Street-level bureaucrats’ cognitive coping during public service delivery: a systematic literature review

How do street-level bureaucrats cope cognitively with the demands of service delivery? What factors shape these coping strategies, and how are they reflected in their behaviours? Based on a systematic review of 129 studies, we show that street-level bureaucrats engage in sense-making and adopt cognitive coping mechanisms such as empathy, compassion, cynical reasoning, emotional detachment, carefulness, categorization, ‘othering’, and moral licencing. These are linked to behavioural responses like rationing and aggression, and are shaped mainly by personal factors. This review contributes to the literature by employing a sense-making lens to examine cognitive coping mechanisms, their antecedents, and their behavioural outcomes.