Week 1 – Assignment: Assess Personnel Management Approaches in Public Administration and Week 2 – Assignment: Generate Best Practices for Recruitment and Selection

Assume you are now in your hypothetical interview for the position of Director of Personnel Administration for Public Organization X. The interview question is prompt. Reflect on the following statement and construct a winning elevator speech based on your combined knowledge from previous courses and the current week’s readings.

Prompt: The job of a public personnel administrator is to manage human capital within the organization.

Length: 3-5 pages, not including title and reference pages

References: Include a minimum of 5 scholarly resources.

____________________________________________

Week1 – Assignment: Assess Personnel Management Approaches in Public Administration

Instructions

For this assignment, reflect on what you have learned about public administration so far and incorporate that knowledge with what you have read this week. You will use these results to prepare an elevator speech for your interview for the position of Director of Personnel Administration for Public Organization X. An elevator speech is concise, focusing on the most important aspects of the results of a conversation. Here, that conversation is your interview.

Prompt: The job of a public personnel administrator is to manage human capital within the organization.

Length: 3-5 pages, not including title and reference pages

References: Include a minimum of 5 scholarly resources.

Your assignment should demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the ideas and concepts presented in the course by providing new thoughts and insights relating directly to this topic. Your response should reflect scholarly writing and current APA standards. Be sure to adhere to Northcentral University’s Academic Integrity Policy.

Kearney, R. C., & Coggburn, J. D. (2016). Public human resource management: Problems and prospects. Los Angeles: CQ Press

Langbert, M. (2002). Continuous improvement in the history of human resource management. Management Decision, 40(10), 932-937

Rosenbloom, D. H. (2010, December). Public sector human resource management in 2020. Public Administration Review, 70, s175–s176

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Week 1

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Exploring Public Service and Governing in the Workplace

You are a skilled administrator who has applied to work in Public Organization X. Your

specialties are vast: public administration in general, administrative laws, theories on

public and organizational management, leadership and strategic management, and

budgeting. As someone who specializes in public administration, you understand a

personnel administrator needs to know about how all of the topics mentioned above

relate to the human capital within an organization. This week, you will take a walk down

memory lane to share everything you have learned to this point and apply it from the

perspective of a personnel administrator – for your big job interview as Director of

Personnel Administration for Public Organization X.

Before your big interview, you will not only take a self-assessment to ensure you are

currently in the field, but you will also explore the history of public personnel

management. As with many facets of public administration, it is interesting to note how

personnel management has shifted as a focus of study for public administrators over the

years.

Just as there are different eras of public administration, public personnel administration

has also evolved in stages. In the United States, for example, the beginning of the

personnel administration system was marked by responsiveness only as the dominant

value. In the very early phases of personnel management, most people obtained jobs

based on their social status. As time progressed, other values like efficiency, social equity,

and individual rights joined responsiveness as dominant values of the time. This shift

includes the inception of concepts and laws such as affirmative action and employee

rights. These values drove (and continue to drive) working conditions for the American

people. Today, the values of community responsibility and collaboration have also joined

the dominant values. You will see later in the course exactly how these additional values

have shaped areas like employee policies and working conditions in general.

Be sure to review this week’s resources carefully. You are expected to apply the

information from these resources when you prepare your assignments.

Heads-Up to the Signature Assignment

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Books and Resources for this Week

Budhwar, P. S., & Boyne, G. (2004).

Human resource management in the

Indian public and private sectors: An

empirical comparison. International…
Link

Kearney, R. C., & Coggburn, J. D.

(2016). Public human resource

management: Problems and prospects.

Los Angeles: CQ Press.
Link

Langbert, M. (2002). Continuous

improvement in the history of human

resource management. Management

Decision, 40(10), 932-937.
Link

Rosenbloom, D. H. (2010, December).

Public sector human resource

management in 2020. Public

Administration Review, 70, s175–s176.
Link

Your culminating Signature Assignment (due in Week 8) will be a reflection of all that you

have learned within the course, and it may require that you complete some work ahead of

time. Your Signature Assignment for this course will be to diagnose and prescribe

potential interventions for failing Public Organization X. To ensure you are prepared and

have adequate time to complete this assignment, please review the instructions by

looking ahead to Week 8. You can contact your professor if you have questions.

50 % 3 of 6 topics complete

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Week 1 Check Your Understanding
Quiz

Week 1 – Assignment: Assess Personnel Management

Approaches in Public Administration
Assignment

Due February 6 at 11:59 PM

As part of this week’s assignment, you will need to complete a Check Your Understanding.

Review the materials carefully and submit the required assignment before 11:59 pm

Arizona time on Sunday.

For this assignment, reflect on what you have learned about public administration so far

and incorporate that knowledge with what you have read this week. You will use these

results to prepare an elevator speech for your interview for the position of Director of

Personnel Administration for Public Organization X. An elevator speech is concise,

focusing on the most important aspects of the results of a conversation. Here, that

conversation is your interview.

Assume you are now in your hypothetical interview for the position of Director of

Personnel Administration for Public Organization X. The interview question is prompt.

Reflect on the following statement and construct a winning elevator speech based on

your combined knowledge from previous courses and the current week’s readings.

Prompt: The job of a public personnel administrator is to manage human capital within the

organization.

Length: 3-5 pages, not including title and reference pages

References: Include a minimum of 5 scholarly resources.

Your assignment should demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the ideas and concepts

presented in the course by providing new thoughts and insights relating directly to this

topic. Your response should reflect scholarly writing and current APA standards. Be sure

to adhere to Northcentral University’s Academic Integrity Policy.

Upload your document, and then click the Submit to Dropbox button.

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Part III: Public
Organizations
of the Future

David H. Rosenbloom is Chair Professor

of Public Management at City University of

Hong Kong and Distinguished Professor of

Public Administration at American University

in Washington, DC. His research focuses

on public administration and democratic

constitutionalism.

E-mail: rbloom313@hotmail.com

Public Sector Human Resource Management in 2020 S175

David H. Rosenbloom
American University and City University of Hong Kong

Public Sector Human Resource Management in 2020

Historically at the federal level in the United States, public sector human resource man-agement (HRM), traditionally called public
personnel administration, has been driven largely by
the ideology of the dominant political party, move-
ment, or coalition. Th ese ideologies incorporate
images of what federal employees should be. From
the founding in 1789 until 1829, federal employees
were viewed as an extension of the socioeconomic elite
that dominated national politics. For the Jacksonian
Democrats who followed the Federalists and Jeff erso-
nian Republicans, federal employees were an arm of
the political party in control of the presidency. Th e
civil service reformers of the 1870s and 1880s imag-
ined federal employees as nonpartisan competent gen-
eralists with high moral standards. Th e Progressives,
who followed, adhered to this image while seeking to
transform civil servants’ competence from general to
technical through science. During the New Deal of
the 1930s, the desire for technical competence was
augmented at the upper levels with adherence to the
president’s policy objectives. In time, as the “imperial
presidency” developed, the federal civil service increas-
ingly was envisioned as an adjunct of the presidential
administration in offi ce.

Within all of these periods, there were undercurrents
that supported alternative visions. For instance, the
Jeff ersonians articulated concepts that would make
the federal service somewhat more representative in
terms of social class background and, to some extent,
partisan persuasion. With the possible exception of
the elite period, each image left a lingering legacy
(among others, see Mosher
1982; Riccucci and Naff 2007;
Rosenbloom 1971; Van Riper
1958).

Today, however, there is no
dominant image of the federal
civil service, and political fac-
tions seek to inform the govern-
ment’s HRM with a variety of

values. Th ese values are sometimes in tension or in
competition with one another, and, consequently,
there cannot be a coherent image, but at best a blurry
one. As with many aspects of U.S. public administra-
tion, these values fall into clusters associated with
management, politics, and law. Th e future of federal
HRM will depend on whether a dominant political
ideology arises and, if so, how it modifi es, rejects,
augments, and prioritizes these values. In the absence
of such an ideology, federal HRM will remain an ag-
glomeration of values temporarily elevated by one set
of political interests or another. In other words, future
HRM’s path dependency will be missing a path.

Managerial Values
Th e chief value of the managerial cluster is cost-
eff ectiveness, which rolls the civil service reformers’
and the Progressives’ emphasis on economy, effi ciency,
and eff ectiveness into one. Unsurprisingly, diff erent
political factions seek cost-eff ectiveness in diff erent
ways. Th ough President Ronald Reagan was unsuc-
cessful in doing so, Reagan Republicans would down-
size the federal civil service, thereby making cutback
management a central facet of federal HRM. Many
across the spectrum would follow President Jimmy
Carter’s eff ort to center federal HRM on performance,
as promoted in pay-for-performance and performance
management schemes. As reinventers, New Demo-
crats sought cost-eff ectiveness through business values
and techniques, including customer orientation,
entrepreneurship, creating value, and better fi nancial
management. Th ey decentralized and deregulated
federal HRM, arguing that a one-size-fi ts-all model

essentially fi ts nothing and
certainly fails to link personnel
functions to agency missions.

President George W. Bush
viewed competitive sourcing
as the key to cost-eff ectiveness.
Like downsizing, this would
put an emphasis on cutback
management, but also would

Today . . . there is no dominant
image of the federal civil service

and political factions seek
to inform the government’s

[human resource management
(HRM)] with a variety of values.

S176 Public Administration Review • December 2010 • Special Issue

employers with the constitutional rights of public employees as citi-
zens or legal residents. With respect to federal HRM, constitutional
integrity typically involves the scope of presidential versus congres-
sional authority over employee job security, rights, and working
conditions. Issues pertaining to the constitutional rights of public
employees tend to involve procedural due process, Fourth Amend-
ment and substantive due process privacy, equal protection of the
laws, and First Amendment guarantees. Courts also play a large role
in interpreting statutes dealing with technical aspects of labor rela-
tions and other HRM matters. Today, one cannot practice public
sector HRM without reference to judicial decisions.

2020
Th ese clusters are likely to persist into 2020, with relatively minor
adjustments. Oddly, dramatic change is more likely to come by a

U.S. Supreme Court decision stripping
public employees of procedural due
process protections or First Amend-
ment rights than through the rise of a
dominant political ideology or public
administrative paradigm shift. Th e
United States is a hyperpluralistic,
fragmented society with a simmering
60-year-old culture war. Unless the
nation coalesces around a new political
movement with an ideology that can
defi ne public administration, 2020 will
look a lot like 2010.

References
Mosher, Frederick C. 1982. Democracy and the Public Service. 2nd ed. New York:

Oxford University Press.
Naff , Katherine C. 2001. To Look Like America: Dismantling Barriers for Women and

Minorities in Government. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Riccucci, Norma M., and Katherine C. Naff . 2008. Personnel Management in Govern-

ment. 6th ed. Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis.
Rosenbloom, David H. 1971. Federal Service and the Constitution: Th e Development of

the Public Employment Relationship. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Van Riper, Paul P. 1958. Th e United States Civil Service. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson.

demand more fl exibility in terms of position classifi cation so that
federal employees could be reassigned to form “most effi cient orga-
nizations” under the Offi ce of Management and Budget’s Circular
A-76 format. President Barack Obama’s administration has not
introduced a comprehensive plan for adjusting or reengineering
federal HRM. Th us far, his emphasis has been on insourcing, which,
of course, runs the gamut of personnel functions—recruiting, select-
ing, placing, classifying, compensating, appraising performance,
training, and engaging in equal employment opportunity and labor
and employee relations.

Political Values
In terms of HRM, the major political values are representativeness
and responsiveness to elected and appointed political authorities
(including members of Congress). Representativeness, articulated by
President Bill Clinton as “a government that looks
like America” (Naff 2000), is built into federal
HRM by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978,
which uses convoluted language to identify the
same objective and includes provisions for com-
bating the underrepresentation of demographic
groups. Responsiveness concerns the interface
between political executives and career civil ser-
vants, centering on the right balance of political
control and employee protection from politiciza-
tion and discrimination based on partisanship. Th e
Senior Executive Service exemplifi es this approach.
Arguably, homeland security legislation providing
managers with greater fl exibility to reassign, trans-
fer, and discipline subordinate employees tips it
toward politicized management. Responsiveness also requires federal
HRM to deal with political appointees, who have a high degree of
turnover and sometimes try to “burrow in” to the career ranks.

Legal Values
Legal values in U.S. public administration are incorporated into
statutes, executive orders and related proclamations, and constitu-
tional law. Many are imposed on public sector HRM by judicial
decisions. Th e dominant legal values in HRM are maintaining
constitutional integrity and balancing the needs of governments as

Th e United States is a
hyperpluralistic, fragmented

society with a simmering
60-year-old culture war.

Unless the nation coalesces
around a new political

movement with an ideology
that can defi ne public

administration, 2020 will look a
lot like 2010.

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Chapter 1 Competing
Perspectives on
Public Personnel
Administration:
Civil Service,
Nonstandard Work
Arrangements,
Privatization, and
Partnerships

Donald E. Klingner
University of Colorado at
Colorado Springs

Abstract
This chapter (1) presents a historical
perspective on public human resource
management; (2) examines the effect
of privatization and partnerships on
traditional HRM values and systems;
(3) discusses how privatization,
partnerships and nonstandard work

ff d i i d

Contents Search within My Notes
copies available

Cover

Half Title

Acknowledgements

Title
Page

Table Of
Contents

Preface

Part I The
Setting

Chapter
1
Competing

Perspectives
on
Public

Personnel

Administration:
Civil
Service,

Nonstandard
Work
Arrangements,

Privatization,
and

…
Chapter 2
What
Every
Public
Sector
Human

Resource
Manager
Should
Know
About the

Constitution

Chapter 3
The
Death
and Life
of

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Continuous improvement in the history of human resource management

Mitchell Langbert.Management Decision; London Vol. 40, Iss. 10, (2002): 932-937. DOI:10.1108/00251740210452791

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Abstract

Human resource management’s challenge is to improve the balance among three competing quality targets: equity, flexibility, and alignment. Management of these targets has
improved through four historical periods: the pre-industrial, paternalist, bureaucratic, and high performance. There always have been trade-offs among the three quality targets,
but the balance among them has improved through history.

Full Text

Headnote
Keywords

Headnote
Human resource management,

History, Total quality management

Values

Headnote
Abstract

Headnote
Human resource management’s challenge is to improve the balance among three competing quality targets: equity, flexibility, and alignment. Management of these targets has
improved through four historical periods: the pre-industrial, paternalist, bureaucratic, and high performance. There always have been trade-offs among the three quality targets,
but the balance among them has improved through history.

Only a decade ago, at the end of the cold war, there was considerable pessimism about the future. Management theorists like Grayson and O’Dell (1988) and Dertouzos et aL
(1989) warned US business about losing its productive edge in the face of Asian competition. Historians like Robert Nisbet (1980) and Paul Kennedy (1987) also warned of
decline in light of, respectively, a dampening in the spirit of progress and excessive military spending. Yet the last decade has seen a renewal of optimism. The optimism is
attributable not only to economic and technological forces, but also to a twocentury old quality improvement process in human resource management (HRM).

Theoretical background

Despite Sanford Jacoby’s (1985) excellent historical analysis of the human resource (HR) function, in recent years the HR literature has been ahistorically defensive about HRM’s
strategic role. Managers and professors have forgotten that HRM has stabilized the workplace and, over many decades, better aligned it and made it more flexible by introducing
equitable, responsive systems. This improvement process has reflected the purposeful choices of top HR and line managers, who have tended to more effectively balance
competing values over time. That is, the evolution of HRM has amounted to a succession of purposeful experiments aimed at developing balancing systems that integrate three
sets of competing values: those of:

1 external constituencies;

2 managements; and

3 employees.

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Improvement has enabled firms to become more effective in satisfying the goals of each through productivity growth and more equitable institutions.

HRM and competing values

Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1983) and Ulrich (1997) have developed models of organizational effectiveness in light of competing values. Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1983) find that there
are four competing models of effectiveness:

1 human relations;

2 internal process;

3 rational goal; and

4 open system.

Ulrich (1997) finds that there are four HR deliverables:

1 employees;

2 efficiency;

3 strategy execution; and

4 capacity for change.

My claim is that Ulrich’s (1997) four HR deliverables capture the competing values that HR departments have targeted in improving HRM over time. Furthermore, each reflects
the interests of one of HR’s three competing classes of constituencies:

1 management;

2 employees; and

3 external constituencies.

Progress has meant that HR managers have successfully designed systems that have achieved better balance in targeting and exceeding all constituents’ expectations[l].

Competing values and continuous

improvement

HRM’s balancing of competing values over time can be viewed as a process of continuous improvement. Deming (1986) and Taguchi (1986) argue that continuous improvement
depends on managements’ and employees’ better meeting customers’ expectations and systematically reducing variability in doing so. Since HR’s effectiveness depends on
multiple sources of quality gain arising from multiple constituencies, the quality challenge with respect to HRM involves the management of interactions among the competing
constituencies. As Deming expresses it, the balancing of the HR quality targets requires profound knowledge about HR systems’ effects on employees, managers, customers and
the public.

History as continuous improvement

I claim that there have been four broad periods of HR history:

1 pre-inustrial;

2 paternalist;

3 bureaucratic; and

4 high performance.

In each, firms have responded to constituents’ demands, trading among the three quality goals in ways that the environment has compelled them. Because of improving
productivity and sophistication of HRM, each period has seen a net improvement over the prior one.

History of HRM

In the following four sections I trace the historical process of quality improvement in HRM. In comparison with subsequent periods, the highest degree of inequity and
inflexibility characterized the pre-industrial period, which lasted in the USA until the late eighteenth century. Subsequent periods saw continuously decreasing levels of quality
loss and increasing levels of quality in HRM. HRM in today’s world has the least variability and highest quality in history.

Pre-industrial period

The pre-industrial period[2], which ended with the Revolutionary War, saw a level of HRM loss due to inequity, inflexibility and misalignment that would be unimaginable today.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the medieval Statute of Laborers, restated in the Tudor Industrial Code’s Statute of Artificers, was the regulatory backdrop for
HRM. It contained the principles of compulsory labor and physical punishment for idleness. Indentured servants and slaves were employed throughout the colonies.
Apprenticeship, itself a form of bound labor, was the only way to procure training in a craft. Laws restricting freedom of employment were routinely passed.

The pre-industrial system certainly took some equity targets into account. The requirement that three months’ notice be given before an employee was discharged was widely
observed. At the same time, workers were aligned to owners’ goals through state-enforced power and privilege. Since compulsion implies little motivation above compliance, it
is unlikely that broad categories of workers were well motivated. If it is not too much of a stretch to call the pre-industrial period’s practices “HRM,” the quality of HRM in this
period was low across all three quality targets.

Paternalist period

The paternalist period lasted from the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth century. During this period, expansion of markets and industrialization shattered the rigid
legal mandates that had previously aligned servant and master (Commons et al., 1946; Morris, 1981). Their doing so enabled firms to dramatically improve labor productivity,

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life expectancies and standards of living. Flexibility was enhanced through the evolution of employment-at-will, the abolition of slavery, and the early development of modern
management practices such as incentive plans. The changes during the paternalist era were needed to accommodate industry’s increasing scale. But flexibility came at a steep
cost in equity and alignment.

There were ideological as well as economic reasons supporting flexibility. The Civil War was in large part caused by what might be called the most inequitable and inflexible HR
practice: slavery. The Republican ideology of free labor evolved from northern distaste for the slave power’s (sic) pro-slavery arguments. The Republican advocates of the free
labor ideology held that there is alignment of interests between labor and management, in part because laborers are often future entrepreneurs (Foner, 1995). Abraham Lincoln,
for example, once remarked that:

The man who labored for another last year this year labors for himself and next year he will hire others to labor for him (Foner, 1995, p. 30).

The free labor ideology’s emphasis on flexibility and alignment thus had some unfortunate effects on equity. For example, the creation of the employment-at-will doctrine during
the paternalist period both freed employees from compulsion and created the “right” to be terminated at will. In fact, capricious treatment of workers characterized the late
nineteenth century’s employment relationship. Employers would often pay wages in devalued paper money or arbitrarily cut pay. The drive system often led to bribery of
foremen to obtain jobs and physical abuse of workers (Jacoby, 1985). These practices implied levels of HR quality loss that would be unimaginable in the USA today. Such losses
included violent strikes (Brecher, 1972).

In sum, there were both quality improvements and losses in the paternalist period. In contrast with the pre-industrial period, the improvements outweighed the losses. The
improvements in flexibility and equity included the abolition of slavery and other forms of compulsory labor. These improvements outweighed the alignment and equity losses
from violent strikes, unpredictable pay practices and arbitrary paternalism. Nevertheless, quality losses from HRM in the nineteenth century were unpalatably large in
comparison with today’s management practices.

Bureaucratic period

Leading up to and after the First World War, management experts, trade unions, institutional economists and reformers applied pressure on firms to reform the paternalist
period’s low quality practices. Such pressure amounted to a systems response to poor alignment and inequity. The improvements came along four lines:

1 management practice;

2 bureaucratization;

3 protective legislation; and

4 unionization.

But these improvements in equity and alignment came at the expense of flexibility.

The earliest inspiration for quality improvement through better alignment came from late nineteenth and early twentieth century industrial engineers, most famously Frederick
Taylor’s scientific management school (Taylor, 1972). Taylor advocated a rational goal-setting model that focused on fractionalization of jobs, tight control of workers and
improved methods of employee selection, training and incentives. These practices met with resistance from unionists as well as shop foremen, but offered a paradigm for
rationalization and control of the workplace.

Another set of management ideas that supported bureaucratization and rational goal setting was the welfare capitalism that executives like Gerard Swope of General Electric
and John D. Rockefeller Jr advocated. From 1919 to 1928, membership in employer-initiated representation schemes grew from 400,000 to 1.5 million (Brody, 1993; Freeman
and Rogers, 1993).

Bureaucratization also proceeded along the lines of the early evolution of the modern personnel department that was derived from social work and other reform movements
(and was connected with the growth in scientific management and welfare capitalism). Job analysis, job evaluation, job classification, training and development and employee
selection techniques evolved as bureaucratic systems responses to arbitrary, high-variance practices of foremen (Jacoby, 1985).

Even with improvements in management practice, including scientific management, welfare capitalism and personnel departments, there was still considerable public support for
protective legislation aimed at enhancing equity. Thus, in the early twentieth century, states passed Workers’ Compensation and other protective statutes. This trend continued
through the late twentieth century, when Congress focused on individual rights and passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Employee
Retirement Income Security Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Unionization represented the most potent and controversial balancing force with respect to employers’ high-variance practices during the paternalist period. Trade unions had
existed at least since the late eighteenth century. Their leaders advocated bureaucratization of the workplace through collective bargaining, protective legislation, and mutual
insurance (Commons et al., 1946; Webb and Webb, 1926; Hoxie, 1936).

Indeed, Freeman and Medoff (1984) provide considerable empirical evidence that unions have reduced variability in treatment of employees and so enhanced quality with
respect to the equity target. They show that unions reduce variability in treatment of employees by forcing managers to discard authoritarian practices in favor of explicit rules;
by raising blue-collar wages relative to white-collar, particularly with respect to benefits; and by instituting procedures for appealing against supervisors’ decisions. According to
Freeman and Medoff (1984), in the American manufacturing sector the standard deviation of earnings is about 50 per cent lower in union that in non-union plants, and quits are
lower by 31 per cent. This lowering of variability is consistent with Deming’s (1986) and Taguchi’s (1986) concept of quality improvement as the reduction in variability around a
customer’s (in this case employee’s) expectations.

At the same time, Freeman and Medoff’s (1984) analysis, as well as Kochan et al.’s (1986), unduly discount the importance of managers’ alignment concerns about business
unions. Flexibility and organizational learning require trust. They also require that executives retain a certain degree of power with respect to their workforce. Many executives
remain convinced that labor unions create impediments to trust and alignment. Every observer of bureaucratic labor institutions has noted that, although unions improve equity,
they have done so in spite of managers’ alignment and flexibility concerns, although there is debate as to whether managers’ concerns are justified.

Therefore, just as the flexibility of the paternalist period came at the expense of equity, so the stability and equity of the bureaucratic period came at the expense of alignment
and flexibility. Other factors also played a role in flagging productivity. By the 1970s, the baby boomers’ entry into the labor force coincided with expanding labor force
participation and possibly contributed to reduced productivity improvement rates[3]. Furthermore, technological shifts involving computers and telecommunications began to
create the need to experiment with new work methods.

High performance period

By the late 1970s there were popular as well as managerial balancing responses to declining competitiveness. First, there was a renewal of public support for free market
ideology. Important industries like transportation were deregulated. Monetary policy was stabilized. In some ways, the election of President Ronald Reagan may be interpreted
as a popular reassertion of the Republicans’ nineteenth century free labor doctrine. For example, there was widespread reassertion of belief in the importance of small business
and entrepreneurship to the economy.

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There were numerous avenues for experimentation as firms sought organizational citizenship behavior (Morrison, 1996), an empowered workforce (Bowen and Lawler, 1992),
customer focus (Zemke and Schaaf, 1989), commitment (Walton, 1985), psychological motivation (Quinn, 1992) and even personal mastery (Senge, 1990). Most recently,
executives and management theorists have debated ways to develop learning organizations, that is, flexible organizations capable of change and progress. In such learning
organizations, alignment as well as flexibility become key quality challenges.

Many of these efforts are reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln’s view of the worker as a potential entrepreneur. They contrast with the view of the US worker as “scarcity conscious”
and “risk averse” that was prevalent during the bureaucratic period (Perlman, 1928; Knight, 1933).

A wide range of HR techniques has been developed to meet these flexibility and alignment goals. For example, a number of authors have emphasized the efficacy of a systemic
approach to HR strategy. Lawler et al. (1995) find that in 1993 30 per cent of firms covered employees with individual incentives and about 14 per cent of firms covered
employees with team incentives. They also find that 42 per cent of firms use at least one power-sharing approach, to include job enrichment, self-managing work teams and
minibusiness units.

Perhaps the late twentieth century can be best characterized as a period of learning through experimentation. Some of the experiments have failed and some have been
successful. Overall, the flattening of productivity during the late 1970s has been remedied. Thus, the high performance period has been one of improvement in the flexibility and
alignment targets.

But the problems HR faces continue to be problems of balance. Just as in the nineteenth century, in the twentieth century enhanced flexibility has been associated with some
equity losses, although the losses are much smaller than before. Real median money income and real compensation per hour have remained flat between 1980 and 1997
despite productivity gains (US Bureau of the Census, 1998). At the same time, the real median income of females with less than a ninth grade education fell by more than 40
per cent during the period (Office of the President, 1999). While these trends need to be addressed, perhaps through improved recruiting, selection and training, they are of
small magnitude in comparison with the equity losses from earlier periods. The share of income going to the low fifth decreased by about 13 percent from 1980 to 1997 (while
the share going to the high fifth increased by 26 percent, yielding a decrease in the ratio of low to high of 45 percent). In contrast, nineteenth century railroads sometimes
reduced their workers’ pay by 10 percent in a single day (Brecher, 1972).

Conclusion

Ever since the industrial revolution began, HRM’s challenge has been that of balance. In the paternalist period, flexibility came at the expense of equity. In the bureaucratic
period, equity was improved at the expense of flexibility. In the high performance period again there have been flexibility and alignment gains at the expense of equity. But late
twentieth century losses in equity are small by historical standards. The result is that the stagnation in productivity growth that characterized the late bureaucratic period has
been ameliorated. Current HR practice provides the best balance in history.

HRM has reduced losses from the interaction of the equity, flexibility and alignment goals of management, workers and society at large. It has helped to improve workplace
quality along all three dimensions. But the process has involved an ebb and flow. Over the long term, it is realistic to expect continued gains in equity, flexibility and alignment
to come at the expense of ever-smaller short-term quality losses.

Sidebar
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available. at http://www.emeraldinsight.cont/0025-1747.htm

Footnote
Notes

Footnote
1 This model of progress contrasts with the macro-economic views of industrial relations pluralists like Dunlop (1958) and Kerr (1983), the micro-economic views of Austrian
economists like von Mises (1966) and Hayek (1960) and the reformist views of institutionalists like Commons et al. (1946) and Webb and Webb (1926).

Dunlop (1958) and Kerr (1983) argue that a nation’s industrial relations system results from bargaining and collaboration among three bargaining agents: labor, management,
and government. Technology, market processes and the locus of power influence the bargaining and collaboration. The outcome is a web of rules. Furthermore, the rules tend to
converge toward a mixed economy, which they see as optimal.

In contrast, von Mises (1966) and Hayek (1960) see progress as the outcome of individual purposefulness. Equilibrium is reached when the purposes of each actor are satisfied.
An “evenly rotating economy,” where each actor’s purposes are fully satisfied, is possible only with minimal state involvement, according to the Austrians.

The institutionalists’ view is that institutions evolve in light of powerful interests whose power derives from preexisting habits, institutions and distribution of wealth. Progress is
possible through reform of state institutions to accord with equitable standards. However, from a normative standpoint the institutionalists tend to emphasize improvement in
equity at the expense of flexibility and alignment.

2 This section on the pre-industrial period relies on Morris (1981).

3 The labor force participation rate has increased from under 60 percent in 1950 to 67.1 percent in 1998, putting downward pressure on wages and productivity (US Bureau of
the Census, 1998).

References
References

References
Bowen, D.E. and Lawler, E.E. (1992), “The empowerment of service workers: what, why, how and when”, Sloan Management Review, Vol. 33 No. 3, pp. 31-9.

References
Brecher, J. (1972), Strike!, South End Press, Boston, MA.

Brody, D. (1993), Workers in Industrial America, Oxford University Press, New York, NY. Commons, J.R., Saposs, D.L., Summer, H.L.,

Mittelman, E.B., Hoagland, H.E., Andrew, J.B. and Perlman, S. (1946), History of Labor in the United States, Macmillan, New York, NY.

Deming, W.E. (1986), Out of the Crisis, MIT Center for Advanced Engineering, Cambridge, MA.

Dertouzos, M.T., Lester, R.K. and Solow, R.M. (1989), Made in America: Regaining the Productive Edge, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Dunlop, J.T. (1958), Industrial Relations Systems, Holt, Rheinhart & Winston, New York, NY.

Foner, E. (1995), Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

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Details

Subject History;
Manual workers;
Human resource management;
Total quality;
Employees;
Equity;
Incentive plans;
Employment;
Productivity;
Ideology;
Evolution;
Abolition of slavery;

Freeman, R.B. and Medoff, J.L. (1984), What Do Unions Do?, Basic Books, New York, NY.

Freeman, R.B. and Rogers, J. (1993), “Who speaks for us? Employee representation in a nonunion labor market”, in Kaufman, B.E. and Kleiner, M. (Eds), Employee
Representation: Alternatives and Future Direction, Industrial Relations Research Association, pp. 13-81.

Grayson, C.J. and O’Dell, C. (1988), American Business: A Two-Minute Warning, The Free Press, New York, NY.

Hayek, F.A. (1960), The Constitution of Liberty, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.

Hoxie, R.F. (1936), Trade Unionism in the United States, D. Appleton-Century, New York, NY.

Jacoby, S. (1985), Employing Bureaucracy, Columbia University Press, New York, NY.

Kennedy, P. (1987), The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, Vintage Books, New York, NY.

References
Kerr, C. (1983), The Future of Industrial Societies, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Knight, F.H. (1933), Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, London School of Economics and Political Science, London.

Kochan, T.A., Katz, H.C. and McKersie, R.B. (1986), The Transformation of American Industrial Relations, Basic Books, New York, NY.

Lawler, E.E., Mohrman, S.A. and Ledford, G.E. (1995), Creating High Performance Organizations, Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco, CA.

Morris, R.B. (1981), Government and Labor in Early America, Northeastern University Press, Boston, MA.

Morrison, E.W. (1996), “Organizational citizenship behavior as a critical link between HRM practice and service quality”, Human Resource Management, Vol. 35 No. 4, pp. 493-
512.

Nisbet, R. (1980), History of the Idea of Progress, Basic Books, New York, NY.

Office of the President (1999), Economic Report of the President: Transmitted to Congress

References
February 1999, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Perlman, S. (1928), A Theory of the Labor Movement, Macmillan, New York, NY.

Quinn, J.B. (1992), Intelligent Enterprise, The Free Press, New York, NY.

Quinn, R.E. and Rohrbaugh, J. (1983), “A spatial model of effectiveness criteria: towards a competing values approach to organizational analysis”, Management Science, Vol. 29
No. 3, pp. 363-78.

Senge, P. (1990), The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Currency Doubleday, New York, NY.

Taguchi, G. (1986), Introduction to Quality Engineering: Designing Quality into Products and Processes, Asian Productivity Organization, Tokyo.

References
Taylor, F.W. (1972), Scientific Management, Greenwood Press, Tokyo.

Ulrich, D. (1997), Human Resource Champions, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA.

US Bureau of the Census (1998), Current Population Reports, P60-203, Measuring 50 Years of Economic Change Using the March Current Population Survey, US Government
Printing Office, Washington, DC.

von Mises, L. (1966), Human Action, Contemporary Books Inc., Chicago, IL.

Walton, R.E. (1985), “From control to commitment in the workplace”, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 85 No. 2, pp. 76-84.

Webb. S. and Webb, B. (1926), Industrial Democracy, Longman, Green, London.

Zemke, R. and Schaaf, D. (1989), The Service Edge: 101 Companies That Profit from Customer Care, American Library, New York, NY.

AuthorAffiliation
Mitchell Langbert

AuthorAffiliation
City University of New York, Brooklyn College, New York, New York, USA

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Forced labor;
Flexibility;
18th century;
19th century;
20th century
Subject:Business indexing term Manual workers;

Human resource management;
Total quality;
Employees;
Equity;
Incentive plans;
Employment;
Productivity

Location United States–US
Classification 9190: United States

6100: Human resource planning
Title Continuous improvement in the history of human resource management
Author Mitchell Langbert
Publication title Management Decision; London
Volume 40
Issue 10
Pages 932-937
Number of pages 6
Publication year 2002
Publication date 2002
Publisher Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Place of publication London
Country of publication United Kingdom, London
Publication subject Business And Economics–Management
ISSN 00251747
e-ISSN 17586070
CODEN MANDA4
Source type Scholarly Journal
Language of publication English
Document type Feature
DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00251740210452791
ProQuest document ID 212076726
Document URL https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/continuous-improvement-history-human-resource/docview/212076726/se-2?

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Week2 – Assignment: Generate Best Practices for Recruitment and Selection

Instructions

Using this week’s readings as a starting point, consider the challenges in recruiting and selecting the best candidates for Public Organization X. Then, choose an organization to examine and apply this week’s concepts. Since you are still in training, you may pick any public organization of your choice for this assignment, but choose wisely and make sure the information you are seeking is readily available.

Give a brief background on your selected organization and its employees, and then produce an in-depth guideline on recruitment and selection best practices for yourself to use when you take over as Director of Personnel Administration of Organization X at the end of your training. You may assume the organization you choose to examine is in the same field as Organization X. This is a great practice, especially since sometimes you get the best ideas from outside research! Just remember, your document should contain best practices specifically related to recruiting and candidate selection.

Tip: It is recommended that you prepare this information in the form of a chart for quick reference rather than in typical essay form.

Be sure to include how different departments or positions may need different strategies for recruitment (e.g., pre-employment screenings) and selection (e.g., complying with the Civil Rights Act). You may present the best practices themselves in the form of an outline or list within the chart.

Length: 4-5 pages, not including title and reference pages

References: Include a minimum of 5 scholarly resources.

Your assignment should demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the ideas and concepts presented in the course by providing new thoughts and insights relating directly to this topic. Your response should reflect scholarly writing and current APA standards where appropriate. Be sure to adhere to Northcentral University’s Academic Integrity Policy.

Battaglio, R. (2015). Public human resource management: Strategies and practices in the 21st century. London: SAGE Publications, Ltd

Cohen, S., Eimicke, W. B., & Heikkila, T. (2013). The effective public manager: Achieving success in government organizations

Leisink, P., & Steijn, B. (2008). Recruitment, attraction, and selection. In J. L. Perry & A. Hondeghem (Eds.), Motivation in public management

Partnership for Public Service. (2018, October). Tech to hire: Transforming federal HR beginning with recruiting and hiring. Partnership for Public

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Week 2

PUB-7017 v1: Public Personnel Administration (33851013…

Recruitment and Selection

Congratulations on your new position as Director of Personnel Administration for Public

Organization X – and welcome to training! Your first week of training will address two

important pieces of the human resource management process: recruitment and selection.

One might say an organization is nothing without the people who keep it running. As

such, it is very important to select the best candidate for the job. This candidate is the

individual who will most likely meet the strategic goals and objectives established by the

legislation guiding the organization.

As you will see in this week’s readings, recruitment and selection can be very complex

tasks within the public sector. Particularly, there are general policies and court decisions

that must be considered when selecting and hiring employees. For example,

discrimination is an illegal activity under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Another

piece surrounds the need for creativity in recruitment. For example, in the past, there has

been a central office or individual responsible for hiring and managing the human capital

in an organization. More recently, recruitment efforts have expanded not only to the

street level but also to more non-traditional recruitment techniques like e-recruitment.

For example, many organizations have now turned to social recruiting, using internet

platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn to reach a more diverse population of talented

applicants. Another trend, blind hiring, is also a way to hire new employees using

technology. As organizations are increasingly interested in diversity and inclusion in the

workforce, using technology to remove unconscious bias in the hiring process is on the

rise.

As you sit through this week’s training, soak in the old and be prepared to use creative

thinking to help Organization X usher in the new. You must understand where an

organization has been and where they are now to best plan for the future.

Be sure to review this week’s resources carefully. You are expected to apply the

information from these resources when you prepare your assignments.

80 % 4 of 5 topics complete

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Books and Resources for this Week

Battaglio, R. (2015). Public human

resource management: Strategies and

practices in the 21st century. London:

SAGE Publications, Ltd.
Link

Cohen, S., Eimicke, W. B., & Heikkila, T.

(2013). The effective public manager:

Achieving success in government

organizations. San Francisco, CA…
Link

Leisink, P., & Steijn, B. (2008).

Recruitment, attraction, and selection.

In J. L. Perry & A. Hondeghem (Eds.),

Motivation in public management…
Link

Partnership for Public Service. (2018,

October). Tech to hire: Transforming

federal HR beginning with recruiting

and hiring. Partnership for Public…
Link

Week 2 – Assignment: Generate Best Practices for

Recruitment and Selection
Assignment

Due February 13 at 11:59 PM

Using this week’s readings as a starting point, consider the challenges in recruiting and

selecting the best candidates for Public Organization X. Then, choose an organization to

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examine and apply this week’s concepts. Since you are still in training, you may pick any

public organization of your choice for this assignment, but choose wisely and make sure

the information you are seeking is readily available.

Give a brief background on your selected organization and its employees, and then

produce an in-depth guideline on recruitment and selection best practices for yourself to

use when you take over as Director of Personnel Administration of Organization X at the

end of your training. You may assume the organization you choose to examine is in the

same field as Organization X. This is a great practice, especially since sometimes you get

the best ideas from outside research! Just remember, your document should contain best

practices specifically related to recruiting and candidate selection.

Tip: It is recommended that you prepare this information in the form of a chart for quick

reference rather than in typical essay form.

Be sure to include how different departments or positions may need different strategies

for recruitment (e.g., pre-employment screenings) and selection (e.g., complying with the

Civil Rights Act). You may present the best practices themselves in the form of an outline

or list within the chart.

Length: 4-5 pages, not including title and reference pages

References: Include a minimum of 5 scholarly resources.

Your assignment should demonstrate thoughtful consideration of the ideas and concepts

presented in the course by providing new thoughts and insights relating directly to this

topic. Your response should reflect scholarly writing and current APA standards where

appropriate. Be sure to adhere to Northcentral University’s Academic Integrity Policy.

Upload your document, and then click the Submit to Dropbox button.

Antecedents and Correlates of Public
Service Motivation

Sanjay K. Pandey and Edmund C. Stazyk

Systematic research, especially empirical research, on public service motiva-
tion is of recent vintage and grows out of a recognition that the public sector
motivational terrain differs from the private sector (Perry & Porter, 1982;
Perry & Rainey, 1988). Early work recognized that these sector-based differ-
ences were related to both organizational and individual circumstances (Perry
& Porter, 1982). Put another way, individual proclivities to derive fulfillment
and satisfaction from public sector work were expected to vary on the basis
of formal and informal aspects of the work environment as well as individual
attributes. This belief is the product of a rich tradition in public administra-
tion scholarship that has long recognized the presence of an ethic grounded
uniquely in public service, which has been expected to lead to the pursuit of
government careers and also predispose individuals to derive satisfaction from
public sector work (Horton, this volume; Mosher, 1982; Perry & Wise, 1990;
Rainey, 1982). It is only in the last 20 years or so that this tradition has given
rise to empirical research on public service motivation.

This chapter reviews antecedents and correlates of public service motiva-
tion. In presenting this review, however, we shy away from a ‘comprehensive
cataloging’ approach. We believe that an alternate approach—identifying dis-
cernible patterns of explanations—is more useful. In taking this approach,
we have a comparatively firm basis for our a priori beliefs about the causal
ordering of antecedents. With respect to the concepts we discuss as correlates,
it is not possible to mount definitive evidence and arguments on the nature
and direction of causal relationship on the basis of extant research. Our review
is based on approximately 50 empirical studies starting with Rainey (1982).
It is important to note empirical research on the public service motivation
concept has been both reinvigorated and transformed since Perry’s reformu-
lation of the concept as made up of four component dimensions, includ-
ing attraction to policy making, compassion, civic duty/public interest, and

Perry, J. L., & Hondeghem, A. (Eds.). (2008). Motivation in public management : The call of public service. Oxford University Press.
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102 Antecedents and Correlates of Public Service Motivation

self-sacrifice (Perry, 1996, 1997, 2000; Perry & Wise, 1990). This is reflected in
the increased use of public service motivation measurement scales proposed
by Perry (1996); about 15 of the studies reviewed used some variant of mea-
sure(s) derived from Perry (1996).

We begin by discussing three categories of explanations as antecedents of
public service motivation, namely, socio-demographic factors, social institu-
tions, and organizational factors. While the first category is largely atheoreti-
cal, the latter two categories of explanations are rooted in institutional theory
(March & Olsen, 1989; Perry, 2000). As correlates, we discuss reward pref-
erences, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. Other correlates
discussed in the literature (e.g. performance, organizational and interpersonal
citizenship behavior, goal commitment, and mission valence) are addressed in
other chapters. After sequentially reviewing the antecedents and correlates, we
offer some concluding thoughts.

SOCIO-DEMOGRAPHIC FACTORS AS ANTECEDENTS

Socio-demographic characteristics are commonly included in public service
motivation studies as control variables in multivariate models (e.g. Alonso
& Lewis, 2001; Brewer, 2003; Gabris & Simo, 1995; Houston, 2000, 2006;
Kim, 2005; Naff & Crum, 1999). Although limited in number, recent studies
have examined the effects of socio-demographic factors as antecedents in a
more systematic manner (Bright, 2005; Camilleri, 2007; DeHart-Davis et al.,
2006; Perry, 1997). Some of the more robust socio-demographic antecedents
include age, education, and gender. On balance, age has a modest positive
association with public service motivation. A higher level of education has a
positive association with public service motivation. Women consistently score
higher on the compassion dimension of public service motivation. For most
other socio-demographic factors, however, it is possible to find instances of
no relationship, a positive relationship, or a negative relationship with public
service motivation. These inconsistencies may be reflective of methodological
shortcomings (Wright, this volume). Nonetheless, on balance, the evidence
suggests socio-demographic characteristics have some bearing on public ser-
vice motivation.

Despite evidence on the positive effect of age on public service motivation
(e.g. Houston, 2000; Perry, 1997), little explanation has been offered. This is
consistent with the usage of age primarily as a control variable in multivariate
models. Steijn (2006) suggests older employees, by virtue of hierarchical posi-
tion and policy/organizational knowledge, are better placed to influence policy

Perry, J. L., & Hondeghem, A. (Eds.). (2008). Motivation in public management : The call of public service. Oxford University Press.
Created from ncent-ebooks on 2022-02-01 15:35:25.
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.

Antecedents and Correlates of Public Service Motivation 103

decisions. This, however, is not an argument for age causing increased public
service motivation. Studies on altruism in elderly and generativity support
the finding on positive association between age and public service motivation.
According to Midlarsky and Hannah (1989), despite good reasons to expect
the relationship between age and altruism to be curvilinear with middle-aged
individuals being the most altruistic, the relationship between altruism and
age is a linear one with the elderly being more generous. Generativity studies
try to understand the role individuals play in shaping the future generation.
These studies make the case that with increasing age and attendant life expe-
riences (such as raising children) individuals become more concerned about
making lasting positive contributions to society (McAdams & de St. Aubin,
1992; Ryff & Heincke, 1983). This insight of generativity studies is supported
in part by Camilleri (2007) who found that individuals with children have
higher public service motivation.

If there is one consistent result across most studies on the effect of a
socio-demographic attribute, it is that education has a positive association
with public service motivation (e.g. Bright, 2005; Moynihan & Pandey, 2007;
Naff & Crum, 1999; Perry, 1997; Steijn, 2006). These studies used heteroge-
neous samples and, therefore, this finding has good external validity. Bright
attributes this finding to the ‘professionalizing’ effect of education. Perry
(1997) employed education as a control variable, but in a later study (Perry,
2000) recognized the key socializing role education plays in shaping individual
beliefs. Boyte and Kari (1999) offer a similar perspective when they suggest
that educational institutions play an integral role in teaching ‘practical citi-
zenship’. Indeed, in their historical and institutional perspective, the higher
education system is seen as a key component of civil society that informs the
relationship between individual and the community and can, therefore, be
expected to inculcate public service motivation.

The relationship between different dimensions of public service motivation
and gender is mixed (Bright, 2005; Camilleri, 2007; DeHart-Davis et al., 2006;
Perry, 1997), except for the compassion dimension. Almost all studies thus far
suggest that women show higher levels of compassion. Bright (2005) suggests
caring and nurturing—associated with differential gender socialization—
makes women more likely to have higher levels of public service motivation.
DeHart-Davis et al. (2006) offer a more nuanced perspective on the effect of
gender on public service motivation. DeHart-Davis et al. (2006) argue women
are likely to display more compassion and men are likely to have higher levels
of attraction to policy making and express greater commitment to public
interest. The basic argument advanced by DeHart-Davis and colleagues, draw-
ing upon feminist theory, is that traditionally public and private spheres have
been separate. Taken together, historical relegation of women to the private

104 Antecedents and Correlates of Public Service Motivation

sphere, and the prevalence of exclusive ‘male’ interaction patterns in the public
sphere, is expected to produce higher compassion among women and lower
attraction to policy making and commitment to public interest. While the
finding on compassion is in line with expectations and other studies (e.g.
Bright, 2005; Camilleri, 2007; Vandenabeele, 2007), the finding on attraction
to policy making with women showing higher levels ran counter to expec-
tations and findings by Perry (1997) and Camilleri (2007). DeHart-Davis et
al. (2006) draw upon the nature of the organizations sampled (redistributive
agencies with limited room for policy making) and ‘gender balance’ (agencies
with significant presence of women) empowering women to behave more like
men to explain positive relationship between female gender and attraction to
policy making in these agencies.

SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS AS ANTECEDENTS

Among the most commonly asserted conjectures about public employees in
the literature is that they have a high level of public service ethic. There is
a two-part underlying assertion regarding the role of social institutions: (1)
Even before individuals have had the opportunity to be exposed to socializa-
tion in a public organization, social institutions have inculcated varying levels
of public service motivation; and (2) those with higher levels of public service
motivation have chosen careers in public service. Evidence from a number
of studies is consistent with this assertion (e.g. Brewer, 2003; Houston, 2000,
2006; Wittmer, 1991).

The important question then becomes which social institutions are respon-
sible for, and how do they inculcate, public service motivation? Perry (1997)
identifies a number of social institutions that can shape the development of
public service motivation, namely the family, religion, and the profession.
In the family context, he hypothesizes that parental relations and parental
modeling can play a role in inculcating public service motivation. Religious
activity, because of its sustained and deliberate emphasis on the other, is also
expected to lead to public service motivation. Professional socialization, a
product of the bargain the profession and society agree upon, is expected to
foster a service ethic.

In the 1997 study, Perry found that parental modeling, as expected, has
a positive impact on public service motivation. The findings on religious
involvement are somewhat more complex. Perry found that church involve-
ment had a negative effect on public service motivation. However, respondents
who scored higher on a ‘closeness to god’ measure had higher public service

Antecedents and Correlates of Public Service Motivation 105

motivation. This suggests religious activity can foster universal and inclusive
propensities as well as parochial and insular tendencies. Perry explains the
counter-intuitive finding by suggesting that the church involvement measure
is reflective of parochial religious commitments and therefore may stand in
opposition to universal civic commitments embodied in the public service
motivation concept. Perry et al. (in press), in the later study, which focused
on volunteerism, found that both parental socialization and religious activity
had a positive effect on public service motivation. The primary difference
between these two studies was the nature of the sample. While the Perry
(1997) study used a broad-based convenience sample, the Perry et al. (in
press) research draws upon a sample of volunteers. Moreover, these volunteers
were recognized for their civic service by having won either the Daily Point
of Light Awards or the President’s Community Volunteer Awards. Therefore,
for the volunteers—a group that is more civic-service oriented—the universal
and inclusive aspect of religious activity perhaps reinforces public service
motivation. Indeed, Houston and Cartwright (2007) have found individuals
involved in public service occupations tend to report being more spiritual than
others.

The last social institution Perry (1997) discusses is the profession. Most
studies report a positive relationship between professional identification and
public service motivation (e.g. DeHart-Davis et al., 2006; Moynihan & Pandey,
2007). The two studies by Pandey and colleagues use the same database, but
employ differing model specifications and two different measures of profes-
sionalism. Whereas the DeHart-Davis and colleagues study uses a measure
of professionalism that includes indicators of both membership and active
engagement with the profession, the Moynihan and Pandey study relies on
membership in a professional group as an indicator of professionalism. In
both studies, a higher level of professionalism is associated with higher public
service motivation.

Professions historically have struck a bargain with society in which they
espouse and uphold a code of ethics that puts public interest ahead of personal
interest. In return, the profession is accorded autonomy and legitimacy in
dealing with specific matters under its purview. The classic example of such
a bargain is with the profession of medicine (Friedson, 1970; Starr, 1982);
however, increasingly this bargain has frayed for medicine as well as for other
professions (Perry, 2007; Sullivan, 2004). Nonetheless, professional associa-
tions and activities continue to be important socializing forces reminding
members of a profession about their obligations to the public. Two of the more
notable American organizations promoting professionalism in public admin-
istration, American Society for Public Administration and the International
City/County Management Association, have ethical codes that emphasize

106 Antecedents and Correlates of Public Service Motivation

promotion of the public interest (Perry, 2000). It is worth noting, however,
that these organizations cover a small proportion of public servants and the
mere presence of a code of ethics within a professional association cannot be
expected to translate into higher levels of public service motivation. Instead,
professional associations must build or shape their socializing institutions
such that members of the profession actively identify with both the association
and the ethical code. Indeed, Frankford (1997) makes the case that institutions
of professional education and training shape the ‘normative constitution’ of
professionalism. It may, therefore, be necessary to redesign these institutions
as well as to sustain connection between educational institutions and working
professionals (Perry, 2007).

ORGANIZATIONAL ANTECEDENTS

The importance of organizations in fostering public service motivation has
not received much attention. Organizations, however, can play an important
role in fostering and sustaining public service motivation, a fact recognized by
Perry (1997) when he called for more research on this theme. Moynihan and
Pandey (2007) take up Perry’s invitation to assess organizational antecedents
of public service motivation. Moynihan and Pandey propose a model that
takes into account a number of key aspects of work environment to develop a
model of organizational antecedents of public service motivation. They iden-
tify organizational culture, bureaucratic red tape, the presence of employee-
friendly reforms, hierarchical levels, and organizational tenure as key organi-
zational antecedents. All of these factors, with the exception of culture, have a
relationship with public service motivation. Given that the study did not use
all dimensions of public service motivation, they urge caution in treating the
culture finding as definitive.

Such caution is worthwhile especially in light of other studies that show
culture as having a positive influence on different work-related constructs.
For example, Kaufman’s (1967) classic study of forest rangers illustrated
how close-knit cultures foster and reinforce a sense of shared commitment
among employees. These arguments are mirrored in DiIulio’s (1994) study
on employees working for the Bureau of Prisons as ‘principled agents’. Using
different methods, Ellickson (2002) and Steijn (2004), also provide evi-
dence for positive effect of esprit de corps and organizational climate on job
satisfaction—a key work-related construct. It is also possible that organiza-
tional culture’s effect on public service motivation is not a direct one but
perhaps one of a moderator or mediator variable.

Antecedents and Correlates of Public Service Motivation 107

As expected, bureaucratic red tape has a negative effect on public service
motivation and a reform orientation has a positive effect. This result is con-
sistent with emerging evidence about the negative impact of bureaucratic red
tape on a range of work-related constructs such as job satisfaction, job involve-
ment, organizational commitment, and role ambiguity (Pandey & Wright,
2006; Pandey et al., 2007). Bureaucratic red tape, as Pandey and Moynihan
(2006) point out, represents a triumph of means over ends. Fulfillment of
public service aspect of the work can be a valued end, and therefore, this
finding points to a key negative antecedent of public service motivation in
public organizations. While Moynihan and Pandey (2007) posit bureaucratic
red tape as an antecedent of public service motivation, it is worth remember-
ing this is a case in which a bi-directional causal relationship is quite likely.
Indeed, Scott and Pandey (2005) argue that those with high public service
motivation may have greater ability to cope with bureaucratic red tape and
keep working towards public service goals.

Somewhat surprisingly, Moynihan and Pandey (2007) find that organiza-
tional tenure has a negative association with public service motivation even
after controlling for age. This is a difficult finding to interpret because the
explanation is likely a product of long-term interplay between organizational-
and individual-level factors (Wright, this volume). One possible explanation
is the frustrated service ethic suggested initially by Buchanan (1975). Scott and
Pandey build on Buchanan’s argument to suggest that large-scale formal orga-
nizations can obscure the link between efforts and values outcomes (2005, p.
161). Thus, even though individuals may join a public organization with high
idealism, the lack of opportunities to experience valued outcomes firsthand
can lead to a damping down of public service motivation.

Moynihan and Pandey (2007, p. 821), in considering a similar finding
on work engagement, suggest that organizations should consider ways to
‘reconnect long-term members to the organization’. Wright (2004, 2007) has
a useful proposal in this regard. Between organizational and public service
goals on the one hand and public service motivation on the other hand,
stands the day-to-day experience of the job, which can be expected to have
a bearing on different types of motivation. Over prolonged periods of time,
even challenging aspects of work can become routine and the ability to see
connections between a job well done and fulfillment of a public service
goal may be challenged. One possible way to address the resultant ennui
then is to find means for effectively communicating the importance of the
job and its benefits for broader public purposes. Using a series of carefully
designed experiments, Grant demonstrates that this is possible. In his exper-
iments, individual employees were made aware of the positive impact of
their day-to-day work in the lives of potential beneficiaries (Grant, in press;

108 Antecedents and Correlates of Public Service Motivation

Grant et al., 2007). This resulted in greater effort, superior performance, and
increased persistence.

Other recent work, building upon Perry (1997) and Moynihan and Pandey
(2007), has affirmed the value of organizational antecedents for better under-
standing public service motivation (Camilleri, 2007). Paarlberg, Perry, and
Hondeghem (this volume) provide clear and specific guidelines on how orga-
nizations can capitalize on the potential value of public service motivation and
make these connections come alive in different organizational activities.

REWARD P

REFERENCES

Individual reward preferences are, perhaps, the most commonly examined
correlate in the public service motivation literature. The argument here
is simple—public service motivation leads individuals to value monetary
rewards less than the opportunity to serve others or the society (Houston,
2000; Perry & Wise, 1990). This inclination to serve others and society, public
service motives by another name, is expected to result in self-selection of such
individuals in public organizations (Crewson, 1997; Norris, 2003). Although
the evidence supports differential valuation of non-monetary rewards, it is less
clear on the value public employees place on monetary rewards.

Rainey (1982) conducted one of the earliest empirical studies on reward
preferences. His study was motivated in part by a ‘search of the service ethic’
(p. 288). Rainey compared differences in reward preferences across employees
in public and private organizations. Based on surveys of middle managers
in four state and four private organizations, he found evidence in support
of a unique public service ethic. However, there was limited variation in the
valuation of monetary incentives across sectors. In a study of employees of
local authorities in the United Kingdom, Pratchett and Wingfield find that
‘allegiance to the public sector is strongest amongst the highest paid cate-
gories and diminishes as income decreases’ (Pratchett and Wingfield, 1996,
pp. 645–6). Those individuals placed in the lowest salary category have the
least loyalty to the public sector, and exhibit little or no sector preference. This
diminishment, in the authors’ opinion, does not reflect sector preferences, but
rather indifference among employment choices.

Crewson (1997) sought to build directly upon the work of Rainey by
answering two questions concerning reward preferences. He sought to deter-
mine whether there were sector-based differences in terms of employee pref-
erences, and also if these differences remained constant over time. Using
data from three national surveys and multiple operationalizations of reward
preferences, Crewson found that public sector employees had a distinct set

Antecedents and Correlates of Public Service Motivation 109

of motives. This led him to argue private sector incentive measures cannot
and should not be adapted wholesale in the public sector. Instead, the public
sector must structure an incentive system that takes public service motivation
into account.

Writing from the public economics literature, François (2000) demon-
strates that public organizations are better equipped to benefit from public
service motivation than the private sector. Delfgaauw and Dur (2006) make
similar arguments. These findings have been mirrored, at some level, by
Houston (2000). Houston applied Crewson’s (1997) measure of public service
motivation to conduct a pooled multivariate analysis of 1991, 1993, and 1994
General Social Survey data in an effort, once again, to examine sector differ-
ences. He found public employees placed more value on intrinsic rewards such
as doing important work. On the other hand, private sector employees were
more inclined to value extrinsic rewards such as income.

Alonso and Lewis (2001) examined reward preferences for 35,000 fed-
eral, white-collar employees who participated in the 1991 Survey of Federal
Employees and the 1996 Merit Principles Survey. Surprisingly, the authors
found little evidence for the effect of public service motivation—particularly
on the relationship between incentive systems and performance ratings. How-
ever, by the authors’ own admission, their measures of public service moti-
vation are flawed, which may account for the discrepant findings. On the
other hand, Norris (2003) examined data from the 1997 International Social
Survey Programme to explore the continued relevance of a public service ethic
across a wide range of countries. The study explored the relationship between
motivational values and work experiences (as antecedents), and the manner
in which these translate into higher job satisfaction and work motivation in
public sector employees. Although there were variations across countries, the
findings demonstrated the importance of extrinsic reward preferences among
these employees. Norris finds these preferences reinforce motivational values
and act as a precursor to higher levels of job satisfaction and work motiva-
tion. Similarly, Wright (2004) argues both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards are
important within organizations. However, organizations may be able to rely
on intrinsic rewards to offset limited extrinsic rewards.

For all intents and purposes, the results of these studies, although mixed,
point to the notion that monetary incentives cannot inherently be considered
a substantial systemic or individual motivator for public sector employees. In
fact, several contrary findings exist, suggesting that the opposite is true. Given
these findings, two conclusions should be drawn. First, it suggests, intuitively,
monetary incentives correlate with the public service motivation concept only
insofar as those incentives are appropriately linked to employee performance.
Second, the literature also indicates nonmonetary, intrinsic rewards may be as
important, if not more, than pecuniary motivators.

110 Antecedents and Correlates of Public Service Motivation

ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT

Organizational action is often tied to the creation of an organizational climate
that fosters and sustains an individual’s public service motivation. Research
along this vein maintains organizational commitment is an important cor-
relate of public service motivation. This approach, at least in terms of pub-
lic service motivation, is an outgrowth of Perry and Wise’s (1990) original
categorization of motives and dimensions, as well as a substantial body of
literature on organizational commitment from the field of organizational
behavior (e.g. Meyer & Herscovitch, 2001). Both of these concepts—public
service motivation and organizational commitment—are widely viewed as
having normative, affective, and rational dimensions.

The first empirical study exploring organizational commitment as a cor-
relate is Crewson (1997). He argues that ‘preference for service over eco-
nomic benefits’ should lead to greater commitment to the organization,
and, using multiple data sets (General Social Surveys, 1989, 1973–93; the
1979 Federal Employee Attitude Survey; and the 1997 Survey of Electrical
Engineers) demonstrates public service motivation is consistently and pos-
itively correlated with organizational commitment. He argues this has per-
formance, recruitment, and retention implications that require additional
exploration.

Camilleri’s (2006) structural equation model on the relationship between
certain antecedents, organizational commitment, and public service moti-
vation within the Maltese Public Service further highlights the association
between the two concepts. His study examines both affective and normative
forms of organizational commitment. The most significant findings in his
model are those on the relationship between organizational commitment
and public service motivation. He finds public service motivation ‘is rein-
forced and strengthened’ by organizational commitment. Moreover, affective
commitment appears to be somewhat more important than normative com-
mitment. This leads Camilleri to conclude organizational commitment is a
dominant predictor of public service motivation.

Examining affective and continuance commitment, and their association
to public service motivation, Cerase and Farinella (2006) come to similar
conclusions. They find both correlate with public service motivation. Con-
tinuance commitment typically refers to an individual’s intention to remain
with an organization, and, as the authors argue, suggests in this case that
public service motivation can be linked to practical and instrumental reasons
for not wanting to leave an organization. However, the findings for affective
commitment as a correlate are much higher, and are significant across each
dimension of public service motivation.

Antecedents and Correlates of Public Service Motivation 111

Finally, Castaing (2006), while surveying three groups of French civil ser-
vants, finds evidence of each dimension of organizational commitment to
correlate with the public service motivation construct. Of these, affective com-
mitment is the most important. This is followed by normative and then con-
tinuance commitment. However, the authors also find ‘it is difficult for public
managers to strongly influence affective and normative commitment to the
organization by managing the psychological contract of civil servants’ (p. 96).
Castaing suggests public service motivation is an antecedent to organizational
commitment. This specification conflicts with Camilleri’s (2006) argument.
However, it is arguable that organizational commitment—particularly when
considered in light of job design and similar factors—can be conceived of as
both an antecedent and consequence of public service motivation. Perhaps
one way of resolving such conflicts is to elaborate causal models linking public
service motivation and organizational commitment, as Vandenabeele (2007)
does by including person–organization fit as a mediating variable. Given the
evidence from these studies, it seems apparent that an individual’s emotional
attachment to the organization is of particular importance to any effort to
foster and sustain public service motivation.

JOB SATISFACTION

As with reward preferences, the lineage of studies on job satisfaction as a
correlate of public service motivation goes back to Rainey (1982). Although
he makes a brief mention of it, Rainey finds that public managers’ response on
the measures within his study suggested public service employment may serve
as a unique source of satisfaction for public sector employees. Again, Perry
and Wise (1990) note the significance of this finding and call for additional
studies on job satisfaction as a correlate of public service motivation.

The first major study on job satisfaction as a correlate is Brewer and Selden’s
(1998) study of whistle-blowers in the federal civil service. Brewer and Selden
(1998) relied on data from the U.S. Merit Principles Survey conducted in 1992.
Relying on four measures of job satisfaction, Brewer and Selden find that
whistle-blowers report, among other things, higher levels of job satisfaction.
The findings lead the authors to conclude whistle-blowers often act in accor-
dance with a theory of public service motivation, and appear to be specifically
motivated by a concern for public interest. Naff and Crum (1999) provide
additional support for the notion that job satisfaction serves as a correlate
with public service motivation. Using data collected on nearly 10,000 federal
employees from the 1996 Merit Principles Survey, which included a subset of

112 Antecedents and Correlates of Public Service Motivation

six measures from Perry’s (1996) original public service motivation scales, the
authors found a significant relationship between job satisfaction and public
service motivation.

Norris (2003, p. 85) takes a somewhat different approach, and examines
job satisfaction as a function of value priorities and reward experiences. She
compares these along several dimensions, and finds ‘all employees desire
better financial rewards and conditions of work, yet there is no reason to
believe, based on these results, that public sector workers are less satisfied with
their positions’. In fact, she further notes public employees are particularly
satisfied with their jobs when their work helps individuals and/or contributes
to society at large. Comparing means, she also found, despite one’s sector
choice, job satisfaction was greater among senior officials and managers than
blue-collar workers. This leads her to conclude public sector employees are
at least as satisfied with public employment as are their counterparts in the
private sector.

In a study of Korean public employees, Kim (2005) finds a significant
correlation between public service motivation and job satisfaction. Moreover,
Kim further finds both public service motivation and job satisfaction increase
organizational performance. Similarly, Steijn (2006), relying on data from two
surveys conducted by the Dutch Ministry of the Interior, finds a significant
relationship between public service motivation and job satisfaction. Finally,
Cerase and Farinella (2006), in a study of employees within the Italian Rev-
enue Agency, find a positive correlation between public service motivation and
job satisfaction. They argue that this points to the ‘distinctive prerogatives of
“civil service”’.

On the basis of these findings, job satisfaction appears primarily to be a
function of an individual’s unique wants and expectations. More importantly,
these wants and expectations can be linked, at times, to a desire to help
individuals and to contribute to society through public sector employment.
Indeed, the vast majority of studies indicate job satisfaction is positively corre-
lated with public service motivation (Cerase & Farinella, 2006; Kim, 2005; Naff
& Crum, 1999; Norris, 2003; Steijn, 2006). This finding is certainly important
insofar as individual attitudes concerning job satisfaction can be affected by
the organization and the organization stands to gain or lose as a result.

CONCLUSION

Our review of antecedents and correlates of public service motivation suggests
it is a dynamic concept contingent on a variety of nuances and factors, some
rooted in individuals and others in institutions, which we have only begun to

Antecedents and Correlates of Public Service Motivation 113

explore. Although this research has yet to elaborate upon and uncover causal
pathways for antecedents and correlates of public service motivation, it does
make two key points. First, that it is possible to understand how public service
motivation develops in an individual, and, second, that public service motiva-
tion makes a positive difference to organizationally valuable dispositions and
behaviors. We briefly present promising prospects in studying antecedents and
correlates of pubic service motivation.

With respect to antecedents, there are two key questions. First, how can we
improve our understanding of the processes by which antecedents influence
public service motivation, and, second, how can we make the best use of
extant knowledge? Perhaps a good starting point for improving understanding
of antecedents is drawing upon institutional theory because the most well-
developed explanations for antecedents of public service motivation, even
for socio-demographic characteristics, invoke a causal logic that relies on
institutional explanations (Perry & Vandenabeele, this volume; Vandenabeele,
2007). Among the antecedents discussed, two of the most prominent are the
profession and the organization. A key limitation of making the best use of
professional institutions is that much of the public service workforce does not
belong to professional organizations. Given the value of professional asso-
ciations, public organizations may consider supporting professionalization
efforts. The salience of organizational influences on public service motivation
suggests that organizations can play an active role in reinforcing and sustain-
ing public service motivation.

The correlates discussed in this chapter and other chapters (Brewer, this
volume; Steen, this volume) highlight the value of public service motiva-
tion. For example, the literature on reward preferences has established public
service motivation leads to distinctive reward preferences. The important
question then becomes how this knowledge can be used to better design
work structures and incentive systems. Part of the answer to this question
depends upon our ability to understand the causality underlying these rela-
tionships in greater detail. Some emerging research is beginning to propose
and account for the complexity of underlying causation linking public service
motivation and its correlates (e.g. Vandenabeele, 2007; Wright & Pandey,
2007).

It is also necessary to devote greater attention to the distinct dimensions
of public service motivation proposed by Perry (1996) as we explore these
causal pathways. Despite increasing use of Perry’s public service motivation
dimensions, there is often a simplistic tendency to equate distinctive reward
preferences with public service motivation. Paying greater attention to these
dimensions can be useful. Little is known about the differential value of
the four public service motivation dimensions. For instance, do street-level
bureaucrats value one dimension, such as commitment to public interest, more

114 Antecedents and Correlates of Public Service Motivation

frequently than upper level management, who may find greater motivation
from attraction to policy making.

Greater attention to the distinct dimensions proposed by Perry (1996)
will also enable scholars to link insights from personality psychology with
public service motivation scholarship (A. M. Grant, personal communica-
tion, 14 July 2007). A key issue in personality psychology is how personality
attributes influence work-related constructs and the workplace. Were we to
accept Wright and Pandey’s (2005) contention about public service motiva-
tion being a key work-related construct, it will be useful to see the manner
in which personality attributes get expressed as public service motivation
in the workplace. Is the civic duty/public interest dimension influenced by
conscientiousness? Does the agreeableness personality dimension determine
the compassion dimension of public service motivation?

Finally, there is a need to employ different methodologies, perhaps multi-
method designs combining qualitative methods with longitudinal designs, to
better understand the temporal dimension of public service motivation. Such
studies can help us understand the relative malleability of public service moti-
vation and how quickly and in what ways institutional influences can shape it.

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University of Kansas working paper.

CHAPTER ONE

THE PERPETUAL CRISIS IN PUBLIC
MANAGEMENT

The attack on government is older than the American Republic. When looking at the modern Tea Party movement, it is important to think
back to the original Boston Tea Party. A tax on tea was opposed by dump-
ing the tea into the Boston Harbor. This nation was created in a moment
of antigovernment fervor. Still, when the party is over, the work of govern-
ment must go on. The garbage must be picked up, the street lights and
roads must be maintained, and the nation must be defended and kept
secure. In the face of three decades of sustained attacks, American gov-
ernment continues to function and improve. While public management
remains in a perpetual crisis, public managers must continue to rise to
the occasion and deliver effective and effi cient services. We see examples
of excellent public management all over America, starting in our own
backyard.

Government ’s response to Superstorm Sandy was well managed, well
coordinated, and reasonably effective. The tragic shooting of twenty-six
young students and teachers at Newtown, Connecticut ’s Sandy Hook
Elementary School could have been far worse without the brave and rapid
response of public school teachers, administrators, and government ’s fi rst
responders. Government is relied on for emergencies, and it typically
comes through. But government also ensures that essential day-to-day ser-
vices are delivered.

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2 The Effective Public Manager

The parks in New York City are in the best condition they have been
in for a generation. This is so, despite cuts in operating expenses and
staffi ng over the past quarter century. The city ’s imaginative commission-
ers, from Robert Moses to Thomas Hoving and from Betsy Gotbaum and
Henry Stern to Adrian Benepe, have all managed to do more with less and
improve the parks.

Parks are more important in New York City than in many other
American cities because although most of the land in New York City lies
under single-family homes, most of the people in New York City live in
apartments. For the children of apartment dwellers, the parks are back-
yards; they are where children go to run and play and toss a ball and be
outdoors with their friends. Despite the improvements in the parks and
the high level of the parks ’ conditions—84 percent rated acceptable in
2011, according to the NYC Mayor ’s Management Report (Bloomberg,
Goldsmith, and Weinstein, 2011)—the city ’s parks and recreation depart-
ment has been criticized for its management practices and suffers from
a negative image in the media. In recent years, the department has been
criticized for using welfare workers to clean parks, for charging nonprofi t
organizations that use the parks for programs sponsored by the nonprofi ts,
for poor park upkeep, and for recruiting and promoting recent college
graduates over civil service employees.

Reasonable people can criticize the Department of Parks and
Recreation ’s management practices, but what is striking is the degree to
which the public image of the department is dominated by these negative
stories. There is little question that success is not as interesting a news
story as failure or a scandal, but government ’s image suffers most from
the public ’s lack of perspective. Government ’s accomplishments are rarely
discussed, but its controversies and failures are front-page stories. The pro-
liferation of mass media, social media, and web-based news outlets through-
out the twenty-fi rst century has added to government ’s negative image.
Government is widely perceived as incompetent.

At many points in U.S. history, the American public has rallied against
government incompetence and failings. Those periods wax and wane;
in fact, after the country overcame the Great Depression and emerged
victorious in World War II, the public expressed great confi dence in the
capacity of government to solve major public challenges. The current
crisis of confidence in government in the United States began in the
second half of the twentieth century—evidenced by opinion polls that
trace a continuing decline in the public ’s trust in government starting

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The Perpetual Crisis in Public Management 3

in the 1960s (Hetherington, 1998). Although opinions of government
effi ciency and waste rebounded a bit around 2002, following the 9/11
crisis, they continued to drop again to historic lows in the years following.
In 2012, public opinion polls revealed that 38 percent of the public felt
that their state-level government was effi cient, whereas only 24 percent
of those polled found the federal government to be effi cient. Since 2002,
favorable ratings of local, state, and federal government have all fallen,
with the most severe decline occurring in the public ’s opinion of the fed-
eral government (Pew Research Center, 2012b). What this steady decline
in confi dence represents is widespread disdain for government, which
has developed into a collective American consensus. The common view
is that government creates rather than solves public problems, and that
government programs and policies detract from rather than add to the
quality of life.

Although mistrust of government is an accepted part of America ’s politi-
cal culture, government is still expected to provide services and enhance
our quality of life. At times, the American attitude toward government
reminds us of the superfi cial edge of toughness that characterizes residents
of our home city of New York: beneath the tough exterior of the average
New Yorker beats the heart of a caring person who is always willing to lend
a hand. Americans say they hate government, but they venerate American
political institutions and, particularly at the local level, consider them a
necessary and positive force in their communities.

In certain times of crisis, such as the attacks on New York ’s World Trade
Center and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, we fi nd renewed reliance, if
not confi dence, in government. When such renewed confi dence is squan-
dered by bungled responses to crises like Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and
the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, we demand even more from
government—more responsiveness, more preparedness, more coordina-
tion, more oversight, more compassion and support for the disaffected.
You might call it a love-hate relationship. We love what it can do and hate it
when we need to rely on it. Many Americans would prefer that government
shrink and play a less signifi cant role in our society, but in a complex world
fi lled with threats and danger, we fi nd ourselves looking to the government
for security and safety. As the economy has become globalized, we also look
to government to help us navigate the uncharted territory of increased
global trade and interdependency. The real issue that we need to engage in
is a debate about the extent and strategic direction of government involve-
ment, not the necessity of that involvement.

c01.indd 3 03-07-2013 16:13:46
Cohen, Steven, et al. The Effective Public Manager : Achieving Success in Government Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013.
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Created from ncent-ebooks on 2022-02-01 15:34:11.

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4 The Effective Public Manager

The Current Crisis Defi ned

There is still a popular and, to some degree, substantive consensus that
government is not capable of producing the public policies we might like
to see implemented. In this view, the signs of failure—crime, drug abuse,
homelessness, declining urban public schools, and corruption in high
elected offi ce—are everywhere. In contrast, we see the dramatic success
stories of the private sector:

• FedEx, with its almost fl awless computer-assisted delivery service
• iPods and iPads that include every song and movie we could ever think of
• Amazon.com and its ever-expanding selection of everything
• Consumer items ranging from lightweight laptop computers and smart-

phones to cars that park themselves
• Increased emphasis on customer service from nearly every consumer

business, with twenty-four-hour access and overnight home delivery of
everything from mattresses to home entertainment systems

Consider the difference between standing in a long line at a local
motor vehicle bureau, post offi ce, or IRS offi ce and driving up to the quick-
service window of a drive-through fast-food restaurant, local bank branch,
or FedEx outlet. In the past decade, government has been moving to mod-
ernize its ability to provide rapid, high-quality customer service, but for the
most part, it lags behind the private sector.

Government is seen as wasteful and corrupt, business as lean and
effi cient—perceptions that are often justifi ed, at least on anecdotal evidence.
According to a Gallup poll conducted in 2011, the American public believes
that the federal government wastes about half of what it spends and that it
is more wasteful than both state and local governments (Jones, 2011). In the
same year, President Obama and Vice President Biden were pushing forward
with their Campaign to Cut Waste to combat the problem of government
waste. The primary goals of the campaign are to reduce the wasteful allo-
cation of funds under the budgets of federal agencies, reduce waste, and,
hence, improve overall government performance. Other waste-cutting initia-
tives under this campaign include eliminating the printing and distributing
of materials that can be found online and decreasing the number of vacant
and unused lots that are currently under government ownership.

In order to achieve the goals of the Obama Administration ’s Campaign
to Cut Waste, a new oversight and accountability board of eleven members

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The Perpetual Crisis in Public Management 5

was established. Members of the board included agency inspectors gen-
eral, agency chief fi nancial offi cers or deputy secretaries, and an offi cial
from the Offi ce of Management and Budget (The White House, 2012).
The fi rst year of the campaign received mixed reviews. Although federal
agencies are supportive of the goals that the campaign seeks to achieve,
many chief fi nancial offi cers (CFOs), who are responsible for budgets and
performance tracking, have questioned the effectiveness of such efforts.
The results from a survey that was distributed to federal agencies participat-
ing in the campaign revealed concerns that (1) the effort might require
resources that would be better and more effectively spent elsewhere and
(2) the campaign ’s goals did not align well with the mission of some agen-
cies (Clark, 2012).

These concerns about waste are well grounded, as there are always
examples of wasteful or ineffective government practices. An infamous
example of government waste is the bankruptcy of solar cell maker
Solyndra, despite receiving $528 million in federal loan guarantees.
Solyndra received loans from the Department of Energy through the 2009
stimulus package. A federal loan guarantee is typically offered on a loan
made by a commercial bank, but in the case of Solyndra, the company
took out a loan directly from the Federal Financing Bank, which is part of
the Treasury Department. As a result, when the company fi led for bank-
ruptcy and it became evident that it would not be able to repay its loan,
the Obama Administration was attacked by its critics for participating in the
deal. The criticisms included the absence of true technological innovation
in the design of Solyndra ’s nonsilicon solar cells (a primary requirement
of the loan guarantee program), a rushed review process in order for the
administration to complete their fi rst loan for this visible new program, as
well as the appearance of corruption when the media reported that a large
investor in Solyndra was also a fund-raiser for Obama ’s 2008 presidential
campaign.

The bankruptcy of Solyndra brought the entire Obama clean energy
program under scrutiny, despite the fact that out of about forty projects
that had received loans through the program, only Solyndra and one
other company had defaulted. An audit report released by the White
House found that the Department of Energy ’s loan guarantee program
needs “more rigorous financial oversight and must implement stricter
performance standards” if it is to be successful (“The Solyndra Mess,” 2011;
Wald, 2012; Broder, 2012). Solyndra ’s failure has reduced the public ’s con-
fi dence in government ’s ability to spur economic development. A failed
subsidy doesn ’t mean all subsidies are bad, and a poorly thought-out public

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Created from ncent-ebooks on 2022-02-01 15:34:11.

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6 The Effective Public Manager

policy does not mean we need to abandon public policies and let the mar-
ket determine everything. Yet daily news stories about government waste
and fraud contribute to an overall image of government incompetence.
It is diffi cult to argue with this perception, despite its inaccuracy.

A great number of government success stories could be cited if one
wished to do so. Successful government programs have been established
for rural electricity, food stamps, interstate highways, education, crime
reduction, and many other endeavors. Even if such successes are recog-
nized, critics argue that government programs are a drain on the economy,
while ignoring the economic benefi ts of government programs such as
the Internet (e-commerce), the space program (telecommunications satel-
lites), the highway system (more effi cient delivery of goods), and water and
sewage systems (biological necessities). Yet without some of the most costly
of government programs, such as the social security system, generations of
young, upwardly mobile professionals might have to spend more time look-
ing after their parents and less time creating wealth. Despite these logical
counterarguments to government critics, the image remains quite negative.

Contracting specifi c tasks out to the private sector is typically viewed
favorably by private sector proponents; however, overreliance on the pri-
vate sector can contribute to perceptions of government waste and corrup-
tion. For example, a 2010 scandal by consultants hired in New York City
to develop a new time card system resulted in fraud that may have wasted
over $80 million. Despite the fact that the fraud was committed by private
sector contractors, the scandal was blamed on government—as it should
be, because government is ultimately accountable.

Although the public sector has diffi culty implementing programs, pri-
vate management is certainly no panacea. Simply look at the Wall Street
and housing fi nance crash of 2008, the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, the
BP oil spill, or the automobile industry bailout and we see that the private
sector does not have a monopoly on management competence. The BP oil
spill represents an event that contributed to increasing levels of mistrust in
large institutions in general—both private and public. Although much of
the blame for the BP oil spill can be found with BP management, insuffi –
cient oversight of the Deepwater Horizon rig by the Minerals Management
Service of the U.S. Department of the Interior was also a major problem.

Until it was restructured in 2010, the goals of the Minerals Management
Service were intertwined and confl icting. The fi rst area of the agency ’s
responsibility involved protecting the environment and regulating the fuel
extraction processes employed by oil and gas companies. In addition, the
Minerals Management Service also generated revenue from leasing land

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ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1469446.
Created from ncent-ebooks on 2022-02-01 15:34:11.

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The Perpetual Crisis in Public Management 7

to oil and gas companies who were operating on U.S. territory. Because
of the increasing engineering complexity of the systems used in drilling
operations, and in particular deep water drilling, in order to develop gov-
ernment regulations, the Minerals Management Service had to rely on the
advice of oil and gas companies that were developing and using those tech-
nologies. The Minerals Management Service was restructured to include
three separate entities: the Bureau of Energy Management, Regulation,
and Enforcement (BOEM), the Bureau of Safety and Environmental
Enforcement (BSEE), and the Office of Natural Resources Revenue
(ONRR). BP and its oil rig contractor, Transocean, were criticized for the
environmental disaster in the Gulf, but a great deal of the blame has fallen
on the government agency that was unable to keep up with advances in
oil drilling technology (Blumenthal and Bolstad, 2010; Bureau of Ocean
Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement, 2011; Barstow, Dodd,
Glanz, Saul, and Urbina, 2010).

Failed public programs are more closely scrutinized by the media than
are private sector failures. A failed private enterprise is just another of the
more than eighty thousand businesses that fail in the United States every
year (Dun & Bradstreet, 2011). Public sector failures are more diffi cult to
hide, particularly if the failure involves a topic that is in the public eye, such
as health care (even though the sector is dominated by private fi rms and
self-employed doctors).

Despite many high-visibility ethics scandals among private companies
that occasionally reach headline news, the public still retains a largely posi-
tive image of the wonders of the free market; over two thirds of the public
believe that society is better off in a free market economy (Pew Research
Center, 2012c). This image was crystallized by the collapse of communist
states throughout Europe in the 1990s and the surge of privatization in
its wake. Most acknowledge that the privatization of communist econo-
mies has had a painful human cost, but the goal of developing a Western-
style consumer economy is seen to be worth the price. The image of the
American culture of consumption, built on Western-style free-market
enterprise, is perceived as a model that works, in contrast with the fail-
ure of state-run enterprises. In fact, the Bush and Obama bailouts and
stimulus programs of 2008 and 2009 probably prevented a second Great
Depression, but because they did not usher in a boom, they were seen
by many as another failure by government. The result of this has been
the discrediting of the usefulness—and even the feasibility—of efforts to
coordinate, regulate, and infl uence the private economy. In cities, the plan-
ning that we have maintained is now hidden in the site-specifi c designs of

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Created from ncent-ebooks on 2022-02-01 15:34:11.

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8 The Effective Public Manager

public-private partnerships. Efforts to regulate business practices continue,
but they are done in an environment that favors deregulation. About half
of the American public report feeling that government does more harm
than good in regulating corporations (Pew Research Center, 2012a). In our
view, we don ’t need less government; we need a more competent one. We
don ’t need less regulation; we need more effective regulation.

Finally, we have seen a decline in the ethos of public service. In the
1990s, President Clinton worked hard to reignite the fervor for public ser-
vice that he experienced as a youth during John F. Kennedy ’s presidency.
He then impaired government ’s credibility when he had an illicit relation-
ship with an intern and abused his pardon power on his way out of offi ce.
Barack Obama ran for president in 2008 as the candidate of hope, but by
the 2012 campaign had to work hard to resist the antigovernment ideology
promoted by his opponents. His narrow victory in 2012 was an indication of
the electorate ’s divided views on the role of government in American life.

Despite the general disdain for government, there are countless exam-
ples of community spirit. We saw it in the massive public response in the
aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. Occupy Wall Street was a prime example
of Americans banding together to bring the issue of economic opportunity
and the extreme concentration of wealth to the top of the political agenda.
The Occupy movement began in September of 2011 when a small, slightly
disorganized group of individuals started a protest against economic
inequality and the political power of some corporations. Protestors called
the wealthy “the 1%.” Within weeks this protest against “the 1%,” with the
slogan “We are the 99%,” became known to international media outlets,
and similar protest groups began to form in other cities around the nation
and around the world.

Politicians quickly jumped on the opportunity to use the Occupy
movement to further their political agendas. Democrats consistently used
the income disparity argument to promote Obama ’s jobs bill, while the
Republicans contended that the “occupiers” were engaging in class war-
fare. The Occupy movement provided a counterweight to the Tea Party ’s
notion that government and regulation have no role in the American
economy. The American public understands that the deregulation of the
finance industry helped destroy the value of their homes and savings.
While the occupiers may not trust government any more than they trust
corporations, they understand that industry cannot be allowed to operate
without proper oversight.

A strong sense of community spirit can also be found in countless non-
profi t community groups and religious institutions, which are well regarded

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The Perpetual Crisis in Public Management 9

by average Americans. They believe these organizations have been success-
ful in making a difference in communities at home and abroad. On the
other hand, government has lost its image as an institution through which
people can do good and serve their fellow citizens, and government work-
ers have suffered a signifi cant decline in status over the past twenty years.
It is increasingly diffi cult to convince public-minded students that they can
effect change and improve people ’s lives by working in government. Even
government ’s forceful response to the attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon, and the demise of Osama Bin Laden, did not fundamen-
tally change popular perceptions of government.

The sum of these trends has been to cause a long-standing crisis of
confi dence in public management. In this context, the term “crisis” refers
to a widespread social dilemma that is incredibly diffi cult to halt or man-
age. While some crises are short term, such as a natural disaster, others are
persistent—like an infection that is resistant to antibiotics. The crisis of
confi dence in public management falls into this latter category. We are not
arguing that the crisis in public management is entirely a bad thing. The
crisis presents tremendous opportunities to redefi ne and improve public
management—opportunities that we will explore in this book. However,
to a considerable extent the crisis is based on perceptions of government
performance that are erroneous or at least only partially accurate.

Nor do we argue that government operations are always as effective
and effi cient as they could be. However, all organizations—government,
private for-profi t, and private nonprofi t—are fl awed. Each experiences
dysfunction and failure. Government is the most regulated and visible of
these three forms of organization, but this does not mean that it is the least
capable of the three. Our view is that each form is best suited to particular
functions and activities. Our hope is that out of the crisis of public manage-
ment we will eventually come to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of
each form of organization. However, for the present, public management
must deal with a profound crisis of confi dence—a perception that govern-
ment can ’t get the job done.

Government ’s Response to the Crisis of Confi dence

Initial reactions to the modern public management crisis came from those
who fi rst defi ned and articulated it: members of the conservative political
movement. The tax-limiting initiatives in California and the Reagan “revo-
lution” in Washington, DC, were concrete reactions to the crisis of public

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10 The Effective Public Manager

management. The argument was continued and expanded by the Tea Party
movement in recent years. The fundamental argument goes something
like this: If government can’t deliver the goods, let’s reduce the public sector and
increase the private economy by reducing government’s revenues. Furthermore, if
government is the problem and not the solution, then we should certainly reduce the
size of government—especially its domestic and social welfare programs. Moreover, in
all cases, the market is better than the government at meeting the needs of the public .

Paradoxically, tax cuts at the federal level, increased defense spending,
and cut-resistant government entitlement programs have had the effect
of increasing the size of the federal defi cit. This was exacerbated by the
George W. Bush tax cuts and war-related increases in defense spending
after 9/11. The trend was continued by Bush ’s and President Obama ’s
anti-recession spending in 2008 and 2009. As the federal share of state and
local budgets was reduced, starting in the 1980s, state and local taxes were
increased in many places to make up for the revenue shortfall. This was
one of the causes of the Tea Party movement, as local property and school
taxes rose at a rapid rate.

After the fi rst decade of the attack on the federal government by politi-
cal conservatives in the 1980s, the second decade of conservative attacks on
public management fi nally included a response by government advocates.
In the 1990s, we saw an effort to “reinvent” government and to reinvigorate
the civil service. Two high-profi le national commissions were established to
set an agenda for reforming public personnel practices. The fi rst, at the fed-
eral level, was a commission chaired by Paul Volcker, the former head of the
Federal Reserve. The second commission focused on state and local public
service; it was chaired by former Mississippi governor William F. Winter.

It soon became apparent that the effort to revitalize the civil service
was addressing only one element of a series of problems with government
management. Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman ’s best-selling private
management book, In Search of Excellence (1982), described a quiet revolu-
tion in management technique that was taking place in a number of suc-
cessful fi rms starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s (and continues to
the present). Reduced hierarchies, a focus on quality, customers, and team-
work, and creative entrepreneurship were lauded in this landmark book.
Public management scholars, journalists, and practitioners began to discuss
the need to apply these ideas to public management. David Osborne and
Ted Gaebler ’s Reinventing Government (1992) synthesized and popularized
the ideas; the core reinvention concept was to rethink how government
delivered, managed, and paid for public programs. Reinvention was born as
an effort to “save” the public sector; it advocated promoting the collective

c01.indd 10 03-07-2013 16:13:47
Cohen, Steven, et al. The Effective Public Manager : Achieving Success in Government Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1469446.
Created from ncent-ebooks on 2022-02-01 15:34:11.

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The Perpetual Crisis in Public Management 11

welfare by admitting that government sometimes did a poor job, and it pro-
posed a series of creative methods that government could use to improve
its performance.

Osborne and Gaebler ’s emphasis on entrepreneurship was criticized by
public administration scholars for its avoidance of issues of constitutional
law and representational democracy. These three questions are typical:

1. What gives this unelected bureaucrat the right to take risks with the
public ’s money?

2. What is the role of elected offi cials in authorizing these creative
programs?

3. How can these programs be held accountable and be overseen by
elected offi cials?

Despite the reservations of public administration scholars, public
administration practitioners jumped on the reinvention bandwagon with
great enthusiasm. Bill Clinton and Al Gore campaigned on the platform
of reinvention in 1992. Mayors in the 1990s—such as Stephen Goldsmith
of Indianapolis, Ed Rendell of Philadelphia, and Rudolph Giuliani of New
York—became proponents of reinvention. In the twenty-fi rst century, many
of the innovations begun in the 1990s have become routinized. One of the
most important early reinvention initiatives took place at the federal level
when then-President Bill Clinton gave Vice President Al Gore the assign-
ment of applying reinvention concepts to the federal government. The
administration asked David Osborne to help lead the effort, which became
known as the National Performance Review, popularly known as the “rein-
venting government” movement.

The National Performance Review

Although clearly based on Osborne ’s reinvention philosophy, the National
Performance Review was also rooted in the experiences of the Brownlow,
Hoover, and Grace Commissions, the new public administration movement
of the late 1970s, and even the privatization efforts of the 1980s. The review
was initially conceived to focus on improved performance, but the commis-
sion leaders quickly succumbed to the political magic of cost cutting and
led the fi nal report with a commitment to cut $108 billion over fi ve years
and reduce the federal workforce by more than 252,000 positions. Whether
or not such cuts made sense, the importance of the report of the National

c01.indd 11 03-07-2013 16:13:47
Cohen, Steven, et al. The Effective Public Manager : Achieving Success in Government Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013.
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Created from ncent-ebooks on 2022-02-01 15:34:11.

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12 The Effective Public Manager

Performance Review was in the reinvention philosophy that it expressed in
four basic principles: (1) cut red tape, (2) put customers fi rst, (3) empower
employees to get results, and (4) get back to basics. Equally important,
the report did not leave the issues at a philosophical level; there were also
action recommendations.

The results of the National Performance Review were mixed. Although
the government claimed that a savings of $137 billion in federal funds
could be attributed to the review, as a New York Times editorial pointed out,
the claim was essentially not provable: it was impossible to separate out the
improvements brought about by the review from those related to the eco-
nomic improvement of the nation as a whole (Broder and Henneberger,
2000). For example, although the federal workforce was reduced by about
three hundred thousand during the mid-1990s, the largest reduction
occurred mostly within the armed services sector, because of the end of the
Cold War (Broder and Henneberger, 2000). Undoubtedly, the reinventing
government movement was responsible for some of this reduction, but the
more important point is how the movement ’s reform effort has shaped the
current thinking in government.

Of course, this reinvention movement is neither the beginning nor the
end of government reform efforts. As Paul Light ’s book The Tides of Reform
points out: “Human beings have been reforming government ever since
they invented government” (1997, p. 2). The key point for public manag-
ers today is to be aware of the culture, standards, and institutions that have
evolved from the mid-1990s reform effort and what that means for the
context in which public managers operate.

The Challenges of the Performance-Based Movement

The reinvention movement that started in the 1990s arguably made a last-
ing impact on how public agencies do business. Across all levels of gov-
ernment we have witnessed the widespread adoption of tools and policies
like “performance measurement,” “performance-based budgeting,” and
“managing for results” (Forsythe, 2001). President George W. Bush con-
tinued this management reform tradition in 2002 with his “Performance
Improvement Initiative,” presented through the White House ’s websites
results.gov and expectmore.gov. Bush ’s performance management initia-
tive adopted a Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART) for all federal
agencies and programs—monthly scorecards that summarize how well
each federal agency executes the administration ’s performance initiative.

c01.indd 12 03-07-2013 16:13:47
Cohen, Steven, et al. The Effective Public Manager : Achieving Success in Government Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013.
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Created from ncent-ebooks on 2022-02-01 15:34:11.

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The Perpetual Crisis in Public Management 13

Numerous state and local governments established similar perfor-
mance management programs—programs that focus on assessing how
well public agencies are achieving their goals and making that informa-
tion publicly available through the Internet and periodic reports. The City
of New York implemented the Citywide Accountability Program, known as
“CapStat,” in 2001 to track performance information. It was modeled after
the city ’s CompStat program, which the police department implemented
in the mid-1990s to improve crime tracking and operational responses.

In 2011, the Obama Administration launched performance.gov, which
is meant to act as a centralized source for tracking the performance of
federal government agencies. The website aims to create transparency by
providing data about the hiring, spending, and cost-cutting initiatives that
are taking place at federal agencies (Marks, 2011).

Not surprisingly, the performance management movement has led to
a boom in academic studies that have looked at how performance manage-
ment programs develop and what makes them effective (Ingraham and
Kneedler, 2000; Roberts, 2002; Moynihan and Ingraham, 2003; Moynihan,
2005; Swiss, 2005; Heikkila and Isett, 2007). For example, under the 2010
Government Performance and Results Modernization Act, federal agencies
must appoint a senior-level offi cer, the Performance Improvement Offi cer
(PIO), who is charged with the task of ensuring that “the mission and
long-term goals of their agencies are achieved through strategic and per-
formance planning, measurement analysis, regular assessment of processes
and the use of performance information to improve results” (Partnership
for Public Service and Grant Thornton LLP, 2011). A survey of these offi –
cers highlighted some of the trends in the primary challenges to achiev-
ing effective performance improvements across agencies (Partnership for
Public Service and Grant Thornton LLP, 2011):

• They often lack top-leader support for building a strong performance
culture, holding people accountable, and making programs and services
more effective.

• They do not have enough authority to improve government perfor-
mance and results.

• They often have multiple responsibilities that include budget and fi nan-
cial issues, causing them to give performance management less attention.
On average, less than 50 percent of a PIO ’s time is spent on performance
management, because other duties are considered more important.

• Performance improvement is often seen as an exercise to comply with a
meaningless external requirement, rather than an opportunity to improve.

c01.indd 13 03-07-2013 16:13:47
Cohen, Steven, et al. The Effective Public Manager : Achieving Success in Government Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013.
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14 The Effective Public Manager

The performance management movement by no means eliminated
the lapses in ethics that plague some public servants, nor can the trend
ensure that agencies will actually perform well. A complementary reform
effort has focused on the increasing use of government oversight mecha-
nisms. Recent oversight reforms have been launched in direct response
to the recognition of contracting and procurement failures related to the
Hurricane Katrina response, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Homeland
Security, and related management failures.

Between 2005 and 2007, an estimated fi ve hundred new federal posi-
tions were added in the federal Government Accountability Offi ce (GAO)
and Inspector General Offi ce (Burman and Kelman, 2007). In 2008, the
GAO employed about 3,100 individuals, and by 2011 the size of the work-
force had grown to 3,200 (Coburn, 2011; Kaiser, 2008). Many of these
positions are devoted to performance measurement and management.
A number of states and local governments have followed suit. The State
of New Jersey, widely known for its political corruption scandals (“pay-to-
play”), started its Offi ce of the Inspector General in 2005. The New Orleans
City Council voted unanimously in 2006 to authorize creation of the city ’s
fi rst Offi ce of the Inspector General. Since 2006, many other cities across
the country have established an Offi ce of the Inspector General, including
the city of Philadelphia, whose mayor appointed former U.S. Attorney Amy
Kurland as its Inspector General.

The increased use of smartphones and GPS has made tracking and
reporting performance less expensive and more accessible. We can track
our FedEx packages from start to fi nish. Every scan can be sent to the cus-
tomer ’s smartphone. Government and management in general are under
pressure to know what the organization is doing at all times. Eventually
the only limiting factor may be our own brains and our ability to absorb
all these data.

These initiatives to make government more accountable indicate that
the crisis in public management has not passed. Not only does public
skepticism over government performance continue, but the reinven-
tion movement has still been overshadowed in many ways by the anti-
tax and antispend philosophy that became entrenched in the American
political psyche in the 1980s. In the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore
sidestepped the reinvention ideas of the National Performance Review
and, like George W. Bush, pitched himself as the candidate for smaller
government. Through two more election cycles, despite the rising
costs of a war in Iraq, most politicians in both political parties contin-
ued to embrace this philosophy. For example, when Barack Obama was

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Cohen, Steven, et al. The Effective Public Manager : Achieving Success in Government Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013.
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Created from ncent-ebooks on 2022-02-01 15:34:11.

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The Perpetual Crisis in Public Management 15

campaigning for President in 2008, he observed that Ronald Reagan ’s
“sense of dynamism . . . changed the trajectory of America” more than any
other administration (Bosman, 2008).

The focus on tax cuts and downsizing adds an additional challenge and
has made it even more diffi cult for government to respond to the crisis
of confi dence and persistent public problems. Two government contract
analysts have noted:

. . . there are not enough contracting and program management
people to develop sound strategies for major procurements and
then manage these contracts after award so they produce results
and stay within reasonable cost. The procurement workforce was
downsized by about a quarter during the 1990s . . . During the last
six years, requirements have increased and spending has grown by
over 80 percent while the government contracting workforce has
remained basically the same size [Burman and Kelman, 2007].

The Obama Administration identified the stark contrast between
growth in federal procurement spending and workforce size, and in turn
developed the Acquisition Workforce Development Strategic Plan: Fiscal
Years 2010–2014 (Field, 2009). The plan outlines the need for growth as
well as processes and action plans for workforce planning, training, devel-
opment, and management infrastructure.

It appears that public managers, elected offi cials, and citizens need
to be continuously reminded that the underlying tenets of the 1990s
reform efforts included recommendations for institutional and structural
reforms—not simply “starving the beast,” as tax-cut proponents are fond
of saying (B. Bartlett, 2007). Underlying the reform efforts was the rec-
ognition that ineffi ciencies are really driven by the rules of government
budgeting, personnel, planning, construction, and contracting, which are
not designed to ensure rapid and effi cient operations. Whether a health
care facility was built by a private fi rm or by the government, the project
would use similar private design and construction fi rms to actually build
the facility. In New York State, the Wicks Law makes it diffi cult to hire gen-
eral contractors, which means that even private fi rms working on New York
government construction projects end up wasting time and money. In most
jurisdictions, public construction takes more time than private construc-
tion because of lengthy government procurement procedures.

Improving government performance therefore requires not simply
tracking performance, but also making changes to the institutions and

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16 The Effective Public Manager

policies that currently can make it diffi cult for public managers to work
effi ciently or effectively. Of course, if we are to reduce the rules of govern-
ing hiring, we must develop a method for ensuring that political patronage
does not reemerge. If we are to reduce contracting oversight and regula-
tion, we must develop a method for ensuring that public procurement is
competitive and as free of fraud as humanly possible. The political chal-
lenges and tradeoffs in revising the overarching institutional setting gov-
erning public managers has been much debated and scrutinized in the
academic literature (Knott and Miller, 1987; Wilson, 1989; Horn, 1995).
Cohen and Eimicke (2008) argue that holding government contractors
accountable requires contractors not only to simply carry out the terms
outlined in their contract, but also to “act as the agents of a representative
system where the directions they receive are designed to both respond to
public views and ensure that government function effectively” (p. 86).

For the purposes of this book, we ask the reader to consider three basic
methods for ensuring effective but honest management:

1. Hold managers accountable for performance. If the parks are dirty,
fi re the parks commissioner.

2. Hold agency chiefs responsible for fair procurement and hiring rules.
One element of performance is adherence to standards of merit
hiring and competitively bid contracts. Again, if a bid is rigged or a
manager is hiring his or her incompetent cousins, fi re that manager.

3. Strengthen inspector generals and enforcement and empower
whistleblowers so that corrupt offi cials are fi red and jailed. But do not
confl ate a manager seeking to cut corners to deliver a service
with someone who is stealing from the public ’s treasure.

At each level of government and in each institutional setting, rules
will structure the feasibility of meeting these three conditions—and thus
how easily we can assure accountability. Even if policies and rules are in
place that support these standards, sometimes the politics of the day will
prevail. Take the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989, which was designed
to allow public servants to report fraud and abuse without fear of losing
their jobs. Negative reactions to whistleblowers by the Bush Administration,
through investigations or gag orders, threatened those protections, leading
Congress to propose legislation to amend the Whistleblower Act in 2007.
After being put on hold during the Bush Administration, the Senate has
continuously approved the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act,
but the Act then failed in Congress after being passed by the Senate in 2010
and 2011 (J. Davidson, 2010, 2011).

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The Perpetual Crisis in Public Management 17

The issue of accountability will always persist, but we argue that to some
degree it is a nonissue. Before a bureaucrat can develop and implement
a public program, that program must be authorized by elected offi cials.
The willingness of elected officials to permit such discretion may vary.
We, of course, urge them to permit creative experimentation. This is not
without precedent, although there are risks involved in permitting public
entrepreneurship.

One of the best examples of those risks is the story of Robert Moses,
perhaps the quintessential public entrepreneur. At the peak of his power,
he had massive infl uence on the development of New York City ’s infrastruc-
ture. For nearly fi fty years, he built roads, parks, stadiums, bridges, beaches,
and housing. He grew so powerful that he was beyond the control of New
York ’s mayors and governors until New York ’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller
fi nally reduced his authority in the late 1960s. The lesson of Robert Moses
is that unelected offi cials can become too powerful, and that is a danger
in some places where innovative government is taking place. However, as
long as elected leaders stay involved in the process and keep their grants
of authority limited in scope and time, there is no reason to believe that
creative government and representative government are confl icting con-
cepts. Again, though, creativity and agility will require us to adapt our rules
on budgeting, personnel, and procurement. We also need to develop and
communicate a more realistic understanding of what public programs can
achieve and a more accurate description of what they have achieved.

Finally, we need to do a better job of training current and future public
managers. That is one of the aims of this book: to help make public manag-
ers more strategic, creative, and fl exible—more fundamentally effective.
We believe that the creative values in reinvention can be coupled with a
sense of ethical responsibility to the public and its representative institu-
tions. We further believe that a professional public manager pursuing an
explicit personal and organizational strategy can deliver effective public
programs and help address the crisis in public management.

The work of public service is an honorable profession. But it is also a
profession requiring skillful use of analytic techniques, management prac-
tices, creative thinking, and modern technology. Social science is learning
more about how to think about policy choices. It is helping us learn more
about how people can interact and be more effective in group settings.
Computer and communications technology is making it easier for us to
teach, learn, and exchange the information needed to be more effective
decision makers and more productive workers. Managers in government,
in the private nonprofi t sector, and in parts of the private for-profi t sector
must learn to use this new knowledge to make their organizations more

c01.indd 17 03-07-2013 16:13:47
Cohen, Steven, et al. The Effective Public Manager : Achieving Success in Government Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1469446.
Created from ncent-ebooks on 2022-02-01 15:34:11.

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18 The Effective Public Manager

effective. The effective public manager of the twenty-fi rst century will need
to be creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial, as well as a lifelong learner.
Stability, complacency, and routine will increasingly be replaced by change,
new problems, and new solutions. We need to get used to it.

Instructor ’s Guide Resources for Chapter One

• Class Presentation (PowerPoint Slides)
• Sample Assignments
• Chapter Summary

Available at www.wiley.com/college/effectivepubmanager

c01.indd 18 03-07-2013 16:13:47
Cohen, Steven, et al. The Effective Public Manager : Achieving Success in Government Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ncent-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1469446.
Created from ncent-ebooks on 2022-02-01 15:34:11.

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PARTNERSHIP FOR PUBLIC SERVICE and SALESFORCE | OCTOBER 2018 1

Tech to Hire
Transforming Federal HR Beginning with Recruiting and Hiring

Technology has the potential to transform federal human
resources, particularly how federal agencies recruit and
hire talent. In decades to come, predictive analytics,
which uses data to predict future events, could help
identify agencies’ potential skill gaps years in advance.
Artificial intelligence could sift through hundreds of
thousands of resumes and professional networking
profiles to identify people with the right skills and
experiences. And blockchain, a ledger-like database that
stores digital transaction information across computer
networks, could speed up background checks and
security clearances, and provide traceable and verifiable
information on applicants’ backgrounds.

But those developments seem far off when assessing
where government is today. Federal hiring processes
are antiquated: It takes agencies 106 days on average
to hire new employees, according to fiscal 2017 Office
of Personnel Management data. The lengthy wait
discourages job seekers from applying for federal careers.
Meanwhile, in fiscal 2017, only 6 percent of full-time
employees were under the age of 30 compared with 45
percent aged 50 and above, and 21.9 percent of the federal
workforce was eligible to retire.

Yet agencies still rely on decades-old legacy technology
to bring new employees on board. Many agencies
have software for storing resumes and hiring-related
paperwork that does not connect with systems that
manage workers once they are hired. Others manually sift
through candidates’ applications and paperwork.

Agency representatives cite many reasons for not
upgrading their recruiting and hiring technologies,
ranging from data privacy and cybersecurity concerns
to reluctance to change current agency systems and
processes. Tight budgets factor in as well. However,
money spent on maintaining legacy technology systems
consumes more than 75 percent of IT budgets, according
to fiscal 2015 Government Accountability Office estimates.
This money might be better spent on replacing patched
and cobbled-together systems with new technology that
functions more efficiently.

As long as agencies continue to accept the technology
status quo, they will be hampered in their ability to

attract the next generation of talent. These federal job
seekers grew up with technologies at their fingertips,
and they expect to be able to use the latest methods when
applying for jobs. For example, 82 percent of people aged
18–34 would apply for a job on a smartphone, according
to a talent acquisition survey, compared with 56 percent
of respondents older than 35.1 However, USAJOBS, the
government online job portal, does not provide that
option, while many private sector companies do.

As a first step toward substantially improving the
recruiting and hiring process, agencies could follow the
lead of the federal agencies already using technologies such
as automated skills and qualifications assessments and
specialized career sites for applicants in particular fields.

Methodology

For this issue brief, the Partnership for Public Service and
Salesforce interviewed human capital and information
technology experts from six agencies, who discussed
ways government could use existing technologies more
effectively. They also discussed how they could further
improve their recruiting and hiring capabilities through
new technologies. What follows are two approaches
taken by agencies using modern technology.

1 Jibe, “2014 Talent Acquisition Survey,” September 2014, 31.
Retrieved from https:// bit.ly/2OP2znp

INTRODUCTION

2 PARTNERSHIP FOR PUBLIC SERVICE and SALESFORCE | OCTOBER 2018

The people we interviewed described several ways
technology helps them recruit and hire talent. The
Social Security Administration uses an online skills and
qualifications test to find the most qualified candidates
from among a large number of applicants. The National
Aeronautics and Space Administration created a
specialized career website to attract job seekers in
high-priority occupations.

Technology can help agencies
find the most-qualified candidates

Agencies often receive hundreds of job applications for
open positions. Not all those job seekers are qualified,
but staff still must sift through all applications, an
often overwhelming undertaking. Indeed, the most
challenging task for federal supervisors is finding skilled
candidates from among the applicants, according to a
2016 Merit Systems Protection Board survey.1

Technology can make the process easier to manage.
The Social Security Administration turned to USA Hire,
an online skills and qualifications assessment tool OPM
launched government-wide in 2012. Initially the test
was designed for only a few administrative professions.
However, OPM has since expanded it to include more
than 900 assessment types for additional job series,
occupations and skills.

Before SSA started using USA Hire, hiring managers
found it difficult to identify candidates most likely to
succeed at the organization. The agency, like many
others, was using self-assessment questionnaires and
paper exams to gauge candidates’ skills and faced the
time-consuming task of evaluating the answers. And even
after doing so, the remaining candidate pool was too large
to manage successfully. “In the past, we often had over
1,000 applications for a single vacancy and we would have
hundreds left at the end” of the assessment process, said
Adam Gower, SSA deputy associate commissioner for the
Office of Personnel.

Since 2016, SSA has been requiring applicants to
take the USA Hire online test after they apply for entry-
level positions such as social insurance specialists, or
other front-line jobs, including those at teleservice and
processing centers. The test was expanded in 2017 to
cover SSA’s most common position: claims specialist.
The new exam incorporates technological innovations
including avatars, or digital figures, to simulate situations
an employee could face.

1 Merit Systems Protection Board, “Improving Federal Hiring Through
Better Assessment,” July 2018, 1. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/2KA7ZiL

Online testing allows SSA to hire more easily for its
1,200-plus locations across the country. “We have small
offices in small towns, and we need to fill positions in each
of those locations,” Gower said. Yet with offices scattered
all over the country, “we cannot simply bring everyone
together and put them in a large room to test.” With the
online approach, job seekers can take the test where they
are located, which “improves the equality of opportunity
for those who cannot travel,” Gower added.

Additionally, most open SSA positions are at the GS-
05 to GS-07 level. Assessing the aptitude of candidates
for these entry-level jobs is challenging because they do
not have a career history that demonstrates their skills
and qualifications.

The online test is meant to help by measuring skills
such as teamwork, critical thinking and problem-solving,
which are among the skills most likely to predict success
on the job, according to a National Association of Colleges
and Employers survey.2 Testing also provides more
accuracy about candidates’ skills than when job seekers
self-report them, as they do when applying for positions
on USAJOBS. Those self-assessments are a common
concern with the federal hiring process, according to
hiring managers, because many applicants underestimate
or overestimate their qualifications. Taking a test through
USA Hire “is better than asking people if they are an
expert,” Gower said.

Once applicants take the test, the results are
automatically scored and displayed electronically. “It
allows us to do something we do not have the human
capacity to do—quickly rate hundreds or thousands of
applications,” Gower said.

The test is successful in “reducing the applicant
pool to include only the most qualified job candidates,”
according to OPM.3 SSA found that up to 20 percent of
applicants either do not take the test or do not follow
through on the entire assessment. The agency is “getting
a lot smaller group at the end of the process that are more
qualified,” Gower said, adding, “We are doing a better job
of identifying the best candidates.”

Another benefit for agencies considering USA Hire is
that it is OPM-approved. OPM’s hiring and organizational
psychology experts designed the technology to comply
with federal hiring rules, so agencies that use it have
fewer legal, security and privacy hurdles to overcome
than if they introduced a new technology. USA Hire also
is an off-the-shelf, readily available technology, making it
quicker for an agency to get the system up and running
than building an agency-specific technology from the
ground up, an option agency staff often think is the only
way to get technology that fits their needs.

2 National Association of Colleges and Employers, “Career Read-
iness Competencies: Employer Survey Results,” December 2014. Re-
trieved from https:// bit.ly/2BLjzZ4
3 Office of Personnel Management, “Assessment & Evaluation: On-
line Assessment.” Retrieved from https:// bit.ly/2vQiOZt

TWO AGENCIES MODERNIZING
THEIR RECRUITING AND
HIRING SYSTEMS

PARTNERSHIP FOR PUBLIC SERVICE and SALESFORCE | OCTOBER 2018 3

Technology can help agencies target
mission-critical talent

Too often, federal hiring managers recruit for a position
by posting a job announcement and hoping skilled job
seekers apply. NASA is one of several agencies that
have moved beyond this “post and pray” approach to
use technology to attract highly-skilled candidates for
mission-critical occupations.

The agency’s custom-built career website focuses on
featured NASA careers in a few specific fields, including
engineering, data science and information technology.
Each job category’s page is tailored for people in that
occupation and draws job seekers in by describing the
possibilities of a NASA career in that field. “If an engineer
comes to our site, they could access a page we built
specifically for engineers,” said a NASA interviewee.

To encourage engineers to imagine working at NASA,
the page describes a range of opportunities to support
NASA’s mission, such as being able to create technologies
to achieve supersonic flight on Earth or building scientific
instruments to detect water on Mars. To build a personal
connection with job seekers, each career page also
includes a video of current NASA employees sharing their
stories. The engineer page, for example, features Rubik
Sheth, who builds radiators for Orion, NASA’s next-
generation spacecraft for human space exploration.

The NASA career site complements USAJOBS by
providing more information on what NASA careers look
like across various fields. All NASA vacancies are listed on
USAJOBS, but select job categories are highlighted on the
agency’s site, with links to USAJOBS to apply. The agency’s
site is a way “to share what working at NASA is like, and
the exciting careers at our agency, as a supplement to
the kind of information you can find on USAJOBS,” said
Jane Datta, NASA deputy chief human capital officer. The
strategy seems to be working. Since the launch, traffic to
the new career site has increased significantly and has
continued to grow. The average time a user spends on
the site has also increased consistently, a factor that helps
NASA determine if the content is engaging.

NASA understood that attracting sought-after
professionals, such as those in STEM fields, requires
a message that differentiates the agency from other
employers. The new career site was part of a larger effort to
enhance NASA’s employer brand and communicate what
makes the agency stand out from its competitors, a message
that is woven throughout the website. On a page called “My
Everyday Extraordinary,” the career site conveys the message
that there are incomparable aspects to a NASA job, including
the “opportunity to work on unique and challenging projects
that truly make an impact on humanity.” Florence Tan, an
engineer featured on the page, discusses the instrument she
built to explore Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, something few
others have had the opportunity to do.

Based on SSA’s and NASA’s experiences, there are
short-term changes federal HR and IT leaders could
implement to transform their recruiting and hiring.

Federal HR and IT leaders should evaluate which steps
in the recruiting and hiring process could be automated
through technology to make the HR process quicker and
more efficient than performing it manually.

Agency leaders also should determine if they could benefit
from technologies their federal counterparts already use.
They could adopt technologies built or modified to comply
with federal rules and processes faster, and potentially at
lower cost, than building a new technology.

Finally, chief human capital officers, chief information
officers and their staff should consider how each
recruiting and hiring technology fits into the HR process.
Technologies supporting various elements of recruiting
and hiring should be connected to each other to offer a
seamless experience to job seekers and hiring managers.

With the number of retirement-eligible federal
employees increasing and the next generation of job
seekers expecting an efficient hiring process similar to
that in the private sector, agencies can no longer rely
on the outdated recruiting and hiring technologies they
have made do with for too many years.

Technology is fast becoming a foundation for managing
the workforce effectively, a process that begins with
recruiting and hiring. For example, some agencies already
use software that automatically transfers personnel
information on new employees into electronic official
personnel files to ensure a smooth onboarding process.
Such technological solutions are the start to bringing
federal human resources into the 21st century.

Improving recruiting and hiring through technology
is a first step in a technology journey that could have an
impact on every job seeker and federal employee. For
example, cloud computing improves access to data and
information regardless of where an employee works
geographically. Communication tools including chat and
instant-messaging functions help employees create a work
community and stay in touch with their agencies and one
another. Applications for mobile devices create new and
different ways to engage customers. Even cutting-edge
technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality
might one day improve the way government operates,
including “using virtual therapy to treat PTSD, educating
farmers on the installation of solar panels, or disaster
management preparedness and response,” according to
the General Services Administration’s website.

While many of these developments seem far off
when considering the government status quo, it is the

STEPS FOR GETTING STARTED

CONCLUSION

4 PARTNERSHIP FOR PUBLIC SERVICE and SALESFORCE | OCTOBER 2018

Partnership and Salesforce’s hope that this issue brief
sparks a conversation on how technology could play a
larger role in federal HR.

The individuals listed below generously offered their
input on how their agencies currently use technology in
recruiting and hiring and the road ahead for government.
We greatly appreciate their time and counsel. However,
the contents of this issue brief do not necessarily reflect
the views of those we interviewed.

Department of Energy
John Walsh
Director, Office of Talent Management

Department of Homeland Security, Federal
Emergency Management Agency
Jason Arnold
Director, Management and Organization Division,
Office of Component Chief Human Capital Officer

Department of the Treasury
Trevor Norris
Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Resources
Chief Human Capital Officer

National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Jane Datta
Deputy Assistant Administrator,
Office of Human Capital Management
Deputy Chief Human Capital Officer

Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Kristin Davis
Chief, Operations Branch

Social Security Administration
Adam Gower
Deputy Associate Commissioner, Office of Personnel

John Morenz
Chief Technology Officer

Partnership for Public Service

Mallory Barg Bulman, Vice President,
Research and Evaluation

Samantha Donaldson, Director, Communications

Peter Kamocsai, Associate Manager

Eric Keller, Senior Manager

Sebastian Leder Macek, Intern

Tim Markatos, Associate Designer

Ellen Perlman, Senior Writer and Editor

Salesforce

Dan Davis, Area Vice President,
Federal Civilian Agencies

Mike Hauser, Senior Director, Global Defense,
Security and Human Capital Management

Jon Moore, Senior Campaign Manager, Public Sector

Christopher Radich, Director, Federal Digital Strategy

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROJECT TEAM

PARTNERSHIP FOR PUBLIC SERVICE and SALESFORCE | OCTOBER 2018 5

KEY DATA POINTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

106 Days

45%

21.9%

75%

82%

on average to hire new employees

full-time federal employees under the
age of 30 in fiscal 2017

full-time federal employees aged 50 and
above in fiscal 2017

federal employees eligible to retire in
fiscal 2017

share of federal IT budgets spent on
maintaining legacy technology systems

people age 18–34 who would
apply for a job on a smartphone

Source: 2017 Office of Personnel Management data

Source: 2015 Government Accountability Office estimates

Source: 2014 Jibe survey

Short-term changes federal HR and IT
leaders can implement to transform
recruiting and hiring:

Evaluate which steps in the
recruiting and hiring process could
be automated to make the HR
process quicker and more efficient
than performing it manually.

Adopt technologies built or
modified to comply with federal
rules and processes faster, and
potentially at lower cost, than
building a new technology.

Connect technologies supporting
various elements of recruiting
and hiring to offer a seamless
experience to job seekers and
hiring managers.

SAGE CQ Press

Public Human Resource Management:
Strategies and Practices in the 21st

Century

Recruitment and Selection

By: R. Paul Battaglio Jr.

Book Title:

Public Human Resource Management: Strategies and Practices in the 21st Century

Chapter Title: “Recruitment and Selection”

Pub. Date: 2015

Access Date: February 1, 2022

Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Ltd

City: 55 City Road

Print ISBN: 9781452218236

Online ISBN: 9781483395784

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483395784.n5

Print pages: 118-149

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online

version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

javascript:void(0);

https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483395784.n5

Recruitment and Selection

Recruitment and selection

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of the chapter, you will be able to do the following:

• Discuss the legal environment of recruitment and selection in the public sector.
• Explain the difference between disparate treatment and disparate impact.
• Outline the key components of the staffing process in the public sector.
• Explain the importance of reliability and validity in selection methods.
• Discuss the role of e-recruitment in the future public service workforce.
• Evaluate the challenges to recruitment and selection in an era of PHRM reform.

Recruiting and maintaining qualified personnel are important and challenging tasks for public human resource
managers in the 21st century. As discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, the legal environment of public human
resource management (PHRM) can be complex: Legislation and court rulings necessary for ensuring non-
discrimination in the workplace can also make hiring in a timely manner a challenge. Economic downturns,
budget cutbacks, and an aging workforce have also strained the capacity of governments to recruit a qualified
workforce. In addition, many jurisdictions have embraced decentralized and deregulated elements of reform
in their staffing processes to improve efficiency and responsiveness in government. As previously noted,
decentralization gives managers more flexibility in recruitment and selection, with the aim of replacing the
centralized, rule-bound systems that exemplified traditional PHRM practices with a more agency-specific,
manager-centered system.

Diminishing public employee access to traditional dismissal-rights procedures is considered a key feature of
deregulation reform efforts. Most notably, deregulation has taken the form of employment-at-will (EAW), which
is seen as a means for increasing managerial efficiency by removing the cumbersome grievance and appeals
processes characteristic of traditional civil service systems. Efforts to curb employee rights have increased in
a number of governments (Hays and Sowa 2006; see also Bowman and West 2007; Condrey and Maranto
2001; Kellough and Nigro 2006). However, these changes have not gone unnoticed by employees, who
appear to be less than enthusiastic about them. In fact, reform has had a dramatic impact on the attitudes and
motivations of public sector personnel. Given these changes, it becomes apparent that recruiting the future
public service will be a challenge for HR directors.

This chapter begins with an assessment of the legal climate of recruitment and selection and introduces the
basics of staffing in the public sector—methods of recruitment and selection procedures. The chapter will then
turn to efforts at both the federal and state levels to remove traditional merit practices and the impact these
reforms have had on recruitment and selection.

The Legal Climate Regulating Selection and Hiring Practices

Navigating the legal environment of employment in the public sector can be difficult, warranting an
appreciation of both past and current legislation and case law. The discussion in Chapter 3 highlighted the
legal environment of PHRM, including the selection process in the public sector. In contrast to hiring in
the private or even nonprofit sector, where managers may simply hire whomever they deem fit, hiring in
the government is less straightforward. Public HR managers are more constrained in hiring decisions and
practices, and applying for government jobs can be a lengthy process due to the time it takes to authorize a
new position. Steps include securing budgetary approval, ensuring an open and fair selection process, and
ensuring con-formance to public employment law. When hiring a potential employee, public HR managers
must be cognizant not only of general practices but also of the court decisions regarding review and selection
of candidates. In particular, a key defining aspect of American public employment is the merit system and its

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emphasis on equal employment opportunity in the selection process.

Disparate Treatment and Disparate Impact

Ever since the Civil Rights Era, careful consideration has been given to upholding equal employment
opportunity in the selection process. Years of discrimination against minorities and women in the staffing
of the public sector led to the passage of sweeping civil rights legislation. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 prohibits discrimination in selection based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or protected
activity (42 U.S.C. §2000e et seq.). Title VII specifically deals with what the courts have termed disparate
treatment—intentional discrimination or mal-treatment of groups and protected classes. Not all instances of
disparate treatment are necessarily illegal. For example, there are bona fide occupational qualifications (e.g.,
gender, age) that are acceptable in specific circumstances, reviewed below. However, instances of disparate
treatment might provoke the following questions:

• Were people of one race, color, religion, sex, or national origin treated differently than people of
another category?

• Is there any evidence of bias, such as discriminatory statements?
• What is the employer’s reason for the difference in treatment?
• Does the evidence show that the employer’s reason for the difference in treatment is untrue and that

the real reason for the different treatment is race, color, religion, sex, or national origin? (US Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission [EEOC] 2010).

The answers to these questions will provide guidance in determining whether disparate treatment has
occurred and an EEOC inquiry is warranted. Disparate treatment is suspected when the evidence suggests
intentional discrimination on the part of the employer. For example, if a minority job applicant was more
qualified than a white candidate but was denied employment because the hiring manager disliked people of
that ethnic group, or a minority employee was passed over for a promotion despite being more qualified than
a white employee, then that person has suffered from disparate treatment. He or she has been intentionally
discriminated against because of race, a protected class under Title VII. Such treatment is illegal.

Toward the end of the 1960s, however, it became apparent that the persistence of discrimination in the
workplace was more pervasive than evidence of intentional discrimination would indicate. Recall our
discussion in Chapter 4 of the landmark Supreme Court decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), which
took up the issue of pervasive discrimination in selection practices. At issue in the case was the promotion
policy at Duke Power Company in North Carolina, which required a high school diploma for job advancement.
Given the practice of school segregation in the South at the time, a disproportionate number of African
Americans did not complete high school. The plaintiffs argued that the promotion policy indirectly excluded
African Americans from higher-paying jobs since they disproportionately lacked the required education. In
the Griggs ruling, the Court said that Title VII prohibited employers from using selection procedures that
disproportionately excluded protected classes, where such procedures are not “job-related and consistent
with business necessity” (EEOC 2010). Thus, selection procedures that might appear to be neutral (e.g.,
requiring a high school diploma) are not necessarily legal; unequal or disproportionate consequences of such
procedures may have an adverse or disparate impact on protected groups. An unintentional consequence
of requiring a high school diploma at Duke Power Company was the disproportionate exclusion of African
Americans from promotion. The EEOC has offered some selection procedure questions that might lead one
to conclude an employment practice has a disparate impact:

• Does the employer use a particular employment practice that has a disparate impact on individuals
of a certain race, color, religion, sex, or national origin? For example, if an employer requires
that all applicants pass a physical agility test, does the test disproportionately screen out women?
Determining whether a test or other selection procedure has a disparate impact on a particular group
ordinarily requires a statistical analysis.

• If the selection procedure has a disparate impact based on race, color, religion, sex, or national
origin, can the employer show that the selection procedure is job-related and consistent with
business necessity? An employer can meet this standard by showing that meeting the selection
criterion is necessary to perform the job safely and efficiently. The challenged policy or practice must

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evaluate an individual’s skills as they relate to the job in question.
• If the employer shows that the selection procedure is job related and consistent with business

necessity, can the person challenging the selection procedure demonstrate that a less discriminatory
alternative is available? For example, would another test be equally effective in predicting job
performance but not disproportionately exclude the protected group? (EEOC 2010)

While not due to a malicious intent to discriminate, disparate impact still results in discrimination and is
therefore undesirable and illegal.

Applying Strict Scrutiny

Unfortunately, the Griggs decision did not settle all of the legal issues surrounding selection procedures,
and by the 1980s, several cases that challenged Griggs came before the Supreme Court. In Wards Cove v.
Antonio (1989) and City of Richmond v.J. A. Croson Co. (1989), the Court contradicted the decision laid out
in Griggs, specifying that selection procedures would be subject to strict scrutiny. In WardsCove, the Court
looked at alleged discriminatory hiring practices in a salmon can-nery operation where a large proportion
of the skilled jobs were held by whites and a large share of the unskilled jobs were held by nonwhites. A
lower court sided with the company, but then the US Appeals Court ruled that the plaintiffs had demonstrated
statistical evidence of discriminatory hiring practices. However, the Supreme Court overruled the appeals
court, citing an error in the statistical methodology used. The Court determined that to establish discrimination,
plaintiffs must do more than show the proportion of whites and nonwhites in the relevant jobs. Instead,
evidence must include a comparison of the racial composition of the work-force in the jobs at issue to the
composition of the qualified and relevant labor pool (Wards Cove 1989). In other words, just because there
are more whites than non-whites in a job does not indicate discrimination; it must be demonstrated using
established methodologies.

In the Richmond case, the Supreme Court ruled that minority set-aside programs (a form of affirmative action)
established by the city of Richmond, Virginia, were unconstitutional. Under the programs, the city showed
preference to minority-owned businesses when awarding contracts. The Court ruled that such programs must
demonstrate a need for remedial action and that no other, nondiscriminatory remedies are applicable (City
of Richmond 1989). These rulings were further refined by the strict scrutiny standard in Adarand Contractors
Inc. v. Peña (1995), which entails more rigorous assessment of selection procedures implemented under affir-
mation action programs. There must be a “compelling government interest” in rem-edying prior discriminatory
practices, and the remedy must be “narrowly tailored” so as not to infringe upon the rights of nonprotected
groups.

While several of the cases cited here deal explicitly with affirmative action efforts (see Chapter 4), they also
bear on selection procedures in general. Specifically, examinations and other selection procedures should
be properly validated for the positions and purposes for which they are used (EEOC 2010). This point was
reinforced in the decision in Ricci v. DeStefano (2009)(a case involving the New Haven, Connecticut, fire
department’s promotion tests. In an effort to avoid legal action, the department disregarded the results of
the examination because African Americans who passed the test did not score high enough to warrant
promotion. The Supreme Court ruled that concern about potential litigation alone is not sufficient grounds to
avoid disparate impact.

The lesson for public HR managers is to know the law applicable to recruitment and selection. The courts
give careful consideration to equal employment when considering cases where disparate treatment and/or
disparate impact are alleged. Selection procedures must be job related and necessary for the proper function
of government.

Recruitment for Public Service

Today’s PHRM climate means that employers must use novel methods to successfully recruit employees.
Economic downturns, budget cutbacks, demographic changes, and baby boomer retirements have
necessitated greater attention to efficient and effective recruitment and selection processes that promote a

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performance-driven and productive public service (Choudhury 2007; Llorens and Battaglio 2010; National
Academy of Public Administration 2001; Partnership for Public Service and Grant Thornton 2007; US Merit
Systems Protection Board 2006; Voinovich 2000). The baby boomer generation is nearing retirement age, so
a large portion of government staff will soon exit public service, leaving many positions empty. Thus, public
HR managers must use as many innovative recruitment techniques as possible to ensure a large pool of high-
quality applicants. Reforms such as decentralization and deregulation have been implemented to improve the
efficiency of this recruitment and selection.

Move to Decentralized Recruitment

Traditionally, recruitment was carried out by a central personnel office that was the sole authority for
determining and meeting workforce needs. For example, a personnel office in a state capital might decide how
and where to recruit for a regional office or some other division or location across the state. Decentralization
efforts in the 1990s, however, challenged the conventional wisdom of using central personnel offices in
recruitment. Critics of a centralized approach cited the additional time, effort, and paperwork needed to
overcome the distances between a central office and the locations it managed. These inefficiencies were seen
as detrimental to managerial prerogatives to hire the best and brightest. Allowing agency managers at the
street level to handle recruitment and selection was deemed more efficient, since those managers were more
familiar with the staffing situations in their own divisions or offices and could better evaluate their personnel
needs; distant personnel offices overseeing recruitment for thousands of applicants government-wide were ill-
equipped to make such assessments. Thus, over the last two decades, agency-level HR directors have been
given greater leeway and control over personnel decisions (e.g., selection) and have become the primary
points of contact for recruitment efforts.

Recruitment Methods

Recruitment methods have also changed over the last few decades. Traditional methods have included
sending recruiters to job fairs or colleges, posting job vacancies in agency hallways, buying advertisements
at local media outlets (newspapers or radio), establishing relationships with college career placement offices,
and relying on word of mouth (Llorens 2011, 412).

However Llorens (2011) noted that many jurisdictions are increasingly pursuing recruitment strategies that
take advantage of advances in information technology—a tool vital for meeting workforce needs as the
population becomes increasingly techno-logically savvy. Such e-recruitment efforts involve the use of various
online or electronic resources. A number of governments have gone a step further by adopting Web 2.0
technologies and using third-party e-recruitment networks. Web 2.0 technology includes blogs, where users
compose personal posts on various interests; wikis (e.g., Wikipedia), where groups compose and edit
knowledge on a variety of subjects in a structured manner; social networking sites (e.g., Facebook and
LinkedIn), where people create and update personal and professional profiles; social bookmarking applica-
tions (e.g., del.icio.us), where people identify websites of interest or “favorites”; and microblogs (e.g., Twitter),
where people post brief, public messages (Dixon 2010, 423).

The most common examples of e-recruitment tactics are posting job vacancies on agency or government
websites and advertising vacancy information on sites such as Facebook and Twitter. For example, the
website USAJOBS.gov is the official source for federal jobs; it is a central warehouse where individuals can
access hundreds of federal job listings, as well as apply for those jobs directly online. Many states have similar
websites listing available positions in the state government. USAJOBS.gov also has a YouTube channel that
features dozens of videos of public employees working in their office environments and talking about what
they do and how they serve the public, as well as practical videos on how the federal government’s recruiting
process works. Another example of e-recruiting is holding virtual job fairs over the Internet; candidates have
the opportunity to interact with potential employers without leaving home (Llorens 2011, 413). Skype, which
enables free video conference calls over the Internet, allows job candidates to be interviewed online instead
of physically visiting an office.

These advances have fundamentally changed recruiting processes, as HR offices can now gather and

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disseminate information much more quickly, as well as reach many more potentially qualified applicants.
Moreover, Internet-based selection methods offer significant cost savings.

Nonprofits in Focus: Recruiting Online Volunteers

Recruitment and selection in the information age has proven to be a powerful component of public sector
employment (Llorens 2011; Llorens and Kellough 2007). Web-based applications are especially important for
NPOs, which often have constrained budgets and can take advantage of the efficiencies the Internet provides.
Although many NPOs rely heavily on volunteers, they must be as savvy in their selection of volunteers as of
paid employees. NPOs have important objectives and need the right people to achieve them. Indeed, NPO
recruiters have been quick to adopt web-based tools to recruit and select the next generation of volunteers
(Dhebar and Stokes 2008).

So, how can on-governmental human resource managers utilize web-based applications to benefit their
organizations? According to Dhebar and Stokes (2008), NGOs have begun to use the Internet to recruit a new
cadre of volunteers who are eager to lend a hand from home as opposed to providing services on-site. Online
volunteering allows those who may not have considered volunteering—perhaps due to remote geography or
a physical disability— an avenue for contributing to NGO missions. Dhebar and Stokes suggested that careful
planning, communicating, monitoring, and giving feedback are the most important components of effective
use of online volunteering. Here are several timely online volunteering lessons offered by Dhebar and Stokes
(2008):

Lesson 1: Plan with Clarity

• Clearly articulate your strategic basis for pursuing online volunteers.
• Define assignments fully before beginning recruitment.
• Keep assignments clear and product focused.
• Limit assignments in duration and intensity.

Lesson 2: Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

• Seek matching services that specialize in volunteers with profiles of interest to your organization.
• Determine the screening mechanism at your matching service. If the service does not have an

adequate screening mechanism, be prepared to introduce one yourself.
• Phrase the assignment posting to clearly connect the work to its impact on your organization’s goals

and programs.
• Date assignment requests so potential volunteers know how long the assignment has been posted.
• Request that filled assignments be pulled (or marked as “filled”) to reduce the number of late

applications.
• Timely communication is key. Be sure to check email daily and keep volunteers up to speed with new

developments.
• Be prepared to provide clear and specific feedback in a timely manner, informing volunteers of their

assignments.

Lesson 3: Monitor and Learn from Results

• Monitor volunteers’ performance and provide regular, informal feedback, detailing how well
volunteers performed.

• Maintain data on assignment completion and retention rates and review the data periodically.
• Prepare a standard evaluation form for all volunteers to respond to when they end their assignments.
• Dhebar and Stokes also provide a number of useful electronic resources for facilitating online

volunteering:
◦ http://www.idealist.org—Idealist’s volunteer board lists international volunteer opportunities.
◦ http://www.mentornet.net—MentorNet’s e-mentoring service connects students

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http://www.idealist.org%E2%80%94Idealist’s

http://www.mentornet.net%E2%80%94MentorNet’s

(undergraduate, graduate, doctoral) and faculty in science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics careers with potential mentors.

◦ http://www.onlinevolunteering.org—UN Volunteers, sponsored by the United Nations,
promotes networking between development organizations and volunteers.

◦ http://www.serviceleader.org/vv/—Sponsored by the Center for Philanthropy and
Community Service at the University of Texas at Austin, ServiceLeader.org provides
resources for organizations looking to use technology in volunteer management.

◦ http://www.volunteermatch.org—VolunteerMatch.org encourages civic engagement among
the nonprofit, volunteer, and business communities in the United States.

In an NPO setting, employees are often paid below market, and volunteers are not compensated. Therefore,
these practices will help to ensure high morale and good performance. These suggestions can easily be
applied in a public sector setting as well.

Preemployment Screening Practices

While the potential for e-recruitment efforts is limitless, the extent to which e-recruitment has effectively
reached underrepresented groups (e.g., minorities) is still unclear (Cober et al. 2000; Kim and O’Connor 2009;
Llorens and Kellough 2007; West and Berman 2001). Consequently, public HR managers, and everyone
involved in the recruitment and selection processes, should be mindful of technology’s potential to introduce
disparate treatment and disparate impact into preemployment and employment. Public HR managers need
a thorough understanding of what recruitment and selection practices are acceptable and what practices are
illegal. Table 5.1 reviews considerations such as race, creed, and national origin, as well as information that
is often solicited by application forms, in terms of what an employer may legally ask an interviewee. For each
factor, the table includes examples of both acceptable and illegal questions.

Table 5.1 Acceptable and Illegal Employment-Screening Questions
Subject Acceptable Questions Illegal Questions

Name
What is your full name? Do you have relevant
work experience while using another name?

What part of the world is your name from? Have
you ever changed your name? Do you prefer to
be called Mr., Ms., or Mrs?

Residence What is your full address?

How long have you lived at your current
address? If you have lived in a foreign country,
what was your address there? With whom do
you reside? Do you rent or own your home?
(Exceptions may exist in jurisdictions that have
residency requirements.)

Race, creed,
national origin

Are you legally able to work in the United
States? Whom would you like to be notified in
the event of an emergency? What languages
do you speak or write fluently (if foreign
language fluency is job related)? Are you a
member of a trade organization that
represents your profession?

What is your race? What political organizations
do you belong to? What country does your
family come from? Where are you a citizen?
What is your previous foreign address? What is
your birthplace? What is the name of a relative
to be notified in case of emergency? What is
your native language?
(Exceptions: Information on race and national
origin may be solicited on a form kept separate
from the application.
A bona fide occupational qualification [BFOQ]
may apply to national origin, e.g., if a casting
agent seeks an Italian to play an Italian
character in a movie.)

Sex, marital
status

Do you have relevant work experience you
gained while using another name? Can you
meet the work schedule for this job?

Are you male or female? What is your maiden
name? Have you changed your name? What
is your sexual orientation? Are you married?

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http://www.onlinevolunteering.org%E2%80%94UN

http://www.serviceleader.org/vv/

http://serviceleader.org/

http://www.volunteermatch.org/

http://volunteermatch.org/

Are you pregnant? How many children do you
have? Do you have child care? Do you plan on
having any more children?
(Exceptions: A person’s sex may be requested
on a form kept separate from the application.
A BFOQ exception may apply to sex.

Age
Can you submit proof of legal age to work
upon employment? Are you at least 18 years
old?

What is your age? When were you born?

(A BFOQ exception may apply.)

Health and
physical
characteristics

Is there any reason you would not be able to
perform the responsibilities and tasks of this
position? Can you perform the essential job
functions?

Do you have any disabilities? Have you had
certain diseases? What is your height? What
is your weight? Have you ever filed a workers’
compensation claim?

Can you perform the job tasks with or without
accommodations

Religion Can you meet the work schedule for this job?
What is your religious affiliation? What religious
holidays do you observe? Of what groups are
you a member?
(A BFOQ exception may apply for a religious
organization, [e.g., religious nonprofit].)

Education

What academic, vocational, or professional
institutions have you attended? What were
your areas of study? Degrees earned?
Diplomas or certificates awarded?

Is the college you attended a historically black
college? What was your grade point average or
class rank? What were your dates of enrollment
(to elicit age)?

Financial
status

What are your salary requirements?
What is your credit rating? Do you have any
garnishments, debts, or other liabilities? What
are your assets?

Criminal
record

Have you been convicted of a crime related
to the duties and responsibilities of this
position?

Have you been arrested? Have you been
convicted of any crime?

Military
service

What was your occupation while in military
service? Did you receive training related to
this job? In what arm or branch of the military
did you serve? When were you discharged?
What was your rank?

Have you been dishonorably discharged from
the military? What was the type of discharge?
What were your years of service (to elicit age)?

Experience

What is your work experience, including
names and addresses of previous employers
and dates worked? What type of position did
you hold? What was your reason for leaving?
What is your salary history?

Inquiries that focus on experience not required
for the job.

Sources: Adapted from Buford and Lindner 2002, 192–93; Witt and Patton 2004, 50.

Employers may consider residence when the agency has a residency requirement (e.g., some public safety or
law enforcement agencies require new hires to live within the city limits). Employers may also ask an applicant
to provide information on race, creed, and national origin for purposes of record keeping, especially for EEOC
purposes. However, the records with this information must be kept separate from the application process.
While the employer can ask whether an applicant can work the job’s scheduled hours, the employer may not
ask the applicant for information about personal or family arrangements. Age and physical abilities may be
considered only insofar as they bear on the applicant’s ability to perform essential responsibilities and tasks
of the position. Salary requirements are a permissible consideration, but an applicant’s financial situation or
history is not. Convictions for a crime related to the duties and responsibilities of the position are job related
and may be inquired about, but other convictions may not.

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The hiring manager may ask certain job-related questions about military service. Moreover, veterans may
be entitled to preferences in appointments and exemptions from reductions in force in accordance with the
Veterans’ Preference Act of 1944 and Title V of the US Code (US Office of Personnel Management [OPM]
2013). These veterans preferences in hiring may vary from state to state, so HR managers in state or local
governments should consult the hiring practices of their jurisdictions.

Needless to say, interviewing and recruiting candidates for jobs in public service can be challenging. Merit and
nondiscrimination policies in public employment, while time-consuming, ensure an effective and fair selection
process. The primary organizing purpose for setting out such specific parameters for what may and may not
be considered in the hiring process is to ensure job-relatedness with respect to the position being advertised.
Any inquiries that focus on a characteristic or an experience not relevant to the job are not permissible.

Bona fide occupational qualifications (BFOQ) are the exception. If an employer can demonstrate that a
particular protected-class characteristic (e.g., being older) is a BFOQ for the job in question, the usually
discriminatory practice (e.g., asking an applicant how old he or she is) is legal (Walsh 2007, 184). Many of
the factors listed in Table 5.1 may fall under the BFOQ exception. For example, mandatory retirement ages
for pilots or bus drivers are not considered to be age discrimination and are permissible for public safety
purposes; good eyesight is necessary for these jobs, and eyesight deteriorates with age. An BFOQ may also
be involved when an applicant’s religious affiliation is reasonably necessary for an organization’s function. For
example, Catholic institutions or universities may require executive officers (i.e., presidents, chaplains, faculty
members) be members of the Catholic Church. Such a religious requirement is generally not considered
necessary for custodial or clerical positions, however. It should be noted that considering race and color is
never per-missible; there is no BFOQ for these characteristics (Walsh 2007, 184).

Selection Procedures

The goal of recruitment and selection is to fill the ranks of the public service with a qualified
workforce—locating candidates and identifying the best person for the job. It is necessary for human resource
managers to be apprised of future workforce needs so that they can make sound decisions about current
staffing. While Chapter 12 covers the topic of HR strategy in detail, the topic deserves attention here, given
its link with selection. Strategic HR planning should determine the appropriate knowledge, skills, and abilities
required for each position. This discovery phase is crucial to job analysis—the crux of any classification
system in the public sector— which is discussed further Chapter 6. A proper job description makes identifying
potential candidates a much easier task.

There are several methods for reviewing candidate applications and winnowing down the group to a list of
qualified applicants. Determining the appropriate method is crucial not only to select the best person for the
job but, as noted above, to comply with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Therefore, a review of the range of
potential screening tools, followed by a discussion of how to choose the most appropriate tools, will be useful.

Selection methods generally focus on one of three functional bases: the individual, simulation, and
examination. Table 5.2 provides an overview of the three groupings of selection procedures and the
advantages and disadvantages of each.

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Table 5.2 Types of Selection Procedures

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Individual-Based Selection Procedures

The most commonly employed selection methods are individual based, involving the evaluation of
biographical data and the more formal interview (Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology
[SIOP] 2012b). Biographical data include a wide assortment of information, including the applicant’s skills,
leadership abilities, job-related knowledge (such as information technology expertise), and interpersonal
skills. Biographical data may also include the candidate’s education, job experience, and interests—items
typically identified in a résumé or curriculum vitae. Interviews are used to gain greater insight into a candidate
beyond what can be learned through biographical data alone. Interviews may take place face-to-face, over
the telephone, or via video on the Internet (e.g., Skype, Adobe Connect, Google Hangouts). Job-specific
questions should be developed with the goal of assessing candidate expertise. It is during the interview that
an HR manager might ask about the factors listed in Table 5.1, as they relate to the job.

Simulation-Based Selection Procedures

Simulation-based selection procedures include assessment centers, work samples, and physical ability tests
(SIOP 2012b). Assessment centers are generally designed to assess interpersonal skills, communication
skills, planning and organizing skills, and analytical skills. The candidate is put through a series of “real-
life” scenarios during which the hiring agency observes and assesses the person’s ability to perform job-
related tasks. Examples include coordinating a staff meeting, processing paperwork, dealing with a problem
employee, or communicating with a client. Employers may either coordinate assessment center activities in-
house or contract with a professional consultant. Typically, assessment centers are staffed by raters who are
adept at analyzing candidate behaviors as well as skill sets.

Like assessment centers, work-sample exercises assess job-related requirements. However, they focus on
more mundane organizational tasks such as writing a memo or entering data on a computer.

For jobs that demand more strenuous activity, physical ability tests may be used to ensure that the applicant
is capable of performing the tasks of the job. Often utilized by law enforcement or other public safety
organizations, physical tests might assess a candidate’s ability to perform activities related to strength,
dexterity, or endurance. Police officers and firefighters are often required to complete periodic physical exams
so that their ability to carry out the demanding aspects of their jobs can be evaluated.

Examination-Based Selection Procedures

Examination-based selection methods use written tests to assess job-related knowledge, skills, and abilities.
They include job knowledge tests, cognitive ability tests, integrity tests, and personality tests (SIOP 2012b).
Job knowledge tests, the most straightforward of the examination-based tests, assess candidates’ knowledge
in a number of job-related areas such as computer programing or public budgeting. For example, you might
be interested in whether or not a budgeting candidate is knowledgeable about specific accounting methods
that can be used to put together a budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

Cognitive ability tests seek to establish a candidate’s aptitude for the job based on a number of verbal,
mathematical, and analytical questions. Such assessments test higher-order analytical skills and hope to
determine a candidate’s critical thinking and reading comprehension abilities.

Integrity tests are used to evaluate a candidate’s ethical compass. Factors that might be evaluated include an
individual’s capacity for honesty, dependability, trust-worthiness, reliability, and sociability. Such assessments
are particularly useful for law enforcement and public safety agencies that require confidentiality and loyalty
in certain jobs; for example, a district attorney must be able to handle sensitive and confidential information
that is shared during a criminal case, or a police officer must be willing to report bribery or other wrongdoing.

Similarly, personality tests are employed to assess a person’s proclivity toward assertiveness, ability to handle
stress, emotional stability, and service orientation. Like the previous methods, personality tests aspire to
predict a future candidate’s success on the job.

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Using Selection Procedures

Which method is appropriate for the organization may depend on the type of opening (supervisory or
nonsupervisory), the number of openings, the potential applicant pool (labor market), and the factors raised
in Table 5.2. Generally speaking, when assessing on-the-job skills, simulation-based methods are preferred,
while assessing job knowledge requires an examination-based method. Individual-based methods are used
to review biographical information (e.g., résumés). The public sector HR managers must consider some
additional factors when deciding to implement any of the selection methods.

First, several of the selection methods may be vulnerable to race or gender bias. Recall from our review of
the Griggs decision in Chapter 4 that education alone was not an adequate criterion for promotion, especially
given the history of discrimination in education against African Americans in the South. Therefore, great care
should be taken to remedy any issues that may result from race or gender bias embedded in the selection
method. In fact, recent court decisions (e.g., Ricci v. DeStefano 2009)have stressed the importance of using
empirical evidence to show that a selection procedure is not biased. In this regard, evaluating the reliability
and validity of any method used is important to ensure that it is statistically sound (this will be discussed
further in the next section).

Many of the selection methods are labor and time intensive, requiring resources to adequately implement.
For financially strapped public sector agencies, cost-effectiveness may be an overriding criterion. Weighing
the costs and benefits of the appropriate selection methods is difficult, especially when public HR managers
must also take into account constitutional and public values. For example, while one method may be less
time-consuming to administer, it may not stand up to legal scrutiny as well as an alternative method would.
Finally, other aptitudes besides knowledge, skills, and abilities may also be useful to consider in the selection
process. Recent scholarship (Guy and Newman 2004; Guy Newman, and Mastracci 2008) suggests that
emotional capacity—caring, negotiating, empathizing, relationship building—may also be an important aspect
of job performance. Personality tests, such as those that assess a person’s emotional quotient, may be useful
when hiring for nursing or social worker positions, for example, which require regular, sensitive contact with
other people.

Assessing Reliability and Validity of Selection Procedures

As mentioned in the previous section, HR managers in the public sector need to ensure that a selection
method shows validity and reliability.

Instrument reliability is more easily measured than validity, but it is by no means an acceptable substitute for
validity. Reliability simply represents the stability and consistency of a selection procedure. For example, we
would expect an individual’s results on a reliable selection examination to be roughly the same each time that
individual takes the test. However, validity—a much more statistically rigorous method—is a more important
tool for assessing adverse impact and job-relatedness.

Validity is concerned with inferences or judgments that may be built into the instrument and its ability to predict
performance on the job (OPM 2012a). Demonstrating validity is not only important for selecting qualified
applicants but also for maintaining a selection process that protects against EEO liability (Shafritz et al. 2001).

An assertation that a selection instrument is valid must be based on solid empirical evidence. This point is
made clear by the EEOC:

Under no circumstances will the general reputation of a test or other selection procedures, its author or its
publisher, or casual reports of its validity be accepted in lieu of evidence of validity. Specifically ruled out
are: assumptions of validity based on a procedure’s name or descriptive labels; all forms of promotional
literature; data bearing on the frequency of a procedure’s usage; testimonial statements and credentials
of sellers, users, or consultants; and other non-empirical or anecdotal accounts of selection practices or
selection outcomes. (Biddle Consulting Group 2012)

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Evidence for the validity of selection procedures can come in several forms. Content validity demonstrates
that a particular selection method (e.g., interview, biographical data such as education) measures the
knowledge or skills that are critical to performance in a particular job.

Empirical validation (or criterion-related validity) goes a step further, demonstrating that selection tools are
statistically significant predictors of performance on the job. For example, we would be interested in validating
whether or not the selection metrics used to hire a new employee are predictive of their scores on annual
performance evaluations. (If an applicant is successful in passing a test and then is hired, is she also
successful in her performance on the job? If not, then the test may not be testing the right factors or criteria.)
Such predictive validity of the selection procedure is desirable given its reliance on statistical analysis (Shafritz
et al. 2001). Comparing the predictive power of one instrument to that of another leads to a higher predictive
validity for a selection procedure (OPM 2012a). In other words, trial and error is a positive approach to building
a more effective selection process.

Many jurisdictions have moved away from written tests as a method of selection. Cases concerning
examinations, such as Ricci and the Luevano consent decree, have heightened fears that improperly
used written tests will have adverse impact. The Luevano decree, which resolved a class-action suit that
was filed in 1979, is now known as Angel G. Luevano, et al., v. Janice R. Lachance, Director, Office of
PersonnelManagement, et al. The plaintiffs alleged that the Professional and Administrative Career Exam
(PACE), which the government had been using to fill about 120 occupations at the GS-5 and GS-7 levels,
had an adverse impact on the employment of African Americans and Hispanics for reasons that were not job
related (OPM 2012b). To avoid the courts, the federal government established a consent decree eliminating
the PACE exam and promoting programs that would enhance diversity among underrepresented groups. As
a result, content validity—measuring whether the content used in the selection procedure aligns with the
content necessary for the doing the job—is a justifiable criterion for choosing a selection measure (SIOP
2012a). Examining a selection procedure’s content validity requires demonstrating the relationship between
the selection procedure and job-related work behaviors, critical tasks, requirements, or outcomes. When
public sector HR selection practices emphasize knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs), content validation is
important evidentiary support for the instrument being employed.

Showing that a particular selection procedure assesses critical job-related characteristics and predicts
performance in that job is crucial to the validation process (Goldstein Zedeck, and Schneider 1993; SIOP
2012a). For public HR managers, sound practice is to measure both the reliability and validity of selection
procedures.

Employee Recruitment and Selection in an Era of PHRM Reform

Recall from our discussion in Chapter 1 that decentralization of PHRM is a significant component of recent
reform efforts (Coggburn 2000; Kettl 2000; Thompson 2001). In a move to enhance responsiveness and
efficiency, decentralization efforts have transferred the responsibility for selection and recruitment functions
within public agencies to frontline managers. The goal is to replace the perceived intracta-bility of centralized,
rule-bound systems and traditional PHRM practices with more agency-specific, manager-centered systems.
During the 1990s, reforms in selection and recruitment spearheaded by the Clinton administration’s efforts
under the National Performance Review (NPR) led to the elimination of the Federal PersonnelManual and
enactment of the Federal Workforce Restructuring Act in 1994 (Naff and Newman 2004). The personnel
manual stipulated a lengthy centralized approach to selection that focused on following strict hiring guidelines.
The Clinton administration’s reform efforts provided agency managers with greater leeway in personnel
decisions. The 1994 act provided federal agencies with greater authority not only over hiring but also over
reductions in force. Advances in technology (e.g., e-recruitment) have also streamlined the recruitment and
selection process over the last two decades.

Initiatives at the federal level have continued the impetus for deregulation and decentralization in recruitment
and selection processes, especially by means of online tools. As noted earlier, federal agencies leverage
USAJOBS to recruit a qualified applicant pool. Further, legislative exemption from Title V of the US Code has
provided many agencies the ability to develop more flexible systems (Woodard 2005, 113). Instead of having
to use the traditional methods of outlined in the Federal Personnel Manual, federal agencies may employ

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a variety of e-recruitment mechanisms specifically suited to their hiring needs. For example, the US Peace
Corps has moved away from sending representatives to job fairs to leveraging social media (e.g., Facebook,
Twitter), thereby reaching a new generation of candidates (Llorens 2011).

State governments have also decentralized decision making, investing it in agencies (Selden Ingraham, and
Jacobson 2001). For example, many states have restructured their central personnel offices into consulting
organizations that then aid agencies in their personnel decisions. The state of South Carolina did away
with its central personnel office as part of a larger government reform effort in 1993 in order to afford state
agencies greater authority over hiring, transfers, pay, and discipline. The former central personnel office was
streamlined and remade as a consulting body for agency HR managers (Hays Byrd, and Wilkins 2006).

Hou et al. (2000) asserted that decentralization at the state level has increased the support, planning,
and supervision responsibilities required of central state personnel offices due to the greater need for
coordination among subdivisions. Thus, while decentralization may be more efficient at the agency level,
Hou’s research suggests that there are other consequences and that a better balance between centralization
and decentralization may need to be found (see Selden and Wooters 2011).

In fact, over the last decade, decentralization has not proven an unmitigated success, and governments have
had to find other solutions. Shared services, a blending of both centralized and decentralized approaches
to PHRM, may be a viable alternative. Governments electing a shared service approach reap both the
efficiencies of centralized rule making and the flexibility of agency-tailored recruitment and selection. For
example, the state of Washington embarked on a shared services initiative in 2009 that established a human
resource management system (HRMS) that allows employees to access personal data and request leave
time (State of Washington, Department of Human Resources 2011).

Privatization has also influenced public sector recruitment and selection. At the federal level, the Competitive
Sourcing Initiative (CSI), implemented in 2001 under the administration of George W. Bush, has encouraged
greater reliance on the private sector. USAJOBS is one example of the federal government’s outsourcing
the operation and management of its workforce recruitment system to a private firm (Llorens and Kellough
2007; Shafritz Russell, and Borick 2007, 423). A variety of privatization initiatives at the state level have also
influenced recruitment and selection functions. The firm Convergys, based in Cincinnati, Ohio, operates a
number of personnel functions that have been awarded to the firm by the states of Florida and Texas (see
Battaglio and Condrey 2006; Coggburn 2007; Condrey and Battaglio 2007). In the case of Florida, Convergys
was awarded a $350 million, nine-year contract to administer many transaction and process functions related
to HR, benefits, payroll, and staffing (Battaglio and Condrey 2006, 31–32). In Texas, Convergys was awarded
an $85 million, five-year contract with the state Health and Human Service Commission to provide many
HR-related functions such as performance management, recruitment and selection, benefits, payroll, and
compensation and classification administration (Coggburn 2007, 319).

Like decentralization, privatization has not been the panacea proponents touted it as. In the case of Florida,
HR privatization initiatives proved more costly and time-consuming than initially anticipated. Operational
problems included employees failing to receive pay and being dropped from their health insurance. For public
HR managers, the lesson is clear: before pursing privatization of personnel functions, the costs and benefits
must be weighed very carefully.

Decentralization and privatization efforts, as well as other reforms such as EAW, have the potential to
exacerbate recruitment and retention problems (Battaglio 2010; Battaglio and Condrey 2009; Coggburn et al.
2010; Condrey and Battaglio 2007). In an EAW setting, job security is no longer a viable recruitment incentive
for public sector employment. Consequently, HR directors and public managers will need to learn novel
methods for marketing public sector employment, as well as motivating and retaining employees. The federal
government, for example, has authorized agencies to employ student loan repayment incentives to recruit
younger employees carrying ever-increasing levels of educational debt (OPM 2008). Web 2.0 technologies
will also be vital for reaching the next generation of public service employees.

Decentralization has caused friction because of its failure to provide uniform guidelines. This is especially true
for smaller jurisdictions that lack the resources to embed HR functions within each agency. Shared service

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models that provide both uniformity and flexibility in the delivery of HR functions may be a viable alternative
to decentralization alone. Privatization is clearly troublesome for maintaining morale, as the process entails
replacing public employees with private contractors. (The issue of motivation in the public service is discussed
at length in Chapter 8.) Declassification methods such as salary broadbanding have also been used as
recruitment strategies; broad pay scales that allow hiring managers to offer higher starting salaries to potential
employees are an attractive tool. Unfortunately, broad-banding has the potential to create pay inequities,
because new employees may make more than senior staff. Performance-based pay, which promises bonuses
to employees as a reward for productive behavior, has also been used as a recruitment strategy. Such bonus
mechanisms, however, have often been underfunded and deficient (as discussed in greater detail in Chapter
6), thus thwarting the recruitment strategies behind them.

Conclusion

In the face of budget shortfalls and economic uncertainty, many governments have opted to reform their HR
functions in a bid to make their jurisdictions leaner. Therefore, public HR directors must be adept at selecting
the recruitment and selection procedures that garner the largest pool of qualified applicants for the respective
job. HR directors face the challenge of balancing efficiency, cost, and fairness in their recruiting tactics. For
example, some selection procedures may be more cost-effective but also carry a risk of race bias. The pursuit
of firm legal footing is no small task, and HR managers need access to the right tools for recruitment and
selection as well as a knowledge of the legal framework for implementing such procedures.

The Ricci v. DeStefano (2009)(case raises a number of questions for both public and private sector employers
to consider. According to Peffer (2009), employers in both sectors will be hard-pressed to prevail in Title VII
disparate treatment lawsuits. Employers will need to demonstrate solid evidentiary support for any decision
to remedy past discrimination or ameliorate disparate impact. Peffer concluded that the Supreme Court
unfortunately provides little guidance to assist employers in assembling such evidence. Even when employers
are able to demonstrate job-relatedness or business necessity for selection practices, plaintiffs may prevail if
they are able to provide evidence of viable alternatives that would have diminished the impact on minorities
(408). According to Peffer, the Ricci decision poses a dilemma for employers:

When employers reject employment practices or procedures such as examinations as a result of reasonable
doubts about their reliability (disparate impact), they can be held to have engaged in discrimination because of
race (disparate treatment). Again, the employer is left with little direction in how to overcome this conundrum.
(409)

The lesson for employers is that they must continually review and validate their selection procedures to
ensure that they are fair and job related. Moreover, employers should make every effort to explore all
alternatives to identify those that have the least impact on minority and other protected-class applicants.

In addition, given the expanded possibilities in the information age, public HR managers will be tasked with
assessing which of the new recruitment mechanisms are most optimal for their particular organizations.
Innovative IT recruitment methods tapping Web 2.0 technologies and third-party e-recruitment may be viable
alternatives for HR directors who want to enhance their abilities to garner a larger pools of qualified applicants
in a cost-effective manner.

According to Selden and Wooters (2011), a shared services model of PHRM creates a centralized service
function that treats employees and agency-based HRM professionals as internal customers. This approach
is designed to enable a government to better leverage existing resources; reduce duplication of HRM
activities across state agencies; and provide more consistent, higher-quality services to internal customers by
concentrating existing resources and streamlining processes.

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Additional Resources

Office of Personnel Management (OPM) http://www.opm.gov
Society for Industrial & Organizational Psychology (SIOP) http://www.siop.org
US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) http://www.eeoc.gov
USAJobs http://www.usajobs.gov

: Decentralization, Declassification, and Efficiency: Recruitment and Selection
Reform in the State of New York Civil Service

In September of 1995, New York governor George Pataki set out to improve the state’s civil service system,
widely deemed antiquated, by implementing decentralization and declassification methods for streamlining
the lengthy HR process. To do so, he instructed Civil Service Commissioner George Sinnott to head up
a task force, which included directors of state operations and representatives from the Governor’s Office
of Employee Relations and Budget and sought input from the public employee unions, to carry out a
comprehensive overview of New York’s civil service system (Sinnott 1998). The joint labor-management task
force’s efforts produced New York’s New Civil Service reform initiative, the first successful personnel reform
in the state in over a century.

Past reform efforts had failed as a result of insurmountable political, legal, organizational, and procedural
obstacles (Vonnegut 1999). For over 100 years, no significant changes had been made to the state civil
service laws. Attempts at reform were often rebuffed by political opponents and public employee labor unions.
One of the main reasons these efforts did not succeed was that reformers failed to consider the interests of
the 70-plus state agencies, nine employee labor organizations, the legislature, the budget, and the courts.
Emphasizing incremental changes to administrative reform efforts instead of more drastic change, the New
Civil Service succeeded where previous efforts failed by championing a collaborative approach that elicited
the feedback and cooperation of all of the stakeholders in the system— the unions, agency-level HR reps,
and members of the legislature.

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http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/student-loan-repayment/

http://www.opm.gov/hr/employ/products/assessments/considerations.asp

http://www.opm.gov/luevano_archive/luevano-archive.asp

http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/veterans-services/vet-guide/#2/

http://www.opm.gov/

http://www.siop.org/

http://www.eeoc.gov/

http://www.usajobs.gov/

From the beginning of the civil service reform initiative, the administration worked extensively with the
employee unions. Commissioner Sinnott’s close involvement of the unions in the process gave them a “seat
at the negotiating table,” and successfully allayed any misgivings labor might have had. This approach
enabled the state of New York to move forward with the New Civil Service (Thompson and Malbin 1999). The
collaborative process was reinforced by establishing the reform policy as part of sunset legislation; in other
words, if after the reform was implemented there was evidence of abuse, the legislation could be terminated.

The labor-management partnership successfully lobbied a joint legislative committee for passage of the
reform package. The key elements of the New Civil Service reform initiative were legislation allowing for the
transfer of employees from one agency to another, improvements to testing and test-reporting procedures,
more detailed applicant lists that gave managers more flexibility, a new public management internship
program, a reduction in and consolidation of the number of state position titles, IT improvements, and more
open communication between state and local agencies regarding personnel changes (New York Department
of Civil Service [NYDCS] 1998; Riccucci 2006; Vonnegut 1999; Walters 2002). These initiatives dramatically
shifted a civil service system that had been rooted in tradition and mired in gridlock.

On March 29, 1996, the proposals agreed upon by the joint labor-management task force were adopted
by the state legislature. The reform legislation authorized the Department of Civil Service (DCS) to transfer
employees between agencies when budget shortfalls necessitated reductions in force. Instead of dismissing
public employees outright, the DCS could institute a strict hiring freeze but then provisionally transfer the
affected employees to open positions within the civil service. Additionally, early retirement incentives with
multiple windows were implemented, giving senior employees the option to retire early instead of being laid
off. These measures reduced the state workforce by 6,000 positions in fiscal year 1996, with the number
of involuntary separations limited to just 235 employees. These numbers were especially significant when
compared with the layoffs that had occurred under the previous retirement system (NYDCS 1998; Sinnott
1998). New York’s reforms have been recognized nationally as a model for state HR management (Riccucci
2006); such publicity can be a powerful recruitment tool.

With respect to recruitment and selection, the New Civil Service legislation drastically changed the status
quo. Improved testing methods allowing for more frequent testing provided employees with the opportunity
to compete for permanent status, a right that was required by law. Relying entirely on internal resources, the
DCS also developed and administered test batteries using rigorous state-of-the-art selection methodologies.
Updated recruitment and selection procedures took advantage of technology to benefit both employees
and managers by providing them with a more timely and efficient method of promotion and movement
from provisional to permanent status (NYDCS 1998; Sinnott 1998). Following implementation of reforms,
managers were much better able to plan for agency recruitment needs, and state employees were able to
optimize their chances for promotion.

Provisional employees—employees holding a nine-month appointment while awaiting testing—were not
considered to be in permanent status and thus were unable to receive the same benefits as permanent
employees; however, they had the right to pursue and attain permanent status and could do so by passing
the state civil service examination. Under the previous program, the selection system was inadequately
monitored, and there was a backlog of over 600 open positions for which no promotion tests had been
scheduled. This led to many competent provisional employees being unable to take the state exam and
effectively denied the right to gain permanent civil service status. Moreover, as they languished in provisional
status, questionable provisional appointments were allowed to circumvent the law. An advantage of promoting
from within is that provisional employees already have the experience of working in the state agency, so
they form an ideal and ready talent pool from which to hire; they can transition more smoothly to permanent
status than someone who is new to the agency. By December 1998, two years after passage of the reform
legislation, of the 140,672 Competitive Class employees in state service, only 0.7 percent remained in
provisional status—a 79 percent reduction from previous years (NYDCS 1998; Riccucci 2006; Sinnott 1998).

Another technological improvement is a civil service website that gives candidates prompt results from their
exams. The new website provides applicants with “employee test profiles,” giving candidates a summary of
their exam performance for each subject area, and provides state offices with up-to-date lists of candidates
eligible for appointment. These improvements to recruitment and selection technologies help the DCS

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1.
2.
3.

improve efficiency and to hire and promote based on merit, one of the fundamental principles and best
practices of civil service (NYDCS 1998; Sinnott 1998).

Civil service rules in the state of New York apply not only to state agencies but also to local counties and
municipalities, which are frequently audited by the state DCS to ensure compliance. For example, Onondaga
County (Syracuse), New York, has reported that the New Civil Service’s comprehensive reforms in testing
and scoring and technological improvements have streamlined the hiring process, facilitating more timely and
predictable notice to potential new hires about the status of their applications (Battaglio and Condrey 2006).
The streamlined process has eliminated many of the provisional hires not only at the state level but also
at the local level. A more efficient testing process has allowed exam results to be posted in as few as 60
days; employees used to wait for results for nine months. Moreover, efficient testing has positively impacted
recruitment at the local level. In many cases, competency exams were held only on certain scheduled
dates—and sometimes only once a year. Local HR directors are now able to administer these tests on
demand and provide potential employees with more timely results. This development has been particularly
helpful for local authorities in the competitive recruitment market for information technology jobs, as qualified
candidates may accept jobs offers from the private sector rather than wait for a slow-moving government
decision.

Additionally, the use of broadbanding with regard to test scores has given local authorities a great deal of
flexibility. With broadbanding, hiring managers can select from applicants who have earned a wide range of
scores rather than only from applicants who have earned scores within a narrow range, and managers can
consider factors besides test scores.

Local authorities have also seen a significant impact from improved outreach by the state civil service system.
Commissioner Sinnott appointed outreach units at the state level to serve as liaisons to local offices, supplying
the local offices with training and other needs. This outreach has increased communication between local and
state authorities.

Reform efforts in New York have brought this state’s civil service into parity with other states’ civil service
systems. This is a considerable achievement given the long history of impediments to reform in the state
(Riccucci 2006). This case stands in stark contrast to the antimerit values emphasized in more radical reform
efforts, such as those in the states of Georgia and Florida. Additionally, scholarship (Mesch Perry, and
Wise 1995) suggests that local HR managers in New York have appreciated the paring down of excessive
rules and regulations that has accompanied implementation of the New Civil Service. This has enabled
local managers to function more efficiently and to focus on achieving their organizational mission within a
competitive environment.

Since passage of the reform, the state still experiences fragmentation in its ability to carry out HR functions,
although not nearly to the extent as under the prior system. Overall, the reforms have been viewed positively
by both those within the New York civil service system (employees, unions, politicians) and national
recognition bodies (e.g., the Society for Human Resource Management and the American Society for Public
Administration) (Riccucci 2006).

For HR managers involved in reform, communicating with affected stake-holders is key. Keeping employees,
politicians, and the public informed is critical to avoiding costly obstacles (e.g., protests, work stoppages) to
positive reforms.

Discussion Questions

Why was the state of New York able to pass comprehensive legislation in 1996 but unable to do so
over the previous 100 years?
With regard to recruitment and selection, what changes were made? What was the impact of these
changes? Do you believe these changes improved recruitment and selection for the state?
What changes might you have recommended? Whom might you have involved or excluded from the
reform discussion? Is it better to compromise in order to achieve reform or better to maintain purity
of vision? Did the players in the New York reforms sacrifice efficiency in order to appeal to a broader

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4.
5.

audience?
What role, if any, did state leaders have in passage of the civil service reform legislation?
Regarding the characteristics of reform discussed at the outset of the text (see Table 1.1), how might
you characterize the reforms discussed in the state of New York? Did the New York reforms go far
enough? Are there any drawbacks to increased managerial flexibility at the agency level?

Exercise: Using Web 2.0 Technology in the Recruitment and Selection Process

Assume you are a newly hired HR manager in the city of Washitonia. The city manager has asked you
to review different approaches to implementing an updated recruitment and selection tool that taps online
efficiencies. Having recently earned your master’s of public administration (MPA), you are eager to approach
the task based on your knowledge of PHRM. With that in mind, what might an updated candidate recruitment
and selection process look like? What technologies might be involved in such an approach? In your opinion,
are Web 2.0 technologies a good means of recruiting qualified candidates? Why or why not?

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“ Week 1 – Assignment: Assess Personnel Management Approaches in Public Administration and Week 2 – Assignment: Generate Best Practices for Recruitment and Selection ”

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Week 1 – Assignment: Assess Personnel Management Approaches in Public Administration and Week 2 – Assignment: Generate Best Practices for Recruitment and Selection

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