In welfare states, governments try to encourage welfare clients to find work and become economically self-sufficient through activation policies. These activation policies range from job retraining, personal care, and labour... [ view full abstract ]
In welfare states, governments try to encourage welfare clients to find work and become economically self-sufficient through activation policies. These activation policies range from job retraining, personal care, and labour market reintegration budgets to job application requirements and sanctions (Rice, 2013). Caseworkers—in Dutch known as ‘klantmanagers’—play an important role in designing tailor-made activation trajectories that fits the needs and skill of the individual clients (Rice, 2013). These caseworkers are, as street-level bureaucrats, not only responsible for designing activation trajectories, but also for motivating their clients to follow their trajectory and find a job. This paper focuses on the motivational strategies that these caseworkers use to motivate their clients. The identification of these motivational strategies is key for understanding how caseworkers can be more effective in helping their clients get back into the workforce. With a growing range of activation policies and the focus of governments shifting from meeting the needs of their unemployed citizens, such as the need for a comprehensive overview of vacant positions in the area, to trying to alter the behaviours, motivations and other attributes of unemployed citizens, the requirements of caseworkers are also shifting (Jewell & Glaser). Thereby increasing the need for caseworkers to succeed in motivating their clients. In this paper we will therefore present a typology of the different strategies caseworkers, as street-level bureaucrats, use to motivate their clients to follow the trajectory that has been designed for them and find work. In order to develop such a typology caseworkers in a municipality in the Netherlands were observed in their interaction with clients. The observations did not only indicate that first-and-foremost the caseworkers are motivational workers, but also that the used strategies varied between clients and across caseworkers. The caseworkers frequently make a conscious decision to choose a specific motivational strategy for a specific client, depending on the situation, such as showing empathy, sharing experiences, which indicates a transformational strategy, or sanctioning clients, and playing ‘good-cop, bad-cop’ with a colleague, indicating a more transactional motivational strategy.
