cho & Ringquist, 2011; Nyhan, 2000). When trust in managers is impaired, SLBs are more likely to engage in defensive behaviors and coping mechanisms to avoid managerial blame (Hood, 2011; Tummers et al., 2015), even when doing so actively subverts meaningful policy goals. Therefore, the discovery that managers can actively generate substantial trust by acting as an interpretive buffer offers a highly actionable tool for public organizations. Public managers often lack the statutory authority to discard politically mandated accountability metrics, even when those metrics are flawed. However, this study demonstrates that managers retain immense power over how those metrics are framed and operationalized on the ground. By practicing the appropriate leadership approach in the framing and operationalization of the metrics, managers can cultivate trust that transforms the manager-subordinate dynamic from adversarial compliance to voluntary commitment.
The insights from this study contribute to ongoing efforts to advance theory building in public sector leadership. A central concern in the literature is that research on public leadership should be grounded in the distinctive “publicness” of governmental organizations, rather than simply adapting and replicating concepts developed in private-sector management (Ospina, 2017). This study speaks directly to that concern by illuminating the central role public leaders play in mediating tensions between democratic mandates embedded in organizational arrangements and the administrative needs for accomplishing agency missions. Unlike for-profit organizations, public organizations often operate under institutional arrangements designed to safeguard democratic values, even when those arrangements complicate managerial capacity or organizational performance. While the present study focused on accountability and responsiveness based on client satisfaction, the underlying challenge extends to other democratically motivated arrangements, including transparency initiatives and participatory governance mechanisms, which are normatively justified yet may inadvertently generate motivational or administrative trade-offs in practice. By foregrounding how public leaders navigate tensions arising from the normative foundations of public organizations, this study offers a theory-building perspective that treats democratic values as a central analytical feature.
An additional methodological implication of this study concerns how client satisfaction is typically modeled. Quantitative studies that explore client satisfaction as a dependent variable should be cognizant of the reverse causality problem, an issue that was neglected in most existing studies (cf. Song, An & Meier, 2021; Im & Lee, 2012; Dahlberg & Holmberg, 2014). Client satisfaction can serve as an external factor that may affect the attitudes, preferences, and capacities of bureaucracy, as demonstrated by this study that experimentally manipulated client satisfaction levels as an exogeneous variable. Some reasonable questions may follow: Does bureaucratic performance of better-quality drive higher client satisfaction? Or is it higher client satisfaction that reinforces bureaucratic performance of better quality? Theoretically, both mechanisms can be at work and do not necessarily predicate one another. The validity of empirical results can be jeopardized if studies do not consider reverse causality or simultaneity in their research design.
This study is based on a single-case examination of frontline policing, and its findings should therefore be interpreted as localized evidence rather than as demonstrations of universal regularities (Van Ryzin, 2021). Policing is characterized by high-stakes, frequently involuntary, and inherently coercive interactions, making client satisfaction a uniquely fraught metric. To translate these insights to other high-discretion policy domains, such as public education, healthcare, or social services, future research must systematically account for how distinct contextual factors moderate the relationship between citizen satisfaction metrics, leadership, and employee work attitudess. For instance, occupational socialization may fundamentally shape how public employeesinternalize client feedback. While the strong internal solidarity of police occupational culture may partially insulate officers from the psychological toll of negative citizen feedback, public servants in care-oriented fields (e.g., nursing or social work) whose professional identities are deeply intertwined with client well-being might experience divergent satisfaction scores as a more profound identity threat. In such contexts, the need for managers to act as interpretive buffers may be even more acute. In a similar vein, the external validity of relational leadership as a trust-generating mechanism may depend heavily on localized work conditions, such as administrative workload and culture. In environments characterized by chronic under-resourcing and heavy caseloads, which is not uncommon (Lipsky, 1980), both the bandwidth required for managers to engage in relational sensegiving, and the capacity of SLBs to meaningfully internalize it, may be severely constrained. High workload forces a rationing of services and time, which can amplify an organization's reliance on easily quantifiable, though flawed, satisfaction metrics as a heuristic for performance. Similarly, a deeply entrenched, compliance-driven culture that rigidly prioritizes numerical targets could easily overpower individual managerial efforts to foster psychological safety. If the broader organizational environment and culture punishes low client satisfaction scores regardless of context, localized leadership approaches may be perceived by SLBs as hollow or administratively impotent. Ultimately, delineating how varying levels of workload, occupational norms, and organizational culture intersect to either facilitate or constrain managerial buffering remains a vital frontier for establishing the broader external validity of these findings across the public sector.
Conclusion
This study examines an important yet underexplored dimension of the democracy–bureaucracy dilemma: the tension between democratic demands for client satisfaction and the administrative imperative of sustaining public servants’ work motivation. Our findings demonstrate that employee motivation is significantly undermined when client feedback diverges from their actual, mission-relevant job performance. Crucially, however, the results indicate that sensegiving leadership can effectively mitigate this demotivating effect without formally weakening satisfaction-based accountability. By carefully framing client satisfaction as an important yet imperfect signal of job performance, managers foster perceptions of interactional fairness and convey essential empathy. Ultimately, this interpretive buffering ensures that public servants' motivation endures even when high job performance co-occurs with low client satisfaction, and it further promotes their trust in the manager.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.