Public Sector Survey

Last week, the CSA Council authorised the distribution to CPSU/CSA members of the survey being conducted by Professor Stephen Teo as part of his research into Change and Ethical Leadership in the Australian public sector.

Preliminary results of Professor Teo’s work revealed 57% of respondents reporting some degree of stress relating to restructuring, while 65%reported feeling tired for no good reason and 60 per cent reported feeling nervous at work.

Professor Teo noted “There is significant stress at the questions measuring overall level of psychological stress — in 10 questions designed to evaluate stress broadly, roughly 20 per cent could be classified as highly stressed.”

The results of the study will be reported on in research papers and presented at academic conferences and published in journals. It will not be possible to identify individual subjects as no identification numbers or names will be included in report material.

We encourage members to take the survey which can be found on The West Australian.

The research is particularly important in the context of Machinery of Government changes. While the CPSU/CSA is developing a workload and waste survey, contributing to this data set would allow for third party academic endorsement of the concerns we are raising in relation to the uncertainty prevalent in the sector at the moment.