Managing stress in the public sector: interactions between supportive management and enacted use of wearables across jobs

Abstract

Purpose This research examines the relationship between supportive management, the use of wearable technology, and felt stress in public-sector jobs with varying discretion and temporal autonomy. Design/methodology/approach We conducted two complementary studies. Study 1 analyzed survey data from 341 public sector employees using finite mixture modeling and cluster profiling. Study 2 used observational daily data from wearable sensors of 18 employees over 48 days. We also conducted an analytical comparison of the two studies’ findings, accounting for job characteristics. Findings In jobs with enabled discretion and high temporal autonomy, supportive management does not directly impact stress. However, it interacts with wearables, showing a stress-reducing association. Conversely, in jobs with constrained discretion and low temporal autonomy, supportive management directly reduces stress but does not interact with wearables. Practical implications Managers should align the use of well-being technologies with the available action space. When the action space is high, the focus should be on non-core IT processes, including private self-review windows and clear procedures for responding to alerts. When the action space is low, support should target core job operations directly. Originality/value This research integrates Street-Level Bureaucracy with the Technology Enactment Framework to examine enacted wearable use depending on action space and supportive management. Empirically, it combines a finite mixture model with wearable stress indicators to model job context heterogeneity in the public sector.