Public Personnel Administration And Public Personnel Administration

You ever wonder how the government goes about choosing candidates for specific agencies in the government? Well that’s what public personnel administration is for. Public personnel administration can be defined as the totality of government organization, policies, procedures and processes used to match the needs of public agencies with the people who staff those agencies. It is a branch of human resource management that is concerned with the acquisition, development, utilization, and compensation of a public organization’s workforce. The term includes three key words in which each has their own specific meanings. First, "public" refers to regional and local governmental agencies as well as non-profit ones. "Personnel" refers to both employees of an organization and to the function and administrative unit that is responsible for hiring. "Administration" refers to the way human resources manages public organizations in an effective and efficient way that helps the organization reach its many objectives and goals.

Public personnel administration consists of three general systems. The first one I’ll talk about is civil service. The civil service helps to protect employee rights and safeguard efficiency. Historically, personnel administration shifted from emphasizing the value of responsiveness to emphasizing political neutral competence among public employees. Before they would use the spoils system and the patronage system, which selected employees and awarded government contracts based on loyalty or party affiliation. In this present day, we are using more of the civil service system, which is a method of choosing employees based on certain formal qualifications such as competitive exams instead of political patronage. It all start...

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...ty to perform the job; and social equity, or leveling the playing field. Responsiveness relates to the importance of considering political loyalty in addition to education and experience when making employee-staffing decisions. In fact, the main difference between public and private personnel administration is the political context and the intervention of politicians and their supporters in decisions affecting public employees.

Efficiency, on the other hand, is the practice of basing appointments on ability and performance, rather than politics. The individual rights of employees are often preserved by national and regional laws, such as the Constitution in the United States; merit systems; and collective bargaining systems, if applicable. Social equity guarantees that groups that cannot compete fairly are given preferences in job selection and promotion decisions.