Mary E. Guy

Mary E. Guy is an American political scientist, public administration scholar, academic, and author. She is a professor at School of Public Affairs at University of Colorado Denver.

Guy has published papers and books on topics related to public administration. She is best known for exploring the emotive demands of street level work, and for her work on the difference that gender makes. Her research has a particular focus on public service delivery, dynamics within the citizen-state encounter, emotional labor, and social equity. She has authored books, including Professionals in Organizations: Debunking a Myth, From Organizational Decline to Organizational Renewal: The Phoenix Syndrome, Emotional Labor: Putting the Service in Public Service, Ethical Decision Making for Everyday Work Situations, Emotional Labor and Crisis Response: Working on the Razor's Edge, and Essentials of Public Service: An Introduction to Contemporary Public Administration.

Guy is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. She was editor-in-chief of Review of Public Personnel Administration from 2001 through 2006.

Education Guy studied at Jacksonville University and received her bachelor's degree in Psychology in 1969. In the following year, she obtained her master's degree in Rehabilitation Counseling from University of Florida. She then enrolled at University of South Carolina and earned her master's degree in Psychology in 1976, and Doctoral Degree in political science in 1981. and highlighted Woodrow Wilson’s point of view about politics and administration. Using bibliometric mapping, she demonstrated the intellectual networks and paths that emotional labor research has followed in its early diffusion into the field. Furthermore, she criticized civil service systems which are designed on the assumptions of a bygone era, thus failing to acknowledge and compensate emotional labor.

Guy presented several approaches for strengthening government and increasing government's capacity to deal with the complexity of interrelated social, administrative, demographic, and economic challenges, and explored Paul Volcker's dream of a government that works better.

Public management Guy examined two decades of affirmative action initiatives and drew a comparative analysis based on the status of women and men in career public management positions. In her study, she argued that women have a long way to go before they reach parity. In 2014, she conducted a study based on the 2002 General Social Survey of 454 government employees and compared Baby Boomers to GenXers. Results of her study indicated minor differences between the Baby Boom generation and Generation X in terms of their appraisal of work motivation factors. She also studied the concepts regarding emotional labor and artful affect, which advances our understanding of leadership.

Public sector human resource management Guy defined human service organizations, discussed the attributes that distinguish them from other organizational forms, and proposed a range of theoretical approaches to address these attributes. Furthermore, she described the relationship that exists between emotional labor and job burnout in the context of individualist versus collectivist cultures, while taking a sample of public servants in the United States and China.

Awards and honors 1998 – Fellow, National Academy of Public Administration 2009 - Delivered Donald Stone Lecture, American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) 2010 - Award for Excellence in Service, University of Colorado Denver 2011,2014,2017,2018 - Chester A. Newland Presidential Citation of Merit, American Society for Public Administration 2012 - ASPA/NASPAA Distinguished Research Award 2018 - Dwight Waldo Award, American Society for Public Administration 2018 - Visiting Distinguished Professor, Boise State University 2020 - Paul Van Riper Award for Excellence and Service, ASPA