Klingner Ch1 The World of Public Personnel Management

• Planning
• Acquisition
• Development
• Sanction

Budget preparation, workforce planning; performance management, job analysis, and pay and benefits

Recruitment and selection of employees

Training, evaluating and leading employees to increase their willingness and ability to perform well.

Maintaining expectations and obligations that employees and the employer have towards one another through discipline, health and safety, and employee rights.

These are important jobs but they are limited in number by tax revenue, high competition.

• Political Responsiveness
• Efficiency
• Employee Rights
• Social Equality

An appointment process that considers personal loyalty and political support as indicators of merit.

Making staffing decisions based on applicants' and employees' abilities and performance.

Protecting employees from political interference or arbitrary treatment that may threaten their job security or interfere with their job performance.

Adequately representing all groups in the workforce and managing this diverse workforce to maintain productivity and a positive organizational culture.

These are the laws and procedures that are used to fulfill the four HRM functions while expressing the abstract values of the system.

• Patronage
• Civil Service
• Collective Bargaining
• Affirmative Action

Legislative or executive approval of individual hiring decisions, particularly policy making decisions, based on loyalty, service, similar political affiliations etc. This person is not always the most qualified but it helps politicians achieve their political objectives. This, in turn, increases political responsiveness for voters.

The belief that a competent, committed workforce of career civil servants is essential to the professional conduct of the public's business.

1883-1937 important period for merit-based developments in public personnel management. Pressures for rational transparent and efficient government. National Civic League applied pressure in New York for merit-based HRM.

Pendleton Act affirmed merit principles were the basis for making public personnel decisions the tools to achieve these in reality did not emerge until the application of scientific management principles to administration in the 1920s

Marked a fundamental shift from patronage to merit systems after the assassination of President Garfield by an “unsuccessful office seeker” in 1881.

grouping jobs by occupational type and skill level and paying them equitably based on the competencies needed to perform the job.

Makes jobs and compensation more straight forward and fair. Less guessing and more clarity for employee regarding career path and employer regarding PADS.

Eliminates politics from administration.

Designed to maintain bureaucratic responsiveness but still protect the career civil service from political interference.

Proposed by Jimmy Carter on the grounds that included poor performance in the public service and difficulty in controlling and directing bureaucrats.

• Created a senior Executive Service (SES).
• Split the old US Civil Service Commission into two agencies:
• 1. Merit Systems Protection Board (USMSPB)
• 2. Office of Personnel Management (USOPM)

High-level administrators who voluntarily elected to leave their civil service positions in return for multi-year performance contracts, in exchange for the possibility of higher salaries and greater career challenge and flexibility.

Created by the Civil Service Reform Act (CRSA) 1978

Responsible for hearing appeals from employees alleging that their rights under civil service system laws and rules have been violated.

Created by the Civil Service Reform Act (CRSA) 1978

Responsible for developing, implementing, and evaluating personnel policies within federal agencies. (Some exemptions available to create a civil service system with their own agencies culture in mind.)

Created by the Civil Service Reform Act (CRSA) 1978

Contracts negotiated between management and unions set the terms and conditions of employment.

Because the legislative body that oversees the agency has to ratify all contracts both labor and management know that the ratification of the contract is more important than the negotiations themselves. Why argue for something that you know the City Council won't vote for?

Civil service systems include all collective bargaining agreements.

Arose as a direct result of the civil rights movement of the 1960's and women's rights of the 1970's.

Represented the value of social equality through recruitment and selection practices to correct the underrepresentation of these groups in the workplace.

Represented the idea that a representative bureaucracy is essential for government to function as a democracy.

Emerged as an HRM system in the late 1970s when Jimmy Carter campaigned against public agencies and employees. Increasing reliance on market-based forces rather than on program implementation by government agencies and employees as the most efficacious tools of public policy marked this paradigm shift.

Epitomizes "do more with less"

Created by VP Gore, aimed at creating a government that "works better and costs less" through fundamental changes in organizational structure and accountability, epitomized by the terms "reinventing government" or "New Public Management"

Trend in the 1990s - continued efforts to increase gov responsiveness and effectiveness or "shrink the beast"

Proponents believe that people should fear government for its power to arbitrarily or capriciously deprive them of their rights. Public policy service delivery and revenue generation can be controlled more efficiently in a smaller unit of government.

Promoted by the Republican Party in power in Congress in 1994 and 2002. One of the emergent nongovernmental values including personal accountability and community responsibility.

Expectation that people make individual choices consistent with their own goals and accept the responsibility for the consequences of their choices rather than passing it on to society.

Promoted by the Republican Party in power in Congress in 1994 and 2002. One of the emergent nongovernmental values including decentralized government and community responsibility.

This belief supplements the other two decentralized government and personal accountability. NGOs can provide social services that local governments cannot. Also Faith-based organizations (FBOs).

Promoted by the Republican Party in power in Congress in 1994 and 2002. One of the emergent nongovernmental values including decentralized government and personal accountability.

Rests on these three values promoted by the Republican-led Congress of 1994 and 2002 that characterize privatization.

• Decentralized Government
• Personal Accountability
• Community Responsibility

In addition is the strategic emphasis on cooperative service delivery among governments, business, and NGOs.

The belief that concrete results in public service delivery can only be achieved by the skilled deployment of human assets regardless of the framework within which it occurs.

Using alternative organizations or mechanisms for providing public services.

Trend in privatization and partnerships.

Temporary and Part-Time employment

Trend in privatization and partnerships. Supplement to full-time employment to reduce costs and enhance flexibility. Variability in rates and expertise as well as length of contract.

Type of Third-Party Government

Agreements with other governmental agencies and NGO's have become commonplace. Allows smaller municipalities a way of reducing costs. With the use of consultants/businesses increases expertise withing the organization with the flexibility to hire and fire in the short term.

Type of Third-Party Government

Allows private business to monopolize a previously public function within a geographic area, charge a competitive rate and pay the agency for the privilege. (EDCO)

Type of Third-Party Government

Enable private businesses to perform public services funded by either user fees from clients or cost reimbursement from public agencies. Ex: airport security, hospital care, housing.

Type of Third-Party Government

Enable individual recipients of public goods or services to purchase them from competing providers on the open market.

Type of Third-Party Government

Provide contributed services otherwise performed by paid employees, if any.

Type of Third-Party Government

Typically used to encourage the private sector to perform functions that might otherwise be performed by public angencies with appropriated funds. Ex: Zoning variances

• Modernization - Incremental
• Radical

Incremental Structural and technical reforms to improve government performance.

Research shows this is the more normal and positive method for response to pressures on government to increase performance.

Wholesale efforts to dismantle existing civil service systems and replace them with ones like those found in the private sector.

Initial studies indicate that radical reforms have significantly increased agency responsiveness

Method by which to reduce costs. May eventually lead to higher recruitment, increased orientation and training costs and loss of organizational memory and "core expertise" necessary  to manage service contracting or privatization initiatives effectively.

• Privilege
• Patronage
• Professionalism
• Performance
• People
• Privatization
• Partnerships

1789-1828 - The small group of upper-class property owners who had won independence and established the national government held most public jobs.

1829-1882 - The public jobs were awarded based on political loyalty or party affiliation.

1883-1932 - Defined public HRM as a neutral administrative function to emphasize modernization through efficiency and democratization by allocating public jobs, at least at the federal level, based on merit.

1933-1964 - Combined the political leadership of the patronage system and the merit principles of the civil service systems

1965-1980 - Social upheavals defined the era in which collective bargaining emerged to represent social equity.

1980s and after - General dissatisfaction with governments led to privatization and other business based HRM solutions followed by partnerships with NGOs and other contractors as third party tools for public service delivery.

The ability of public, private and NGOs to work together toward economic development in the context of political, social and environmental sustainability.

Making good policy decisions and using scares resources effectively.