In his seminal work on Street-Level Bureaucracy, Lipsky introduces the idea that street-level bureaucrats handle the stressors of frontline work through coping. In his piece (1980) he describes the work of these bureaucrats as having a built-in contradiction between exercising discretion in response to clients and the need to process clients through routines, stereotypes and other ways of facilitating work. Workers handle the stresses of this contradiction through coping (p. 140).
Since Lipsky, scholars of public administration have continued to tie coping with street-level bureaucrats (Nielsen, 2006; Tummers & Rocco, 2015). Literature on individual determinants of coping style in public service delivery is lacking, especially on