Does HRM add value to the study of Professional Street Level Bureaucrat’s outcomes?

This study examines the extent to which being a HERO (i.e., Hope, Efficacy, Resilience, and Optimism) impacts police officer Street Level Bureaucrats (SLBs) operational and organizational stress, and their subsequent well-being. The sample comprised 220 Italian and 228 English SLBs, and hypotheses were tested using the Analysis for Moment Structures (AMOS) v.27 Structural Equation Modelling software. The findings depict that HERO explains approximately a fifth of SLBs’ organizational stress, and together, their variance accounted for approximately two-thirds of SLBs’ well-being. Finally, as one personal psychological resource for helping police officers cope with stress in the workplace, the findings indicate a need to upskill SLBs in HERO so that they can better negotiate bureaucratic processes, without becoming more susceptible to negative stress-related outcomes.