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Organizational leadership and culture
Organizational leadership and culture
Public personnel administration
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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.
This is better explained by the public servant knowing why he is doing the job and who it is benefiting, socially, and how he is impacting and making a change for the better in their own mind, personal. In the first two “chapters” of Caught between the Dog and the Fireplug, or How to
The Personnel staff of the human resource department must be able coordinate and oversee employment and selection processes, including the vacancy announcement program and the scheduling, conducting, and processing of entrance and in-service examinations.
Modern Bureaucracy in the United States serves to administer, gather information, conduct investigations, regulate, and license. Once set up, a bureaucracy is inherently conservative. The reason the bureaucracy was initiated may not continue to exist as a need in the future. The need or reason may change with a change in the times and the culture needs. A bureaucracy tends to make decisions that protect it and further it’s own existence, possibly apart from the wishes of the populace. It may not consistently reflect what might be optimal in terms of the needs and wants of the people. Local governments employ most of the United States civil servants. The 14 cabinet departments in the U.S. are run day-to-day by career civil servants, which have a great deal of discretionary authority.
...ervices to ensure that hiring and testing processes are equitable and legal. The Lewis v. City of Chicago case was found in favor of the plaintiffs that may have been an oversight in which the city simply desired to create a manageable hiring list. Illegal classifications and hiring projection errors created a case where a class action group was victims of disparate treatment. Hiring and promotional processes must remain fair and consistent to maintain a positive as well as legal employer.
Nigro, Lloyd G., and Felix A. Nigro. The New Public Personnel Administration. Itasca, Illinois: F.E. Peacock Publishers, Inc., 1994.
...r pillars of public administration are equally important in the process of public administration and complement one another in the provision of quality public service. When public administrators have economy in mind they focus on the best combination of available resources to provide optimum public service. To ensure that public service is not limited to only a section of the public, the issue of equity is taken into consideration so that public interest is realized. Efficiency and effectiveness additionally go hand in hand in ensuring that allocated resources are used in the best possible manner to attain set goals. Thus whereas the first three public administration pillars – Economy, efficiency and effectiveness are concerned with how public service is provided the fourth and most recent addition (Equity) concerns with for whom public service is provided.
a. The three types of personnel strategies are: 1) election, 2) appointment, and 3) rules composed of merit, seniority, and representativeness factors. Electoral systems emphasize values, debate, political responsiveness, and generalized knowledge of government. Elected leaders are required to serve terms and be reelected periodically if they wish to pursue a career in government. There are two types of elected
Clifford, J. P. (1994). Job Analysis: Why do it, and how should it be done? Public Personnel Management. Volume 23. Pp. 321-340.
The study of public administration only continued to grow over the course of the next two decades. As the study of public administration expanded, so did the development of s...
Since its emergence as a field of study, there have been some important contributions to public administration. Its goal has always been to improve productivity which then improves workplace performance. All of the contributions have been aimed at completing the work with the highest level of efficiency and at the lowest cost.
In the future I would like to see myself, as a continuously promoted public official who could possibly become a pro-active politician in today’s demanding political arena. To achieve this, I would like to gain more knowledge which can help me reach intellectual maturity to the latest practices adopted in the field of Public Administration. My desire for self-development in this area and curiosity to learn past and contemporary developments in different societies will help me to solve the problems easily.
Traditional public administration is traced back to the works of scholars like Max Weber, Woodrow Wilson and Fredrick Taylor. This form of administration was mostly influenced by Max Weber with his bureaucratic model and theory. Max Weber was a well-known sociologist born in Germany in the year 1864. He came up with his bureaucratic model as a way to try to improve management in organizations. ‘Weber emphasized on top-down control in the form of monocratic hierarchy that is a system of control in which policy is set at the top and carried out through a series of offices, whereby every manager and employee are to report to one person in top management and held accountable by that manager’ (Pfiffner, 2004, p. 1).
According to Sapru R.K. (2008) p370-371 the traditional ideal of public administration which inclined to be firm and bureaucratic was based on processes instead of outcomes and on setting procedures to follow instead of focusing on results. This paradigm can be regarded as an administration under formal control of the political control, constructed on a firmly ranked model of bureaucracy, run by permanent and neutral public servants, driven only by public concern. In emerging nations the administration was true bureaucracy meaning government by officers. In this perspective Smith (1996) p235-6 perceived that“the bureaucracy controls and manages the means of production through the government. It increases chances for bureaucratic careers by the creation of public figures,demanding public managers, marketing boards.
...ot function properly. Politics and administration should be seen as very interconnected. It is worth reiterating just as the structure of governments has changed over the years, the structure and role of public administration have also changes dramatically. Furthermore, it is important to state that public administration has grown from its traditional role of merely implementing policies adopted by the “political” branches of government to playing very significant role in the formation of public policies. This is definitely more evident in regards to professional expertise bureaucratic officials provide during problem identification, agenda setting, policy formulation, and evaluation that shape the content of public policy today. Overall, the idea that Wilson has proposed gives an accurate idea of what the relationship should be between politics and administration.
Under the POAS, the Chief Executive has the right to first nominate candidates that he thinks fit for the fourteen Political Officials posts, to the Central People’s Government who has the power over official appointment. However, unlike the previous system, where the Principal Officials were civil servants hired on permanent and pensionable terms; the Principal Officials under the POAS will be employed on contract, where their contract term will not exceed that of the Chief Executive whom they were nominated