Creating Societal Value at the Frontline of Public Service Delivery

This chapter seeks to address how frontline officials in teams interact about creating societal value. Based on twenty-nine in-depth semi-structured narrative interviews with frontline officials and their direct supervisors from three teams in Dutch public organizations, we describe how frontline officials engage in team interactions about the why and what of creating societal value. We show that the how refers to the interaction process itself that functions to answer both a purpose question of why a frontline team does its work involving the various value perspectives, and an operational question of what needs to be done to create the desired societal value. Based on our findings, we draw conclusions and outline directions for future research.