Basics of Public Personnel Administration

Public personnel administration is one of the core areas of public administration.

Public personnel administration is involved with virtually everything that relates to employment systems in the workplace, including many social issues such as affirmative action, sexual harassment, and other forms of discrimination.

The field includes some detailed “nuts-and-bolts” functions like using procedures for hiring employees, designing tests, and ensuring that the workforce is well trained.

Today, our societies are employee societies.

Virtually everyone works for an organization, often a rather large one.

The purpose of public personnel administration (human resources) is to attract, hire, train, and maintain a productive, satisfied workforce.

Personnel departments perform many roles such as examining job descriptions, creating classification systems, handling benefits, and many other functions.

They do not provide any service directly to the public.

They are staff departments rather than line departments.

Differences between Public and Private Personnel Administration

The lack of a profit motive is the most obvious difference between public and private sector organizations, and this greatly affects the way that personnel are used.

Business must earn a profit to exist; few public sector organizations generate the funds that sustain their operations.

Related to the lack of a profit motive is the fact that government agencies lack competition.

The public sector is monopolistic.

There really is not any true competition.

Citizens, for all practical purposes, do not have a choice about their service provider for police and fire protection or water and sewerage.

Aside from complaining, the only choice citizens dissatisfied with the quality of water have in their jurisdiction is to move out of the district.

People who are unhappy with the service at a private firm have many other options because of competition there are others out there.

Businesses have incentive to try to satisfy customers.

If they fail over a period of time, they will lose their customers to other firms.

Businesses also attempt to keep operating costs low to remain competitive in the marketplace.

There is no such incentive in the public sector due to the lack of competition.

Moreover, if labor costs and other operating expenses rise, government can raise taxes.

Corporations must either raise prices or find internal ways of reducing expenses.

The monopolistic nature of government is often criticized, but it also provides stability for society, albeit imperfect at times.

Fortunes shift and change rapidly in the marketplace, but government must continue to exist.

Government typically provides services rather than products.

Public sector is labor-intensive; manual labor is required in most of the cases to handle the job.

Managers in the private sector have greater freedom over personnel matters.

A corporation has flexibility in how it hires and fires people.

Notwithstanding certain laws that have been imposed by government, such as occupational safety, unemployment compensation, equal employment opportunity, and labor relations, private managers are free to handle most personnel matters as they see fit.

Public administrators are bound by red tape and complicated rules that guide personnel decisions.

Although government does impose many rules that affect personnel matters in the private sector, the rules set by civil service and public employee unions are usually more rigid.

Authority is less structured in the public sector.

In a private corporation, an employee usually has little doubt about who is in charge or how the chain of command works.

In government, authority is more confusing because of the executive and legislative powers.

Amateurs often serve as the head of public agencies.

Private firms are typically led by more experienced executives who will stay with the organization much longer than the heads of high-ranking officials stay in the public sector.

The heads of agencies are often selected because of their policy views and ties to the chief executive.

Thus, partisan politics is often at the core of their selection; their managerial skills are secondary.

In the private sector, managers are usually picked because of their knowledge and technical skills.

Government also uses its personnel system for multiple purposes.

In the private sector, employees are hired for the sole purpose of making products or delivering services, which is directed toward an economic end-making money.

Employees in the public sector are hired to perform tasks and deliver services, but the system is also designed to accommodate other functions such as rewarding the politically faithful or rewarding special categories of people like military veterans.

Government employment is sometimes used to stimulate the economy.

Hiring people during hard economic times makes the personnel system either part of the economic system or a disguised form of welfare, depending on one’s point of view.

Government personnel system may be used to achieve socially desirable goals, such as hiring people with physical disabilities.

Challenges to the Merit System: Equal Employment Opportunity, Affirmative Action, and Representative Bureaucracy

The merit principle has been a part of the civil service, in varying degrees, since 1883 in USA.

It took more than 100 years to get most federal employees (90 percent) covered by merit systems.

The merit system was believed to be a way to eliminate or minimize appointments of political hacks to government positions.

Classical personnel administration theory was based heavily on the principles of scientific management and Weberian bureaucratic theory.

These ideas worked well for building a personnel system based on technical competence and positions.

The goals were to get qualified people who could perform their jobs free of political influence, situated in a hierarchical organizational structure.

The merit system was well suited for attaining such a system.

The merit system was based largely on creating standardized practical tests for positions.

In the US a standardized, multiple-choice test was used to select recent college graduates for employment in a variety of federal agencies.

The test measured verbal and mathematical abilities thought to be relevant to administrative and professional positions.

It was thought that the tests were objective with no biases against minorities.

Over time, however, it was found that minorities tended to score lower on the tests than white males.

The civil rights movement questioned the way that government jobs were allocated.

The idea of merit had been defined as expertise, but critics argued that academic degrees and previous education and training often indicated social status and political power as much as ability.

Critics believed that minorities had been excluded from educational opportunities in the past, which locked them into low-paying jobs.

Their inability to advance was caused by discrimination more so than by their capability.

The merit system was viewed as a new form of patronage, one that protected a class of people rather than a political party.

The US Congress passed a series of laws, but many of the laws were contradictory.

The Veterans Preference Act of 1944 provided for preferential treatment of veterans, but most veterans were white males.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 forbid discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, or national origin, but the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, which prohibits discrimination for those 40 years of age or older, was viewed as a way to lock in white males, thus further restricting the opportunities for minorities.

Therefore, a new set of values entered into public personnel administration that challenged the merit principle, which many had worked hard to make a reality for more than a century.

The central concept of civil rights movement, which started with African Americans, but later Hispanics, Native Americans, and women joined, was affirmative action.

Affirmative action is defined as a planned, aggressive, coherent, management program designed to promote equal employment opportunity for disadvantaged groups, those who have historically been the victims of discrimination.

It is argued that the “playing field” is neither level nor fair, and the deliberate action by government is needed to make the field level.

The goal is to increase opportunities for minorities through positive government action backed by laws.

Typically, the argument for affirmative action holds that if the playing field were level, all segments of society should be represented by the proportionate amount of minorities.

The way that affirmative action is supposed to work is either by setting aside a certain number of positions to try to bring about better racial or gender balance, or by giving an advantage to minority candidates who are qualified for the positions.

Critics of affirmative action have argued that it is nothing more than legalized discrimination and that quota and other techniques should be illegal on their face value.

Sexual Harassment

Another issue that affects public personnel system is sexual harassment, which is another form of discrimination.

Sexual harassment is defined as repeated, unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical contact of a sexual nature.

Sexual harassment has been a difficult area to deal with for many organizations because it can take so many forms, such as sexual compliments from a supervisor to a subordinate or explicit photographs or jokes in the office.

Such activity can create a hostile working environment for an employee who is the victim of harassment.

The guiding doctrine is that the workplace should be free of this type of discrimination and those sexually explicit comments and advances are not tolerated.

Surveys of federal employees in the US revealed that 42 percent of women and 15 percent of men claimed to have been sexually harassed.

To deal with sexual harassment, organizations have created policies that make it clear that such activity is forbidden.

Some firms in the private sector in the US have gone so far as to forbid dating among employees or to ban management from fraternizing with any subordinate.

In the public sector, many universities have adopted policies that forbid faculty from dating students and even faulty of higher rank from dating faculty of lower rank.

Sexual harassment, in its worst form, involves an abuse of power by someone in a position of authority.

It is not easy to define sexual harassment.

What is unacceptable in one workplace is tolerated in another.

The safe approach is simply to separate one’s personal life from one’s professional life.

Sexual harassment creates a hostile work environment and that should be prevented by the employer.

The relationship between power, romance, and life in organizations should be determined well.