Challenges of Public Personnel Administration

INTRODUCTION1

DISCUSSION1

Legal/Constitutional/Judicial Oversight1

Strategic Civil Service Reforms3

Affirmative Action and Diversity4

Representative Bureaucracy5

Bureaucracy and Democracy6

CONCLUSION7

Challenges of Public Personnel Administration

Introduction

There are no doubts in the fact during the past few decades; the world has witnessed radical transformation of every aspect of human life. Advent of information technology, globalization, trade liberalization, emergence of market economies, escalating levels of privatization, increasing competitive pressures and several others factors have contributed towards transforming the business world. Citizens are no longer ready to accept a passive or receptive role in governmental or public administration matters, and they are more willing to adopt an active and aggressive role, where they demand radical reforms and high levels of accountability from governments and public sector organizations. Taxpayers are pushing the policymakers to ensure high levels of efficiency and productivity within the public sector organizations or else they demand that those tasks be performed by efficient and productive private sector organizations (Cooper, 2003).

This paper is an attempt to explore and analyze the challenges faced by public sector personnel administrators in managing and administrating the human resource and ways in which factors such as privatization and globalization have contributed towards amplifying these challenges for public personnel administrators or managers.

Discussion

Legal/Constitutional/Judicial Oversight

Public sector organizations have lesser liberty or room to avoid or deflect from legal or judicial oversight since other private sector organizations look up to public sector organizations for examples and role models. However, the fact is that, at several occasions, these factors seriously hamper the ability of public service organizations to improve their personnel management practices.

Kellough & Selden (2003), based on their study examining several factors and their impact on public sector reform, present empirical evidence to highlight the fact that union membership within a particular state has a negative correlation with the level of reform of personnel administration system within that state. Reforms of personnel administration system include several steps such as decentralization, labor management partnerships, strategic planning, number of job classes and board pay levels. Therefore, states where there is a significantly high union membership ratio, public personnel administrators face a dilemma as they have to respond to the pressures of greater efficiency and productivity and at the same time, they also have to become an example in smooth labor management relations (Cooper, 2003).

Important here to note is the fact that the market model dictates that regulations are detrimental to business because they increase the cost of doing business. Therefore, many capitalistic and free market economies, over the years, have aimed at boosting their private industries through easing the burden of regulations. On the other hand, the public sector has been operating with the burden of excessive regulations that make it troublesome for the public sector managers to replicate the performance of private sectors. Therefore, the challenge for public personnel administrators is to ensure maximum compliance with constitutional, legal or judicial oversight and ensure productivity at the same time (Stillman, 1996).

Moreover, in the wake of European Sovereign Debt Crisis and the austerity measures taken by ...