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52 THREE CHAPTER In the Government of Canada, the earliest, most eloquent cry for improved services was made by the highest ranking executive in the bureaucracy, the Clerk of the Privy Council in the late 1980s. PaulTellier even made improving services to the citizenry a cornerstone to the famous PS 2000 vision (Kernaghan 1991; Rawson 1991) that was designed to establish a public service for the 21st century. Critical to PS 2000, and to the likes of Osborne and Gaebler’s Reinventing Government, was a conviction that the ‘culture’ of the public service had to change in order to measurably improve public services from one that was inward-looking to one that was more focused on the needs of Canadians (Osborne and Gaebler 1992; Seidle 1995). A generation later, while governments across Canada have done a great deal to improve service to the public, the objective of creating a genuine ‘service culture’ seems as difficult as ever to realize. Research and practices in the private sector have pointed to a solution in terms of understanding ‘culture’ and the best ways of shaping it so that it could in turn make service companies more competitive. Since the early 1990s, it has been known as the ‘satisfaction mirror’—an axiom that employees who were happy in their jobs were more likely to deliver better service than employees who were not. “Service-driven service companies ” were found to thrive on a “service profit chain”—a model that placed employee satisfaction as a critical link between internal service quality and customer satisfaction/retention and profit (Schlesinger and Heskett 1991a, b). Some public administration scholars in Canada were also attentive to the phenomena. Canadian Public Administration, the flagship journal of public administration in the country, published an article on the critical link Can We Create a Service Culture? Can We Create a Service Culture? 53 between employee engagement and customer satisfaction based on a case study performed at Xerox (Lacasse 1991) as a part of a trend of scholarly material (Roth, Bozinoff and MacIntosh 1990; Séguin 1991; Lacasse 1991; Bouchard 1991; Marson 1991; Morin 1992; Das and McKenzie 1995). Further studies in the private sector showed that employee commitment translated as better service, and ultimately made a company more profitable in addition to being competitive (Rucci, Kirk and Quinn 1998). This chapter argues that while a ‘service culture’ can be promoted in the public sector, its impact will be limited by a number of factors that invariably impair the construct of a genuine public service ‘value chain’. First, the current nature of the work makes the improvement of a service culture inherently difficult. Front-line employees in the public service have relatively little discretion in serving clients and must follow procedures established to ensure fairness of service. The service culture of the public service, inevitably, has had to conform to bureaucratic rules, strictures and rigours. Second, the nature of the service itself is limiting. Most government services are ‘low involvement’—the relationship may be life-long, but infrequent, routine, and in little need of the personalization typical of a ‘service culture’. A service culture in bureaucratic terms is not likely to go beyond the courteous, timely and effective delivery of prescribed solutions. Third, it is difficult to maintain a service culture where the clients have no incentive to seek the service except to avoid an outlaw existence. It cannot be forgotten that most citizens do not typically require an active service from government—it is demanded by the state or its provision is imposed by a state monopoly. Fourth, evidence collected by governments shows that public servants are largely satisfied with their work, and that the service culture is already healthy (albeit within its limits). This may be promising in some regards, but it also carries a risk; satisfied workers may not necessarily be willing to change their customer-relations practices radically without substantial incentives. Finally, the efforts required to achieve an ‘engaged’ workforce can be expensive and subject to laws of diminishing returns. Governments are already loath to subject their services to genuine cost-effectiveness comparisons. Indeed, without this vital, missing element, it will be difficult to argue that there is anything more than a superficial public value chain. It took more than a decade for the public service to react to what was published in Canadian Public Administration in the early 1990s in terms of exploring the link between a healthy working culture and the concept of employee satisfaction. In 2003 the...

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