U1D1-24-Compare and Contrast the differences in employee management in both public and private organizations (non-profit). see details

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 arrangements affect productivity, and (4) explores how the structure of HRM and the role of managers and HR managers changes under these alternative values, systems, and strategies.

A Historical Perspective on Public Human Resource Management

Public human resource management (HRM) in the United States can be viewed from at least four perspectives (Klingner, Nalbandian, and Llorens 2010). First, it is the functions (planning, acquisition, development, and discipline) needed to manage HR in public agencies. Second, it is the processes by which public jobs, as scarce resources, are allocated. Third, it is the interaction among fundamental societal values that often conflict. These values are responsiveness, efficiency, employee rights, and social equity. Responsiveness means a budget process that allocates positions and therefore sets priorities and an appointment process that considers political or personal loyalty along with education and experience as indicators of merit. Efficiency means staffing decisions based on ability and performance rather than political loyalty. Employee rights mean selection and promotion based on merit, as defined by objective measures of ability and performance, and employees who are free to apply their knowledge, skills, and abilities without partisan political interference. Social equity means public jobs allocated proportionately based on gender, race, and other designated criteria. Fourth, public human resource management is the embodiment of human resource systems: the laws, rules, organizations, and procedures used to fulfill personnel functions in ways that express the abstract values.

Historically, U.S. public HRM systems developed in evolutionary stages or eras, analytically separate but, in practice, overlapping (see Table 1.1). As discussed in more detail below, in the patrician era (1789–1828), the small group of upper-class property owners who had won independence and established the national government held most public jobs. As this generation passed, an era of patronage emerged (1829–1882) during which public jobs were awarded according to political loyalty or party affiliation. Next, the increased size and complexity of public activities led to an era of professionalism (1883–1932) that defined public HRM as a neutral administrative function so as to emphasize modernization through efficiency and democratization by allocating public jobs, at least at the federal level, on merit (Heclo 1977). The unprecedented demands of a global depression and World War II led to the emergence of a hybrid performance model (1933–1964) that combined the political leadership of patronage systems and the merit principles of civil service systems. Next, social upheavals (1965–1979) presaged the emergence of the people era in which collective bargaining emerged to represent collective employee rights (the equitable treatment of members by management through negotiated work rules for wages, benefits, and working conditions), and affirmative action emerged to represent social equity (through voluntary or court-mandated recruitment and selection practices to help ameliorate the under-representation of minorities and women in the workforce). Thus, by 1980 U.S. public HRM could be described as a dynamic equilibrium among four competing values, each championed by a particular system, for allocating scarce public jobs.

The Emergent Paradigms: Privatization and Partnerships

The privatization paradigm emerged at the end of the 1970s when President Carter campaigned by running against the national government as a Washington “outsider.” Following his election, he proposed the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act on grounds that included poor performance in the public service and difficulty in controlling and directing bureaucrats. Beginning in 1981, the Reagan administration, though starting from fundamentally different values and policy objectives, continued to cast government as part of the problem. Consequently, this paradigm shift was marked by increasing reliance on market-based forces, rather than program implementation by government agencies and employees, as the most efficacious tools of public policy. The emphasis on economic perspectives and administrative efficiency reflected the intense pressures on the public sector to “do more with less.” This caused governments to become more accountable through such techniques as program budgeting, management by objectives, program evaluation, and management information systems. It also caused efforts to lower expenditures through tax and expenditure ceilings, deficit reduction, deferred expenditures, accelerated tax collection, service fees and user charges, and a range of legislative and judicial efforts to shift program responsibilities and costs away from each affected government.

The 1990s and 2000s brought continued efforts to reduce government—either by increasing its responsiveness and effectiveness or by “shrinking the beast” and putting more resources in the hands of individuals and businesses. These were exemplified by Vice President Gore’s National Performance Review (National Performance Review 1993a, 1993b), aimed at creating a government that “works better and costs less” through fundamental changes in organizational structure and accountability, epitomized by the terms “reinventing government” or “new public management” (Osborne and Gaebler 1992). The Republican Party swept into control of Congress in 1994, 2002, and 2010 as a result of a shift toward three emergent nongovernmental values: personal accountability, limited and decentralized government, and community responsibility for social services. Proponents of personal accountability expect people to make individual choices consistent with their own goals and accept responsibility for the consequences of these choices, rather than passing responsibility for their actions on to society. Proponents of limited and decentralized government believe that government is to be feared for its power to arbitrarily or capriciously deprive individuals of their rights. They also believe that public policy, service delivery, and revenue generation can be controlled efficiently in a smaller unit of government in a way not possible in a larger one. And for some, a reduction in government size and scope is justified by perceived government ineffectiveness; by a high value accorded to individual freedom, responsibility, and accountability; and finally, by a desire to devote a smaller share of personal income to taxes. The most significant consequence of the emergence of the third value (community responsibility), at least as far as public HRM is concerned, has the delivery of local governments social services through NGOs funded by taxes, user fees, and charitable contributions.

Third-party social service provision has become more complex with an ideologically driven emphasis that directs contracting strategies towards faith-based organizations (FBOs). With the passage of the “charitable choice” component of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, charitable choice has expanded to include a range of federal programs, such as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (1996); Welfare to Work Formula Grants (1997); Community Services Block Grants (1998); and drug abuse treatment programs (2000). The White House Center for Faith-Based and Communities Initiatives (CFBCI) and five similar offices in the Departments of Education, Justice, Health and Human Services, Labor and Housing and Urban Development were established to contract with faith-based agencies nationwide. According to a study conducted by the Rockefeller Institute of Government (2003), thirty-two states had also contracted with FBOs to provide some social services, and eight states had enacted legislation requiring the inclusion of FBOs in contracting. More recently, state departments of labor received directives from the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) CFBCI requiring the development of state DOL strategic plans specifically aimed at increasing the number of faith-based grantees by providing training and technical assistance to these organizations as they competed for service provision contracts.

This emerging partnerships paradigm rests on the same values of personal accountability, limited and decentralized government, and community responsibility for social services that characterized the privatization paradigm, with an added strategic emphasis on cooperative service delivery among governments, businesses, and NGOs. The strategic element of this paradigm is undergirded by the belief that concrete results in public service delivery can only be achieved by the skilled deployment of human assets regardless of the framework within which it occurs. This new framework’s advocates also argue that the skilled deployment of human assets is best accomplished outside of the traditional civil service model. This has combined with anti-union sentiment, due also to public and legislative pressure to reduce the negative impacts of health care costs and defined benefit pension systems on state and local governments. These pressures increased dramatically due to the ideological effects of “Tea Party” Republicans in the 2010 midterm congressional elections. Because state and local governments depend heavily on property taxes, the collapse of real estate markets beginning in 2008 stressed their budgets. At the same time, the “Great Recession” of 2008–2011 resulted in decreased equity prices and returns and thus posed a long-term threat to the financial solvency of public employee pension systems.

As a result of combined financial pressures and anti-union sentiment, many states are rethinking and reinventing their public personnel systems, from far-reaching efforts in Georgia and Florida, the abolition of public sector collective bargaining in Wisconsin, and other more nuanced efforts to enhance third-party service delivery options (Selden 2006; Cayer and Kime 2006; Naff 2006; Hays, Byrd, and Wilkins 2006; Fox and Lavigna 2006; Nigro and Kellough 2006; Bowman, West, and Gertz 2006; Coggburn 2006; Battaglio and Condrey 2006).

Privatization and partnerships both rely upon the same two basic HRM strategies: using alternative organizations and mechanisms to deliver public services, and increasing the flexibility of employment relationships for the remaining public employees through a variety of nonstandard work arrangements (NSWAs).

Alternative Organizations and Mechanisms

These alternatives include purchase-of-service agreements, privatization, franchise agreements, subsidy arrangements, vouchers, volunteerism, and regulatory and tax incentives (International City Management Association 1989). These are not new. But they are increasingly common, and they supplant traditional service delivery by civil service employees hired through appropriated funding of public agencies.

Purchase-of-service agreements with other governmental agencies and NGOs have become commonplace. They enable cities and counties to offer services within a given geographic area, utilizing economies of scale. They offer smaller municipalities a way of reducing or avoiding capital expenses, personnel costs, and political issues associated with collective bargaining, and legal liability risks. In addition, the use of consultants (individuals or businesses hired under fee-for-service arrangements on an as-needed basis) increases available expertise and managerial flexibility by reducing the range of qualified technical and professional employees that the agency must otherwise hire.

Privatization, as the term is generally used in the United States, means that while a public agency provides a particular service, the service is produced and delivered by a private contractor (Savas 2000). It may result in the abolition of the agency (at times an intended ideological goal). Privatization offers all the advantages of service purchase agreements but holds down labor and construction costs on a larger scale. It has become commonplace in areas like solid waste disposal where there is an easily identifiable “benchmark” (standard cost and service comparison with the private sector) and where public agency costs tend to be higher because of higher pay and benefits (Kosar 2006; Siegel 1999; O’Looney 1998; Martin 1999).

Franchise agreements often allow businesses to monopolize a previously public function (e.g., cable TV and jitneys as a public transit option) within a geographic area, charge competitive rates for it, and then pay the appropriate government a fee for the privilege. Cities encourage franchising because it reduces their own costs, provides some revenue in return, and results in continuation of a desirable public service.

Subsidy arrangements enable private businesses to provide public services funded by either user fees to clients or cost reimbursement from public agencies. Examples are emergency medical services provided by private hospitals and reimbursed by public health systems, and rent subsidies to enable low-income residents to live in private apartments as an alternative to public housing projects.

Vouchers enable individuals to purchase public goods or services from competing providers on the open market. For example, educational voucher systems allow parents to apply a voucher to defray the cost of education for their children at competing public or private institutions, as an alternative to public school monopolies.

Volunteers contribute services otherwise performed by paid employees, or not at all. These include community crime watch programs in cooperation with local police departments, classroom teachers’ aides who provide tutoring and individual assistance in many public schools, and community residents who volunteer services as individuals or through churches, and other nonprofit service agencies. Frequently, such contributions are required to “leverage” a federal or state grant of appropriated funds. Though they would probably not consider themselves volunteers (and still less as public agency “clients”), prison inmates are often responsible for laundry, food service, and facilities maintenance.

Regulatory and tax incentives encourage the private sector to perform functions that might otherwise be performed by public agencies with public funds. These include the zoning variances for roads, parking, and waste disposal granted to condominium associations. In return, the association provides services normally performed by local government (e.g., security, waste disposal, and maintenance of common areas).

Nonstandard Work Arrangements

All these alternative mechanisms provide public services without using public employees and in many cases without using appropriated funds. Yet even in those cases where public services continue to be provided by public employees working in public agencies funded by appropriations, massive changes have occurred in employment practices. Chief among these are increased use of temporary, part-time, and seasonal employment and increased hiring of exempt employees (those outside the classified civil service) through employment contracts. Increasingly, public employers reduce costs and enhance flexibility by meeting minimal staffing requirements through career civil service employees and hiring other employees “at will” into temporary or part-time positions (Mastracci and Thompson 2005). These temps usually receive lower salaries and benefits than their career counterparts and are certainly unprotected by due process entitlements or collective bargaining agreements. Alternatively, where commitment and high skills are required on a temporary basis, employers may seek to save money or maintain flexibility by using contract or leased employees in exempt positions. While contracts may be routinely renewed with mutual approval, such “employees” may also be discharged at will in the event of a personality conflict, a change in managerial objectives, or a budget shortfall. These professional and technical workers usually receive higher salaries and benefits than can be offered to even highly qualified civil servants, and they enable management to cut personnel costs quickly if necessary without having to resort to seniority-based layoffs and the bureaucratic chaos precipitated by the exercise of civil service “bumping rights.”

As this trend continues, the workforce of the future will include multiple work arrangements for workers hired under different terms and conditions. At a minimum, these include traditional employees hired to “permanent” full-time or part-time positions to civil service positions that may also be covered by collective bargaining agreements. They also include other workers hired to NSWAs—temporary workers (neither unionized nor covered by civil service), contract workers (hired through temp agencies, individual performance contracts, or contracts with their private employers), and volunteers.

Recalling that the first definition of HRM is the policies and procedures that determine how employees are managed, these multiple systems have developed because of the advantages they offer employers. We see a shift toward NSWAs because of their presumed greater flexibility, efficiency, and ideological conformance with market values. In practice, this means less concern for traditional hiring, training, and performance evaluation practices and more concern for contract-based employment. Contract workers are expected to have current competencies. Because their work is time-limited by the terms of a contract, counseling and performance appraisal are less vital than under collective bargaining or civil service systems. Given the lack of career emphasis or protection, sanctions increasingly involve nothing more than the nonrenewal of a contract with individuals or with a firm.

The new strategies diminish employee rights. It is more likely that employees hired at will into temporary and part-time positions will receive lower pay and benefits and will be unprotected by civil service regulations or collective bargaining agreements. Whether or not the political neutrality of public employees suffers in this environment is unknown presently, but it seems logical to assume that as the criteria for success become more arbitrary or capricious, civil service employees—particularly those in mid-management positions—will begin to behave more like the political appointees whose jobs depend on political or personal loyalty to elected officials (Brewer and Maranto 2000).

The new strategies also threaten social equity (Wilson 2006). Pay comparisons over the past twenty years have uniformly concluded that minorities and women in public agencies are closer to equal pay for equal work than are their private sector counterparts. Managerial consultants are overwhelmingly white and male. Many part-time and temporary positions are exempt from laws prohibiting discrimination against persons with disabilities or family medical responsibilities.

These complex systems create conflicting expectations and accountability based on political, administrative, and market perspectives. An organization that primarily manages contracts may not be able to adequately manage performance. When an organization’s workforce includes both NSWA workers and traditional employees, the result is always complexity and often confusion and uncertainty over the psychological contract (terms of employment) between the organization and its employees.

The Effects of Privatization, Partnerships, and NSWAs on Performance

The impact of the new strategies on efficiency has been mixed. On the plus side, the change in public agency culture toward identifying customers and providing market-based services increases productivity. And the threat of privatization or layoffs has forced unions to agree to pay cuts, to reduced employer-funded benefits, and to changes in work rules (Cohen and Eimicke 1994). But the personnel techniques that have become more common under these emergent systems may actually increase some personnel costs, particularly those connected with employment of independent contractors, reemployed annuitants, and temporary employees (Peters and Savoie 1994). Downsizing may eventually lead to higher recruitment, orientation, and training costs and loss of the organizational memory and “core expertise” necessary to effectively manage contracting or privatization initiatives (Milward 1996). Minimum staffing usually results in increased payment of overtime and higher rates of employee accidents and injuries. As the civil service workforce shrinks, it is also aging. This means increases in pension payouts, disability retirements, workers’ compensation claims, and health-care costs.

What is emerging, then, is a human resource framework that paradoxically embraces both collaborative and control-oriented managerial styles, exposing the underlying tensions inherent in the values of monitoring (compliance) and empowerment (outcomes). The tensions are evidenced by the debates over the desire to maintain control mechanisms associated with traditional civil service systems (risk adversity) and the strategic attractiveness of responsiveness and managerial empowerment (stewardship). Yet rising levels of ambiguity and turbulence at the national and state levels of government demand understandings that move beyond either/or thinking (Kisfalvi 2000).

Opposing and interwoven elements are evident throughout government as citizens and public officials struggle with the coexistence of authority and democracy, efficiency and creativity, freedom and control (Lewis 2000). The new HRM paradigm may be increasingly about the management of both control and collaboration and, more critically, about developing understandings and practices that accept, accommodate, and even encourage these tensions. As an example, increasingly state government agencies are using a model of collaborative social service provision and approaches to addressing social problems. These often involve overlapping partnerships with various public sector organizations, a recognition that the complexity of social issues is in part due to its residence within an interorganizational framework, and a recognition that these problems cannot be tackled by any one organization acting alone. These new and often confusing organizational relationships suggest that HR managers will not only need to manage control and collaboration simultaneously but also become much more sophisticated in the competencies needed to work across organizational boundaries (Klingner 2008).

However, collaboration brings its own sets of problems in that contract compliance, rather than traditional supervisory practices, becomes the primary quality control mechanism. This creates a real possibility of fraud and abuse (Moe 1987). In this regard, state and local governments’ experience suggests that privatization and service contracting outcomes are most likely to be successful when governments:

· Pick a service with clear objectives that can be measured and monitored

· Use in-house or external competition and avoid sole source contracting

· Develop adequate cost accounting systems to compare service alternatives and monitor contractor performance

· Consider negative externalities such as impacts on an existing workforce, impacts on the local economy, other governments or functions, governmental policies, or certain societal groups (Siegel 1999)

The impact of contemporary HRM strategies on the last traditional value (political responsiveness) is also problematic. Public-private partnerships raise fundamental accountability and performance issues for elected officials and public managers (Klingner, Nalbandian, and Romzek 2002). The emergent values and systems alter the fundamental role of government by placing greater emphasis on individuals and by shifting the focus of governmental social service delivery from a national to a state and local level. Continual budget cuts and pressures can result in a budget-driven rather than mission-driven agency. Budget-driven agencies that address public problems with short-term solutions designed to meet short-term legislative objectives are not likely to be effective. Long-range planning, or indeed any planning beyond the current budget cycle, is likely to become less important. Agencies will not be able to prepare effective capital budgets or to adequately maintain capital assets (human or infrastructure).

The conflict between traditional and emergent paradigms represents a fundamental conflict over the appropriate role of government in society. Supporters of privatization and partnerships see them as an opportunity to reduce the size of government (“downsizing”) and reaffirm the basic competitive advantage of market-based models and the legitimacy of individual accountability and community responsibility. Critics see them as a retreat from hard-won historical advances in health, education, and welfare, and the acceptance—implicit or explicit—of increased income inequality and lack of opportunity for our country’s poorest and most disadvantaged citizens. For them, the elected and appointed officials who preside over the dismantling of social and public infrastructure for the sake of short-term political gain are abdicating their responsibility to the public welfare. Realistic budget and policy analysis requires that Republicans agree to raise at least some taxes and simplify the tax code by reducing loopholes and that Democrats agree to reduce some entitlement programs (e.g., Social Security and Medicare) by tying them to income or life expectancy. The alternative is an increased national debt that increasingly undermines economic growth and represents a profoundly inequitably transfer of wealth from future generations to current ones. Our current national political stalemate (2010–?), based on Republican control of the House and Democratic control of the Senate and presidency, represents the failure of both parties to engage in the fundamental legislative process of rational decision making based on common acceptance of facts and compromise among competing values.

The Changing Structure and Role of Public Human Resource Management

Three main groups share responsibility for public HRM. Political leaders are responsible for authorizing personnel systems and for establishing their objectives and funding levels. Personnel directors and specialists design and implement personnel systems or direct and help those who do. In civil service systems, they usually work within a personnel department that functions as a staff support service for managers and supervisors. Their main responsibility is achieving agency goals within a prescribed budget and a limited number of positions. HR directors and specialists both help line managers to use human resources effectively and constrain their personnel actions within the limits imposed by political leaders, laws, and regulations. Managers and supervisors are responsible for implementing the rules, policies, and procedures that constitute personnel systems, as they work with employees on a day-to-day basis.

While the basic HRM functions remain the same, the relative emphasis among functions and how they are performed differ depending on the system. HR under a patronage system heavily emphasizes recruitment and selection of applicants based on personal or political loyalty. Once hired, political appointees are subject to the whims of the elected official. Few rules govern their job duties, pay, or rights, and they are usually fired at will. Nor is development a priority.

In a civil service system, HR is a department or office that functions as an administrative support service to the city manager, school superintendent, hospital director, or other agency administrator. Because civil service is a complete system, HR has a balanced emphasis on each of the four major personnel functions—planning, acquisition, development, and sanction. HR is responsible for maintaining the classification system of positions that have been categorized according to type of work and level of responsibility. The pay system is usually tied to the classification system, with jobs involving similar degrees of difficulty being compensated equally. HR is also responsible for developing and updating the agency’s retirement and benefits programs. It also handles eligibility and processing of personnel action requests (retirements and other related changes in job status). HR is responsible for advertising vacant or new positions, reviewing job applications, administering written tests, and providing a ranked list of eligible applicants to managers in units where vacancies actually exist. After the manager conducts interviews and selects one applicant, HR then processes the paperwork required to employ and pay the person. HR is responsible for orienting new employees to the organization, its work rules, and the benefits it provides. It may conduct training itself or contract for it. HR implements employee grievance and appeals procedures, advises supervisors throughout the organization of appropriate codes of conduct for employees, establishes the steps necessary to discipline an employee for violations of these rules, and develops procedures to follow in the event the employee appeals this disciplinary action or files a grievance. If employees are covered by a collective bargaining agreement, HR is usually responsible for negotiating the agreement (or hiring an outside negotiator who performs this function), bringing pay and benefit provisions into accord with contract provisions, orienting supervisors on how to comply with the contract, and representing the agency in internal grievance resolution or outside arbitration procedures.

HR is responsible primarily for implementing HR acquisition rules emphasizing social equity for minorities, women, and persons with disabilities. Thus, it most heavily affects recruitment, selection, and promotion policies and procedures. The affirmative action director shares responsibility with the personnel director in this area. Once members of these protected classes are hired, other personnel systems (civil service or collective bargaining) influence the ways planning, development, and discipline occur.

In general, reliance on NGOs reduces the absolute number of public employees, thereby reducing the HR department’s functions. But it also increases the importance of planning and oversight because these are necessary to estimate the type and number of contract employees needed to provide a desired level of service, develop requests for proposals to outside contractors, evaluate responses to proposals by comparing costs and services, and overseeing contract administration. HR directors, staff, and managers work increasingly with citizen volunteers and community-based organizations to supplement paid staff. In these cases, public managers need to become more skilled in recruiting, selecting, training, and motivating volunteer workers (Pynes 2009).

Flexibility in employment relationships is achieved primarily by the increased use of temporary, part-time, and seasonal employment and by increased hiring of exempt employees (those outside the classified civil service) through employment contracts. Employee development is largely irrelevant: Most contingent workers are hired with the skills needed to perform the job immediately. Objective performance evaluation may still be required to maintain effectiveness, but not to maintain equity or discipline. Because at-will employees have no job retention rights, it’s easy for employers to control the terms of the relationship. If employees do their jobs adequately, they get paid; if not, they are simply released at the end of their contract and not called back when workload once again increases.

The evolution of public personnel management in the United States adds emergent systems without replacing their predecessors. Instead, new and emergent systems interact and conflict in ways that reflect the dynamic interaction of laws, conditions, and policies. But regardless of the particular system or combination of systems that control HR policy and practice within a particular agency, the organizational structure and relationships within which public HR functions are carried out are established and regulated by law. Usually, the organization of public HRM follows a pattern that is tied closely to the evolution of personnel systems themselves. In the United States nationally, this process was represented by passage of the Pendleton Act (1883) and creation of the U.S. Civil Service Commission. This in some cases followed and in other cases encouraged the establishment of similar state and local civil service agencies. As public personnel management tried to unify the opposing roles of civil service protection and management effectiveness, the organizational location and mission of the central personnel agency became increasingly significant. In some cases it remained an independent commission. In others, it split into two agencies like the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, one responsible for protecting employees against political interference under civil service rules, and the other responsible for administering and enforcing the chief executive’s HRM policies and practices in other executive branch agencies. As collective bargaining and affirmative action emerged as separate personnel systems, separate agencies were often created at all levels of government to focus on these responsibilities. Other agencies like a Department of Labor (federal, state, or local) may have additional personnel responsibilities for regulating public employee pay, benefits, and working conditions. Often, these agencies have conflicting or overlapping roles in particular HRM functions.

Over time, the role of HR in public agencies has evolved with changes in the political and administrative context. The primary roles have been watchdogs against the spoils systems, collaboration with legislative restrictions, cooperation with management, and compliance with legislative mandates. During the professionalism era (1883–1932), HR professionals championed merit system principles because public HRM was generally viewed as a conflict between two systems, one evil and the other good. Public HR managers were considered responsible for guarding employees, applicants, and the public from the spoils system. This required knowledge of civil service policies and procedures and the courage to apply them in the face of political pressure.

During the performance era (1933–1964), HR sought to maintain efficiency and accountability, and legislators and chief executives sought to maintain bureaucratic compliance through budgetary controls and position management. Through such devices as personnel ceilings and average grade-level restrictions, it became the role of public personnel management to control the behavior of public managers and to help assure compliance with legislative authority. In effect, it was the responsibility of HR to synthesize two distinct values (bureaucratic compliance as the operational definition of organizational efficiency, and civil service protection as the embodiment of employee rights). There was tension between them because they were both symbiotic and conflicting. And together with the value of bureaucratic neutrality, they supported the concept of political responsiveness.

During the people era (1965–1979) the focus of public HRM shifted to consultation as HR managers demanded flexibility and equitable reward allocation through such alterations to classification and pay systems as rankinperson personnel systems, broad pay banding, and group performance evaluation and reward systems. This trend coincided with employee needs for utilization, development, and recognition.

In the privatization era (1980–present), public HR still works consultatively with agency managers and employees and with compliance agencies. But its role and objectives are more contradictory. First, HR is required, more than ever, to manage government employees and programs in compliance with legislative and public mandates for cost control. Given the common public and legislative presumption that the public bureaucracy is an enemy to be controlled rather than a tool to be used to accomplish public policy objectives, its authority may be diminished by legislative micromanagement, or the value of cost control may be so dominant as to preclude concern for employee rights, organizational efficiency, or social equity. Second, HR may work increasingly with volunteers and NGOs (particularly FBOs). Because many public employees (particularly school teachers and administrators, police, and firefighters) are still covered by union contracts and collective bargaining agreements, civil service and collective bargaining are still important. But as risk management, cost control, and management of other types of employment contracts become more important, a calculating perspective of the joint possibilities for organizational productivity and individual growth tends to supplant a uniform and idealistic view of public services motivations. This represents a narrowing of the public HR perspective.

Third, and somewhat paradoxically, even as this minimalist view of personnel management emerges, there are countervailing pressures to develop an employment relationship characterized by commitment, teamwork, and innovation. Productivity is prized, risk taking is espoused, and variable pay systems that reward individual and group performance are touted. Perhaps the key to the paradox is the emerging distinction between “core employees” (those regarded as essential assets) and “contingent workers” (those regarded as replaceable costs). It is likely that public HR success will continue to require the ability to develop two divergent personnel systems, one for each type of worker within a dual labor market system and to maintain both at the same time despite their conflicting objectives and assumptions.

With the emergence of the partnership era (2002–present), public HR is increasingly expected to operate within a framework of structures, process, and people that are to a large extent outside of immediate control yet are part of the collective enterprise. The ability to manage tensions will be the defining characteristic in shaping and managing collaborative agendas. Managing these tensions will be even more difficult as frequent changes in government policy and in partner organizations impact the roles of and job changes for public sector employees. Recognizing the effects of emerging structures and processes on employment systems, mobilizing and capacity building will be the benchmarks of collaborative success.

The impact of changing values and systems can be seen in Table 1.2.

Conclusion

Public HRM can be viewed from several perspectives. First, it is the planning, acquisition, development, and discipline functions needed to manage human resources in public agencies. Second, it is the process by which public jobs are allocated as scarce resources. Third, it reflects the influence of seven symbiotic and competing values (political responsiveness, efficiency, individual rights, and social equity under the traditional pro-governmental paradigm; and individual accountability, downsizing and decentralization, and community responsibility under the emergent privatization and partnerships paradigms) over how public jobs should be allocated. Fourth, it is the personnel systems (i.e., laws, rules, and procedures) used to express these abstract values—political appointments, civil service, collective bargaining, and affirmative action under the traditional model; and alternative mechanisms and flexible employment relationships under the emergent privatization and partnerships paradigms.

Conceptually, U.S. public HRM can be understood as a historical process through which new systems emerge to champion emergent values, integrate with the mix, and in turn supplement—but not supplant or replace—their predecessors. From a practical perspective, this means that the field of public HRM is laden with contradictions in policy and practice resulting from often unwieldy and unstable combinations of values and systems and fraught with the inherent difficulties of utilizing competitive and collaborative systems to achieve diverse goals. Civil service is the predominant public HRM system because it has articulated rules and procedures for performing the whole range of HRM functions. Other systems, though incomplete, are nonetheless legitimate and effective influences over one or more HRM functions. While HR functions remain the same across different systems, their organizational location and method of performance differ depending upon the system and on the values that underlie it.

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