PUB 503 ML:Theories, Principles, & Practice of Public
Administration Questions & Key Terms [Day Three]
Critical Thinking Questions
1. Is the organization a product of our national culture? How
does our American culture influence our public service
employees? Where does freedom end and order begins? Give me
your opinion along with some examples.
2. What is leadership? Is the leadership roles different of
elected officials as opposed to the administrated roles? How
does the transactional role of the administrator differ from the
transformational role of the elected official? Give some
examples of each.
3. What is human capital? Does the morale of the workers effect
the leader- follower relationship in the workplace? What can
governments’ human capital managers do to positively impact
their followers work product? Discus and give some examples.
4. What is a “whistleblower” and how are they protected by
Congress?
Managing Human Capital in the Public and Nonprofit Sectors
1
1
People as Human Capital
Personnel administration, or personnel management, is the
planning and policymaking for, and managing of, employees,
and is
limited to “internal” processes, such as compensation.
During the 1980s, a more modern view emerged: human
resource management, which expands the field by
including “external” processes, such as professional
development.
Currently, human capital management views employees as
valuable assets that can be further enriched through greater
investment, and
aligns human capital policies with the organization’s mission.
Personnel-lists, or professionals and specialists in the field,
often use these terms interchangeably, as do we., the most
commonly used initials “HR” designates all three titles.
Nevertheless, they do have differences:
each successive title represents a broader concept that places an
increasing emphasis on the worth of employees.
2
Who Wants To Work And Who Doesn’t?
Over five consecutive years, the percentage of undergraduates
who planned to work for the federal, state, or local government
“immediately after graduation” declined by nearly half:
Local governments, however, exert a particular pull;
82 percent of women and 74 percent of men who once worked in
local government would “consider returning” to a local
government leadership position.4
Barely half of students in masters of public administration
(MPA) and similar programs express interest in being employed
by government, and, at the twenty top programs, not even half
are.
More generally, white people, Republicans, and those who
never served in the military are overrepresented among those
Americans who spurn working for government.
An astonishing 56 percent of corporate and nonprofit managers
are not or “not at all” interested in working for the federal
government, and only
17 percent express any interest in doing so.
None of this is good news for governments, but the real story
lies with growing student interest in working in the independent
sector
The decision to start careers in the independent sector, rather
than the public one, works out well for those who make it.
“Compared to those working in the public sector, managers in
nonprofits report greater freedom in deciding how to carry out
their job functions,
more control over their work schedules, and greater
opportunities for pay increases.”
3
The Evolution Of Public Human Capital Management
The evolution of public HR management in the United States
can be roughly divided into six phases.
Government by Gentlemen, 1789–1827
Government by Spoilers, 1828–1880
Government by the Good, 1881–1905
Government by Scientific Managers, 1906–1936
Government by Policymaking Administrators, 1937–1954
Government by Professionals, 1955–Present
Depending upon the phase in question, America’s governments
have been dominated, in successive turns,
by its aristocrats, corrupt officials, ardent reformers,
“scientific” managers, dynamic administrators, and timid clerks.
4
Government by Gentlemen, 1789–1827
In 1789, the federal government started off with three
departments (State, Treasury, and War), and, by 1836, it had
five departments and 336 employees.
During most of this period of very limited government indeed,
the first half-dozen presidents favored “government by
gentlemen,”
or those who were reputed to be persons of character and
competence, qualities that were defined largely by a respected
family background and a high degree of formal education.
Being a member of the establishment counted for a lot:
over the course of the country’s first forty years, almost two-
thirds of the eighty to a hundred or so top appointees were
drawn from the landed gentry, merchant, and professional
classes.
5
Government by Spoilers, 1828–1880
Even as they were being governed by gentlemen, however,
Americans were growing less gentlemanly in their politics.
When independence was declared, in 1776, over four-fifths of
the states required that, to vote, men must own land or have
paid taxes, but,
by 1830, only half of the states retained these stipulations.
As a result, far more men could vote, and many could not be
described as gentlemen. When combined with a populist
candidate—in the form of Andrew Jackson in the election of
1828—
voting turnout more than tripled from the previous election (16
percent turnout), and surpassed half of all eligible voters for the
first time.
These fundamental political changes meant only one thing:
spoils.
If presidents were to emerge, like Jackson, from the class that
earned its own living, then politics had to be made to pay.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, Jackson maintained
past establishmentarian patterns, dismissing about the same
share of political appointees as had his gentlemanly
predecessors.
John Tyler (1841–1845) was the first president to implement a
comprehensive spoils system, a practice that reached its apex
with the presidency of Abraham Lincoln (1861–1865),
but spoils continued to mar government for the next several
decades.
It is difficult for those of us reared in an environment of largely
honest government to appreciate the extent—and the
brazenness—of the spoils period.
After an election, newspaper advertising typically swelled with
such announcements as, “WANTED — A GOVERNMENT
CLERKSHIP at a salary of not less that $1000 per annum. Will
give $100 to anyone securing me such a position.”
6
Government by the Good, 1881–1905
The corrupt excesses of the spoils system eventually resulted in
a reform movement that was determined to rid government of
those bureaucrats who owed their office to nothing more than
party hackwork.
Between 1861 and 1882, sixty-four civil service reform bills
were introduced in Congress, but not one of them was passed by
even one chamber.
The assassination of President Garfield by a deranged office
seeker, in 1881, changed Congress’s collective mind.
7
The Civil Service Act of 1883
Just two years following Garfield’s assassination, Congress
passed the Civil Service Act (also known as the Pendleton Act,
after its legislative sponsor), which created a bipartisan Civil
Service Commission charged with creating a nonpartisan federal
service.
The act’s commitment to neutrality and fairness was
strengthened by subsequent presidential directives that
prohibited an employee’s removal for political or religious
reasons (in 1896), and guaranteed due process for those who
had been hired competitively (1897).
Although the Civil Service Act was influenced by the British
public service, the Senate inserted some major provisos that
were uniquely American.
One such clause was that civil service examinations must be
“practical in character.”
In stark contrast to Western Europe, the law laid no tracks
between the civil service and the universities, and it was only in
1905 that the Civil Service Commission first observed that “the
greatest defect in the Federal Service is the lack of opportunity
for ambitious, well-educated young men”;
a serious effort to correct that deficiency surfaced, eventually,
in the 1930s.
Similarly, the act set up no body of permanent, high-level,
professional public administrators, as is the norm in Western
Europe.
The unintended consequence is that Washington now oozes
presidentially-appointed political executives, who consistently
underperform relative to careerists.
8
“Goodness” versus “Badness”
“Government by the good” led, in 1907, to President Theodore
Roosevelt’s Civil Service Rule I, which prohibited almost seven
out of ten federal workers from participating in political
campaigns and barred the solicitation of political contributions
from federal employees.
These reforms were strengthened and broadened by the Political
Activities Act, also known as the Hatch Act, of 1939.
In 1940, the Hatch Act was amended to extend its coverage to
state and local workers whose salaries are paid entirely or in
part with federal funds,
and to prohibit these employees from running for public office.
More recently, Washington has lightly loosened political
restrictions on government workers.
The Hatch Act Reform Amendments of 1993 lifted the 1907
prohibition on federal employees participating in political
campaign, but they still may not be candidates in partisan
elections or engage in political activity while on duty.
In 2012, Congress passed the 2012 Hatch Act Modernization
Act, which continues the ban on entering elections for those
state and local employees who are paid entirely with federal
grants or loans,
but lifted the prohibition from those who are paid only in part
with federal funds.
In 2016, the Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to
discharge or demote a (in this case, local) government employee
because he or she supports a particular political candidate.
Over time, civil service commissions, which typically
administered these and similar policies, became associated
“with morality, with a connotation of ‘goodness’ vs. ‘badness,’
quite apart from the purposes for which people were
employed.”27
9
Government by Scientific Managers, 1906–1936
Despite government by the good, good government remained
elusive.
In 1912, an analyst decried the “snail like pace” of government
employees, alleging that they wasted from 40 to 70 percent of
their work time.
The influential New York Bureau of Municipal Research, a
privately-supported think tank founded in 1906, agreed with this
assessment, and its first forays focused on getting public
“workers to do the work they were hired to do,” a concentration
that quickly incorporated a “strong link between the bureau and
scientific management.”
It was, a likable link, and it left legacies. A major one is the
position classification system, first adopted by Chicago in 1912,
and which has been described as
“the ascendancy of scientific management.”
The council-manager form of local government emerged as a
direct outgrowth of the period’s precepts; the first government
to adopt a council-manager plan was Sumter, South Carolina, in
1912, and, by 1930, 418 local governments had adopted it.
Certainly government by scientific managers served to extend
the reach and power of the Civil Service System. Between 1900
and 1930:
the proportion of federal civilian employees administered by the
Civil Service Commission shot from 46 percent to 80 percent;
the number of states that had merit systems expanded from two
to nine;33 and cities with civil service commissions nearly
quadrupled from sixty-five to 250.
10
Government by Policymaking Administrators, 1937–1954
In 1937, the report of the president’s Committee on
Administrative Management (more commonly known as the
Brownlow Committee, after its chair, Louis Brownlow) was
published,
and, for the first time since its founding, the usefulness and
power of the Civil Service Commission were quietly questioned.
“Personnel was seen as a principal, if not the major, tool of
management,” and the committee recommended that each major
agency have its own personnel manager reporting to its top
administrator.
The president quickly complied, in 1938, with Executive Order
7916. The Hoover Commission’s first report, issued in 1949,
also took up this cudgel, and “little Hoover commissions” in
many states did the same. Today, agency-based HR offices are
commonplace.
There was more. “Administration” also expressed the long-
denied reality that public administrators make public policy.
When, in 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, assumed
the presidency after two decades of Democratic government, he
discovered, maddeningly,
a huge civilian bureaucracy that had more than quadrupled in
size since the last Republican administration, and which was
run by entrenched Democratic policymakers, who, perversely,
were protected by
civil service regulations that were based on the premise that
politics should not intrude on administration!
Although academia during this period was barely beginning to
recognize that bureaucrats made public policy, elected
policymakers clearly understood that they did.
11
Government by Professionals, 1955–Present
By mid-century, another value was entering the milieu of public
HR: professionalism.
The professional period encompasses two distinct systems of
public HR.
One is Specialized Public Professional Systems, or those public
personnel systems that are geared to the career needs of high-ly-
educated specialists.
The other is the Professional Public Administration System,
which reflects the idea that FIR systems should encourage
effective and efficient management by competent generalist
administrators.
These professional systems are two of the five systems of public
human capital management, each with its own values and
mission,
the remaining three are the Civil Service, Collective, and
Political Executive systems.
12
The Civil Service System: The Meaning Of Merit
The civil service has been the historic heart of public
administration. The general Civil Service System, or merit
system (a phrase that emphasizes the values of public service, in
contrast to its bureaucratic structure),
is career personnel who have tenure and who are administered
according to traditional merit practices.
The civil service is independent of government and is also
composed mainly of career bureaucrats hired on professional
merit rather than appointed or elected, whose institutional
tenure typically survives transitions of political leadership.
It is the opposite of the spoils system
A civil servant or public servant is a person employed in the
public sector on behalf of a government department or agency.
A civil servant or public servant's first priority is to represent
the interests of citizens.
Workers in "non-departmental public bodies" (sometimes called
"Quangos") may also be classed as civil servants for the purpose
of statistics and possibly for their terms and conditions.
Collectively a state's civil servants form its civil service or
public service.
13
Public Human Capital Management
What do governments’ human capital managers do? Their major
duties, listed in the order of the most time that they devote to
them, are:
recruiting and hiring;
benefits administration;
pay administration;
developing FIR policy, such as retirement plans;
position classification;
training and development;
processing grievances;
appraising and measuring employee performance;
brokering conflict; managing diversity;
and collective bargaining, among other activities.
FIR professionals also may influence the morale of their public
agencies.
It seems that if FIR workers are happy in their work, then their
agencies’ co-workers are happier than the overall norm.
14
Grass-Roots: Recruiting Bureaucrats
Asked “which workforce issues are important to your
organization?” more than nine out of ten state and local
officials replied that
“recruiting and retaining qualified personnel with needed skills
to public service.
State and local governments are abandoning printed media in
recruiting and are going full-blast electronic.
Eighty-four percent of these governments cite “online job
advertising” as their “most successful” recruitment practice in
“reaching qualified candidates,”
followed by “government web sites”
and “social media;
“state/ local newsletters,”.
Those states with more usable Web sites [receive] significantly
more applications per job opening.
The states are introducing major reforms designed to
decentralize and simplify recruiting.
A plurality of states, twenty-two, have decentralized
recruitment to the agencies, and another eighteen share this
responsibility with the central personnel bureau.
Nevertheless, nearly four out of ten state agency heads think
that the complexity of personnel procedures
is their most serious impediment for recruiting.
Local governments have focused on proactive recruitment.
Most solicit applications from minority and women’s
organizations, state and private employment agencies, unions,
professional organizations, and use internships as a recruiting
tool.
15
Does Washington Hire Well?
In spite of itself, Washington may be hiring fairly well.
Twenty-nine percent of federal executives and top professionals
who were hired from outside the government think that the
quality of federal supervisors is better than in their last place of
employment and 21 percent think that the quality of their co-
workers is higher.
Most of the data support these opinions. Almost half of all
entering federal employees have college degrees in specifically
relevant fields.
There is “little difference in the education levels and grade
point averages” among applicants who accept offers of federal
employment and those who take other options, an indication that
Washington competes successfully in hiring.
State Hiring share at least one hiring issue with Washington:
“The size of the applicant pool for career professional positions
is not likely to be large [and] the quality of the applicant pool is
not likely to be very strong.”
16
A Caveat about Federal and State Hiring
Despite corporate managers’ contempt for working in the
federal government, a solid majority of upper-level new federal
hires and a dominating plurality of entry-level ones who were
hired from outside the government nevertheless are drawn from
the private sector.
Overwhelmingly, these sector switchers cite “job security” as
their leading motivation for making the switch.
State mid- and upper-level administrators who were hired from
corporations typically supervised few corporate subordinates,
and their switch often entailed a public-sector promotion.
Do these patterns imply that the public sector has a special
attraction for managers whose corporate careers are stuttering,
or even stuck,
and only then does government become their belated second
choice?
It is an all-the-more intriguing question when we realize that
only 3 percent of upper-level new federal hires and 4 percent of
entry-level ones who are hired from outside the government are
drawn from the independent sector—
the sector that far surpasses the other two in terms of its
employees’ disdain for job security and their strong need for
socially meaningful work.
17
Classifying Bureaucrats
Position classification is a core tenet of the Civil Service
System. Indeed, employees in the civil service are also known
as “classified” employees.
Classifying Federal Employees Until 1923, when the
Classification Act was enacted, federal supervisors had
unlimited autonomy to determine the pay of workers,
and federal employees were growing increasingly angry about
their lack of rigor and, often, fairness.
The act authorized the Civil Service Commission to group
federal positions into rational classes
and pay their occupants accordingly.
A more comprehensive Classification Act was enacted in 1949.
It established the dominant classification system, the General
Schedule (GS), composed of fifteen grades for civilian workers,
and, within these grades, there are roughly 420 to 450
occupations, as OPM continuously revises the number.
At the very top are the 8,000 or so members of the Senior
Executive, Senior Professional, and Senior Foreign services,
each with its own classification system.
Blue-collar and Postal Service employees, and about twenty
agencies, also have their own systems.
Classifying at the Grass Roots All state governments have
position classification systems.
Eight states have decentralized classification from their central
personnel office to the agencies, and another eight distribute
this duty between their HR and line agencies.
A dozen states require their cities to adopt classification plans,
although almost all local governments of any size have them.
Most cities and counties use a single classification system,
although, oddly, the smaller the jurisdiction, the more likely
that there will be multiple systems.
18
Training
Training workers to improve their workplace skills is closely
and clearly linked with organizational productivity.
“The most effective private firms” spend from 3 to 5 percent of
their budgets on training.
Training heightens nonprofit, federal, and state and local
employees’ job satisfaction, engagement, and organizational
commitment, and lowers their inclination to consider quitting
their jobs—
not a surprising correlation in light of the fact that, as
government training expenditures rise, so do promotion rates,
and significantly so.
Evidence also suggests that a greater investment in training
reduces public employees’ discrimination charges.
19
Training Feds
Most federal training emerged when the Government Employees
Training Act was enacted in 1958, and
today there are Management Development Centers and a Federal
Executive Institute dedicated to training federal administrators.
Washington spends a modest 1.3 percent of its “personnel
budget” on training, and, still worse, federal administrators are
prone to focus on training programs when they need to cut
budgets,
and to cut them back more than other programs.
This need for more training seems to be present at every level
of the federal service, from top, to middle, to bottom.
Nearly two-thirds of the Senior Executive Service has not
received “formal executive coaching,” a rising proportion, even
though those with fewer than ten years of experience ranked
training and development third as “the key driver of satisfaction
and commitment, not pay.”
The Secret Service’s uniformed officers received a
average of just twenty-five minutes of training over the course
of a year;
A promising innovation is the growing use of training via
computers. Seventy percent of “federal leaders” (GS 13 and
higher) think that “digital technology has improved access to
training relevant to agency mission.”
20
Training at the Grass Roots
Nearly three-quarters of state and local officials report that they
receive “regular training,” a proportion that is far higher than
that of the feds.
State administrators spend an average of twenty-five hours a
year in “formal classroom training.”
It appears that most training for these administrators is
conducted by universities.
State governments devote, on average, “more than 1.3 percent”
of their annual payrolls to training, a conservative calculation,
with some states spending “upwards of 5 percent.”
“Unfortunately, many states report that
the training budget is the first thing eliminated in spending
freezes or budget cuts.”
More than nine-tenths of the states impose training
requirements on municipal and county employees, focusing on
police and fire fighters;
only a small minority of states requires training for “other”
local employees.
21
Bolstering Bureaucrats’ Bravery
Whistleblowers, who are found in all sectors, are a courageous
(some would say crazy) class of employees who “blow the
whistle” on their organizations
for engaging in shoddy or corrupt practices.
Persons who expose governments’ security secrets—all national
governments have such secrets, and they have them for the same
reason that middle-aged people wear clothes
—do not qualify as whistleblowers.
Encouraging Whistle Blowing
The federal, state, and local governments have enacted laws that
encourage whistle blowing.
22
Whistleblower: A Risk Worth Taking- Maybe
A whistleblower is a person who exposes any kind of
information or activity that is deemed illegal, unethical, or not
correct within
an organization that is either private or public.
The typical whistleblower in the public and private sectors is a
well-educated family man in his late forties who has been in his
organization about seven years
and has a strong belief in “universal moral codes.”
Those who become whistleblowers can choose to bring
information or allegations to surface either internally or
externally.
Internally, a whistleblower can bring his/her accusations to the
attention of other people within the accused organization such
as an immediate supervisor.
Externally, a whistleblower can bring allegations to light by
contacting a third party outside of an accused organization such
as the media, government, law enforcement, or those who are
concerned.
Whistleblowers, however, take the risk of facing stiff reprisal
and retaliation from those who are accused or alleged of
wrongdoing.
23
Federal Encouragement
The most significant legislation that Congress has passed is the
1986 amendments to the False Claims Act of 1863.
They permit the federal government to award whistleblowers
from 15 to 30 percent of any money recovered from fraudulent
practices, with the exception of tax fraud, that they report in
any federally funded contract or program.
These amendments have been quite effective.
Prior to their passage, only three out of ten federal workers who
observed an illegal or wasteful activity reported it, but,
following their enactment, fully half did so.
A decade after their passage, more than 1,100 companies were
exposed by whistleblowers for defrauding the government,
compared with just twenty during the previous decade.166
24
Securing Bureaucrats’ Jobs
The popular image of the Civil Service System is one of a job
for life; 58 percent of Americans think that government offers
better job security than business, compared with 13 percent who
say
the same for business versus government, or a factor of better
than four.
Do, in fact, government employees actually have more secure
jobs than private-sector employees?
You bet they do.
Americans commonly assume that the long tenures that job
security brings equate with mediocre performance. This is far
from the case, at least in government, for two reasons.
First, multiple studies have found that greater job security
correlates clearly and positively with higher productivity in
governments,
Second, even when there is relatively little job security in the
public sector, there is no “strong evidence” that managers take
advantage of it by dismissing low-performing employees at a
significantly accelerated rate.
25
Civil Service Slippage at the Grass Roots
For more than thirty years, Congress encouraged state and local
governments to adopt merit systems.
The 1939 amendments to the Social Security Act of 1935
mandated that states establish systems for their unemployment-
security and public- assistance employees, or lose their Social
Security funds.
All states quickly complied.
The Intergovernmental Personnel Act of 1970 offered grants to
subnational governments to expand and refine their civil
services, but, as Congress grew disenchanted with merit
systems,
funding vanished within a decade.
As in Washington, the Civil Service System’s grass-roots’ reach
peaked in the 1980s, when about three-fourths of the states had
comprehensive merit systems, and 60 percent of all state
employees worked in them.
Eighty-eight percent of cities with populations of more than
50,000 had merit systems, and an estimated 95 percent of all
municipal employees worked in them.
These numbers would soon wither. By the 1990s, literally
hundreds of grass-roots’ personnel reforms were in the offing.
26
Civil Service Reform in the States
At the end of the first millennium, “the general picture that
emerges [in state governments] is one of administrators trapped
by rigid, slow, and cumbersome systems that are incapable of
meeting government’s human resources needs.”
This was especially unfortunate since personnel is the single
largest consumer of revenue in the states; “almost everything a
state does is labor intensive.” But change was afoot.
In 1996, Georgia initiated civil service reforms that were the
most sweeping of any government at the time; other states
followed
Sixteen states have contracted out at least some of their
personnel services to the private sector
There has been a discernible decline in state-employee job
security in thirty-one states, twenty-eight of which have
adopted, in whole or part, at-will employment —that is,
employees serve at the sufferance of their supervisors sans
protection by the merit system.
Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas
have, for all intents and purposes, eliminated their civil
services.
States most likely to implement these reforms tend to have
relatively weak public unions, Republican-controlled
governments, high administrative and legislative
professionalism, low unemployment, and plentiful resources.
Has the stature of state merit systems been diminished by these
reforms? Yes.
In 1983, the heads of personnel agencies in thirty-nine states
reported directly to the governor, but two decades later, this
held true in only twenty states.
Georgia’s personnel reforms, cited as the “most dramatic
reforms” of any state, were hailed by prestigious professionals
as “likely the best in the country.
There are, however, some benefits for civil services in reformed
states.
The more that governments decentralize human resource
activities, the more that “positive relationships” develop
between “senior line managers” and human capital executives,
and these relationships increase HR’s influence and
performance.
27
Civil Service Reform in Communities
As with the states, personnel is localities’ largest single
devourer of dollars, so it follows that civil service reform is at
the heart of local governmental reform; perhaps 70 percent of
all local reforms relate to personnel policies.
Five percent (precisely the percentage it was thirty years
earlier256) of cities and counties contract out their “personnel
services” to a for-profit corporation, more than 1 percent are
delivered by another government, and half a percent contract
with a nonprofit organization. Nearly 9 percent of local
governments deliver personnel services via “public employees
in part,” meaning that corporate or non-profit employees are
involved, as well as the government’s own employees.257
28
The Impact of Civil Service Reform
As with the states, personnel is localities’ largest single
devourer of dollars,
so it follows that civil service reform is at the heart of local
governmental reform;
Civil service reform has been remarkably successful.
The states, where reforms have been relatively radical, provide
the best examples of this.
Hiring, promoting, reassigning, and firing have been
streamlined, and, although at-will employees are dismissed
more expeditiously than are employees who are protected by
civil service regulations, at-will employment does not associate
with greater numbers of employees being fired.
State employees who serve at will are “significantly less
negative about the full range” of civil service reforms than are
their co-workers who are in the civil service,
but state personnel managers display, at best, only a rueful
acceptance and some distrust of at-will reform.
An understandable concern among traditionalists was that
reform would re-introduce unfettered patronage to state
government,
but this has not happened.
We must note that a sad consequence of public personnel reform
is that HR directors, and the enterprise of public human capital
in general, often are sidelined, ignored, or dissed.
This seems especially true at the federal level, where morale in
most agencies has been in decline for years, a decline that may
be linked to the corresponding decline of HR management.
29
The Collective System: Birth Of Organized Labor
Public human capital system is the Collective System, and it
refers primarily to
blue-collar workers and white-collar professionals whose jobs
are administered via agreements between management and
organized workers.
The core of the Collective System is worker solidarity; in a
word, unions.
Efforts to organize public employees first surfaced in the 1830s,
and with reason:
wages and working conditions typically were abysmal.
With the passage, in 1935, of the National Labor Relations Act
(the Wagner Act), which guaranteed private-sector workers the
rights to unionize, bargain collectively, and strike, unions
surged forward.
At its apex, in 1953, organized labor included almost a third of
all nonagricultural employees in the nation.267
30
Bargaining with Governments
Collective bargaining, or collective negotiations, is a method in
which representatives of employees and employers jointly
make policies about employees’ working terms and conditions.
Historically, collective bargaining has largely been the preserve
of the private sector, but, in 2009, this relationship reversed for
the first time,
and the public sector had over 9 percent more workers covered
by negotiated agreements than did the private one.
By 2013, the traditional pattern had reestablished itself, and
businesses had nearly 10 percent more workers who bargained
collectively than did governments.
Of those public employees who are covered by a negotiated
agreement,
59 percent work for a local government,
27 percent for the states,
8 percent are federal civilian employees,
6 percent are Postal Service workers.
31
Striking Government
There is scant agreement on whether public employees have a
right to strike, with some arguing that striking is an act of
insurrection, and others contending that it is a fundamental
freedom.
The courts have held that there is no constitutional right of
public workers to strike, but neither has the judiciary prohibited
the enactment of laws permitting them to strike.
Striking Washington The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 was the first
legislation to prohibit strikes by federal employees. In 1970,
more than 210,000 postal workers violated the law by staging an
unprecedented walkout;
the Labor Department met almost all their demands, and the
strike was over in just two weeks.
A nonplussed Congress soon divested itself of its postal
problem by passing the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970,
which transformed the Post Office Department, a federal
agency, into the Postal Service, a federal corporation.
More broadly, Congress reasserted its anti-strike policy with
the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which forbids strikes and
slowdowns by federal employees.
In 1981, however, 95 percent of the 13,000 members of the
Professional Association of Air Traffic Controllers (PATCO),
possibly justifiably, probably arrogantly, and certainly
foolishly, struck.
President Ronald Reagan promptly decertified PATCO—that is,
the federal government no longer recognized PATCO as the
official representative of its members—
and dismissed more than 11,000 air traffic controllers, breaking
their union in the process. Reagan’s decertification was historic,
and arguably strengthened the hand of all governments in
dealing with unions.
32
Why Do Incompetent Federal Employees Hang On?
Nonperformers are deeply entrenched in their jobs, and average
an astonishing fourteen years in the federal employ. How could
this be? There are several reasons.
A Little-Used Probationary Period
An Awful Appeals Process
Taking Unsatisfactory Action
Regrettably, supervisors often take “disciplinary” action that
effectively rewards incompetents and sanctions productive
employees.
A Supine System
Federal supervisors receive little support from above
Congress Intervenes (Temporarily)
State administrators seem to be doing a better job of dealing
with incompetents than
their federal counterparts.
Although a third of state agency heads think that personnel
rules make it difficult to discipline or discharge poor
performers,
they nevertheless terminate classified workers in a speedy
twenty-nine days, on average, for “performance issues,” and an
even briefer eighteen for “behavioral issues.”
33
Some Helpful Hints on Dealing with Incompetents
Not all is lost in the battle against incompetents. Research has
found that, regardless of sector, some underused techniques can
be effective. These include:
■ Confront with clarity, empathy, and privacy. When
supervisors deal with a poor performer quickly, directly, issue
more warnings and formal sanctions more frequently, fire (when
possible) promptly when warnings fail, and do so while treating
the underperformer with dignity, their units’ productivity is
higher than those of supervisors who do not.510 Of course, any
conferences with poor performers should be done in private.
■ Put all the rotten apples in the same barrel. Not only does
isolating them reduce their ability to infect good apples, but a
bunch of egocentric, energetic, destructive, overbearing people
often can come up with excellent, creative ideas.511
■ Make accountability human. When radiologists saw
photographs of patients whose X-rays they were examining,
their diagnostic accuracy quintupled relative to when they did
not see their patients’ photographs.512
■ Let the sunshine in. Employees are less honest and more
selfish when they work in dark recesses or wear sunglasses in
their office.513 Light up the workplace and beware the
employee who sports shades in it.
34
The Attributes of Effective Classification
One is the identification those attributes that an effective public
job classification system should have. These include the
following:
■ Equity: All employees with comparable qualifications and
responsibilities should be assigned to the same grade level and
be paid within ranges that are comparable to similar
qualifications and responsibilities in the private sector.
■ Transparency: The classification system should be predictable
and comprehensible to management, employees, and taxpayers.
■ Flexibility: The classification system should allow for
adjustments in pay (among other potential adjustments) within a
uniform, government-wide system so that agency needs and
missions may be fulfilled.
■ Adaptability: Fundamental reviews of the entire classification
system should be undertaken periodically so that the system’s
adaptability to changing workplace and workforce
characteristics is assured.
■ Simplicity: The classification system should enable employee
mobility among agencies, maintain a rational number of
occupations and meaningful differences in skills and
performance within those occupations, and be cost-effective and
easily managed.
■ Appropriateness: Positions should be classified based on
mission needs, and employees should be classified according to
their unique abilities so that those positions may be filled
appropriately.
35
Lessons Learned
There are some organizational factors that encourage, indirectly
but clearly, more effective performance management. These
include:
employees who are engaged in their jobs; organizational and
managerial flexibility; high levels of trust and professionalism
in the organization; and useful performance appraisals.
More proactively, public and nonprofit administrators also can
act in ways that will result in better performance management.
These include the following.
■Evaluate the effectiveness of the agency’s current performance
appraisal system.
■Establish a separate budget for the performance pay system.
■Involve employees, including union officials, in building a
high performance organization and in revising the pay system.
■Assure that there is a “clear separation of interests,” such as
separate career paths, “between politicians and senior civil
servants.”
■Communicate goals clearly.
■Link individual objectives with organizational goals.
■Make sure that rewards are high and clearly differentiated.
■Link performance pay with additional incentives, such as
promotion.
■Select supervisors who are flexible and who will effectively
manage performance.
■Hold every supervisor accountable for effective performance
management.
■Arrange so that the system can be reviewed both internally and
externally.
■Provide supervisors with the training, resources, and
managerial support they need to improve their employees’
performance.
■Say “thank you” when it is warranted.
36
The Rise of the White House Loyalty Test
37
The Fibers of Organizations: People
1
1
2
“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much”
― Helen Keller
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller
Why Work For The People?
Threads” served as our metaphor for theories of organizations.
“Fabric” referred to the interwoven forces that form
organizations.
And “fibers”—the woof, weft, and tensile strength of
organizations—describes people in organizations.
Sixty-three percent of government workers prefer to work for
government rather than business (preferred by 36 percent),
and local government employees appear to feel the most
positive about working for government.
3
3
The Draw of the Public Sector
The reasons why people enter, or do not enter, public service
are reasonably clear.
Starkly Different Values
Those people who enter government careers have
high public service motivation (i.e., the desire to serve society
in a secular context), positive views of the public sector, and
negative perceptions of the private one.
Those who enter business hold values that are “completely
opposite…
Money Does Not Make Their World Go Around,
It appears that high salaries are considerably less important to
those who work in government than they are to those who enter
the corporate sphere.
Note: When it comes to compensation, governments can’t win.
4
Making a Difference
The classic view of public administration is that of a calling,
and, to a surprising degree, it still is.
Additional research confirms that mission matters.
Holding a public administrative office correlates more strongly
with public service motivation than any other factor, including
even one’s “personal characteristics.”
Personal characteristics that associate with high levels of public
service motivation include women, people with more education,
and members of professional associations.
There is a tangible connection between public service
motivation and making a difference—a good difference.
There is an additional motivation that underlie why people work
for government, and it eclipses all else. It is: job security.
5
The Draw of the Independent Sector
The sector with the most committed professionals is the
independent one.
Money matters for the most part, much less to these workers
than those in other sectors.
However a large number of nonprofit chief executives are paid
between $500,000 and $1 million—compensation that exceeds
that of any public counterpart—and the median CEO pay
exceeds $120,000.)
The opportunity to do “something worthwhile” in their
organizations means much more to the purpose-driven worker as
to their wiliness to serve as volunteers more intensively than
either their public or private counterparts.
Note: because job security means much less to nonprofit
employees, many nonprofit employees are more inclined
to undertake riskier behavior and make riskier choices than are
workers in the other two sectors.
6
Building A Bridge Through Public Service
7
Psychological Man
Administrative man
Rational, or Economic, man
“Administrative Man”
In Models of Man, Herbert Simon contrasted psychological, or
Freudian, man, as the model of the human condition with
rational, or economic, man, which is the model used by
economists to predict the behavior of the economy.
Economic man has the same goal (acquiring money) as everyone
else in the economy, and behaves (ration-ally) just like
everyone else to achieve it.
Administrative man bridges psychological man and rational
man. Administrative man has all the unique idiosyncrasies and
limited reasoning power of psychological man,
but, like economic man, also understands the mission of the
organization, and knows that his or her interests and those of
the organization can be somehow synchronous and
complementary.
This freakish fusion of the Freudian and the fiscal, when
combined with any organization’s obsession with minimizing
uncertainty, can produce “the bureaucratic personality,”
that can render the bureaucracy ever more rigidly where rule-
bound can result in “over conformity” among its fellow, who
have made inflexibility and indifference an art form.
8
The Energetic, Committed Bureaucrat
Americans work hard. On average, they work longer than do
workers in other developed countries, or about thirty-four hours
per week;
a fifth of Americans work forty-nine hours or more per week,
and more than two-fifths take no vacations, not even of one day.
And their work hours are growing; Americans work eleven more
hours per week, on average, than they did in the 1970s.
Public Administrators seem to “hang in there” with the same
tenacity as their private-sector counterparts, and studies “do not
indicate a terrible malaise in the public sector if the private
sector is used as a baseline.”
Where employees in the public and private sectors diverge is in
the depth of commitment to their jobs, and some research
suggests that public administrators may hold a passion for their
work that borders on the unhealthy.
Bureaucratic Burnout among American managers attains
“serious proportions in both arenas,” but burnout in the public
sector is “not appreciably worse” than in the private sector.
“City employees feel more time stress than their state and
federal counterparts,” and it is indisputable that some types of
local employment, such as public safety, have inherently high
levels of stress.
Nonprofit Professionals may be the most devoted to their jobs.
They score highest in “total energy and investment in the job,”
followed by government workers and corporate employees,
respectively.
9
Job Turnover – Maybe?
Most Americans like their work. National polls taken over three
decades find that, in nearly every survey, Americans report that
they are satisfied with their jobs, and would take the same job
again “without hesitation,” and
only one out of eight is dissatisfied with his or her job.
Bureaucratic Satisfaction Bureaucrats provide some variation on
these themes, although the research on this topic is singularly
opaque, and contradictory findings on the job satisfaction of
public administrators are “equally abundant.”51
There is, however, at least one commonality: public employees
who possess emotional intelligence, or the ability to
comprehend, harness, and manage moods in themselves and in
others,
are more satisfied with their jobs than are those who lack such
intelligence.
From the 1960s through the 1970s, the job satisfaction of
federal workers was low and falling lower. For the last three
decades, however,
job satisfaction has risen steadily, and, over thirty years federal
employees report that they are not only satisfied in their jobs,
but
would recommend their government as a place to work.
10
Today’s Management Challenge
In sum, the public and nonprofit managers’ maze: Compared
with business administrators, government executives are faced
with employees who are:
Hypercritical loners determined to do something of social
importance,
Employees demanding unremitting recognition but who are
uninterested in being bought off with monetary bonuses.
Managers in the independent sector share these same
characteristics—with a vengeance.
They are more committed to making a difference in society and
have lower needs for wealth, recognition, and job security than
either public administrators or private ones.
According to some research, nonprofit employees also have a
greater need to dominate colleagues and may be wilier in
getting their way than are their private-sector counterparts.
Certainly, these are precisely the kinds of qualities that we want
in our public and nonprofit administrators.
But they make for a tough workforce to manage—and to be
managed by.
11
Are We a Product of Our Birth Environment?
The circumstances under which people are born and how they
mature determine how people perceive their organization and
behave in it.
It appears that the order in which they were born caused the
child to behave and develop certain characteristics. In specified
cases, the firstborn child that was studied as an adult, continued
to demonstrate the identical traits as seen when they were a
child.
It has been observed that the first born is often raised with more
attention than the following child or children, which causes
the first born child to develop certain leadership characteristics.
Studies that were related to the U.S presidents, discovered that
more than half were firstborn, the rest were middle and four
were lastborn. After investigating the birth order of the U.S
presidents,
important leaders were also looked at and showed the same
outcome; a large number of every type of leader was firstborn
rather than last.
Note: Although not infallible, birth order is the major
determining factor in explaining why some people defend the
establishment and other revolt against it.
Firstborns are, literally, born to conserve. Laterborn’s are,
literally, born to rebel.
12
Organizational Culture Vs Turning Points
Birth order plays a large part in the progressive mastery of
psychological tasks that determine what sort of
leader, follower, or stakeholder one becomes.
How one approaches these tasks is known as “turning points.”
The first turning point occurs from birth to year one, when trust
or mistrust is inculcated into one’s psyche as a result of one’s
early experiences with others.
From one to six, the development of autonomy versus shame
and doubt.
From six to ten, initiative or guilt.
From ten to fourteen, industry or inferiority.
From fourteen to twenty, identity versus role confusion.
From twenty to forty, intimacy or isolation.
From forty to sixty-five, generativity versus stagnation.
And from sixty-five until death, ego integrity as opposed to
overwhelming despair.
Should one take a negative path at any given turning point, all
is not lost; with effort, a positive path can be taken at the next
turning point.
13
Is the Organization a Product of our National Culture ?
Just as birth order and aging influence how people inside
organizations behave in them,
so does the larger society in which they live.
National culture, or “the collective mental programming of
people in an environment,” is perhaps
the single greatest external determinant of organizational
behavior.
One indicator:
senior corporate executives judge a startling 42 percent of their
managers assigned to projects overseas to have failed.
14
Yes We Are!
National cultures are reflected in their bureaucracies,
even when those bureaucracies administer cultures far removed
from their own.
15
Organizational Behavior
National Culture
Turning Points
What Is Leadership?
Leadership is both a research area and a practical skill
encompassing the ability of an individual or organization to
"lead" or guide other individuals, teams, or entire organizations.
Folks who attain the position in a administrative organization
most likely embrace the creed that “the superior of all is the
servant of all.”
Leadership “at the political level is an influence relationship
among leaders and followers who intend real change that reflect
their mutual purposes.”
These definitions stresses
non-coercive manipulation by both leaders and followers;
the presence of multiple leaders as well as multiple followers;
the purposeful attainment of substantive change;
and teamwork.
Despite the fact that most of the country’s founders questioned
the whole idea of political leadership,
the United States is the focal point for much of the leadership
literature.
16
Leadership or Administration?
Is leadership different from administration? Yes. Is one more
important to organizational success than the other? No.
Leadership deals with change. Administration copes with
complexity. Both are equally vital to organizational success.
Both leadership and administration involve
“deciding what needs to be done,”
creating the work and relationships to achieve it, “
and then trying to insure that those people actually do the job.”
Leadership’s way of accomplishing these three tasks is to set a
direction—create a vision—for the organization, and then
align people, communicate, and inspire to fulfill it.
Administration plans and budgets for the vision, and
organizes, staffs, controls activities, and solves problems to
implement it.
In periods of slow change and a placid environment,
administration is of greater significance; in times of rapid
change and a turbulent environment, leadership is.
“A peace time army can usually survive with good …
management up and down the hierarchy …. A war time army,
however, needs competent leadership at all levels.
No one yet has figured out how to manage people effectively
into battle; they must be led.”1
17
Full Range Leadership Model
The Full Range of Leadership Model (FRLM) is a general
leadership theory focusing on the behavior of leaders towards
the workforce in different work situations.
The FRLM relates transactional and transformational leadership
style with laissez-faire leadership style.
18
19
Transactional Leadership
is a part of a style of leadership that focuses on supervision,
organization, and performance; it is an integral part of the Full
Range Leadership Model.
Transactional leadership is a style of leadership in which
leaders promote compliance by followers through both rewards
and punishments.
Through a rewards and punishments system, transactional
leaders are able to keep followers motivated for the short-term.
Unlike transformational leaders, those using the transactional
approach are not looking to change the future, they look to keep
things the same.
Leaders using transactional leadership as a model pay attention
to followers' work in order
to find faults and deviations.
This type of leadership is effective in crisis and emergency
situations,
as well as for projects that need to be carried out in a specific
way.
20
Transformational Leadership
is a theory of leadership where a leader works with teams to
identify needed change,
creating a vision to guide the change through inspiration, and
executing the change in tandem with committed members of a
group;
it is an integral part of the Full Range Leadership Model.
Transformational leadership serves to enhance the motivation,
morale, and job performance of followers through a variety of
mechanisms; these include
connecting the follower's sense of identity and self to a project
and to the collective identity of the organization;
being a role model for followers in order to inspire them and to
raise their interest in the project;
challenging followers to take greater ownership for their work,
and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of followers,
allowing the leader to align followers with tasks that enhance
their performance.
The transactional approach has its limitations. It concentrates
only on the problems confronting the leader in dealing with a
small group, but not the leader’s subordinates and the problems
confronting them.
What kinds of transactions, or exchanges, occur between and
among leaders and followers that facilitate or impair both the
leader’s and the group’s effectiveness?
21
What is Political Culture?
Political culture is defined by the International Encyclopedia of
the Social Sciences as the "set of attitudes, beliefs and
sentiments that give order and meaning to a political process
and which provide the underlying assumptions and rules that
govern behavior in the political system".
It encompasses both the political ideals and operating norms of
a polity.
Political culture is thus the manifestation of
the psychological and subjective dimensions of politics.
A political culture is the product of both the history of a
political system and the histories of the members.
Thus, it is rooted equally in public events and private
experience.
22
What is the Relationship of Political & Civic Culture?
The term “political culture” refers to the specifically political
orientations, attitudes toward the political system and its
various parts, and attitudes toward the role of self in the system.
We speak of a political culture just as we can speak of an
economic culture or a religious culture.
It is a set of orientations toward a special set of social objects
and processes
In describing the values of a nation, civic culture is a
subspecies of the political culture which includes:
positive orientations toward a democratic infrastructure;
the acceptance of norms of civic obligation;
and the development of a sense of civic competence among a
substantial proportion of the population.
Note: A civic culture is one committed to democracy and civic
engagement.
23
Political Culture Of The United States
Political culture is a part of a society for which shared attitudes
and beliefs establish a unique identity with regard to public and
private governance.
In the United States, at least three political cultures took root
during the colonial period.
They were formed in New England by religious refugees from
England, in the Mid-Atlantic region by Dutch settlers, in
Virginia by English adventurers seeking fortune in the New
World, and in Carolina by English investors who envisioned a
model constitutional society.
In Virginia and Carolina, and later elsewhere in the South,
Scots-Irish settlers influenced the cultural hearth that created
the American South.
Each began with established cultures of the British Isles and the
Netherlands, evolving into unique cultures that remain in
existence today in the United States.
24
How Does Political Culture Impact Leadership?
Because leadership can be defined as a process of influencing
others to agree on a shared purpose, and to work towards shared
objectives.
Although leaders may be required to undertake managerial
duties as well, leaders, whether politically or administrative,
typically focus on inspiring followers and creating a shared
organizational culture and values.
Although managers deal with complexity, while leaders deal
with initiating and adapting to change,
many organization leaders take responsibility to direct and guild
the tasks of planning, budgeting, organizing, staffing,
controlling and problem solving.
This is accomplished by take on the task of setting a direction
or vision, empowering people with shared goals and objectives
,
and communicating, and motivating along cultural guidelines.
25
Are Leaders Needed?
The dramatic and inspiring image of “The Leader” at the head
of charging warriors persuades the less palpitating among us to
ask: Are we being conned? Do we really need leaders?
More precisely put, do organizations need hierarchical leaders,
or those people who occupy high executive office?
This question is even more radical than that of whether we need
leaders, because chief executives do a lot more than lead.
“Leadership” is only one of ten distinct roles, such as
disturbance handler and spokesperson, that an executive plays,
and these executive duties are common to both the public and
private sectors, perhaps because “the private sector is becoming
more like the public sector.”
How do organizations get things done?
The answer: Those who get things done in organizations are
those who have the knowledge and skills that are crucial to the
achievement of organizational objectives.
The Limits of Leadership. But is it possible that organizations
really do not need chief executives and top administrators?
Well, yes, at least in a fairly substantial minority of
organizations in all sectors.
Why? Because environmental forces, and, less commonly,
internal ones (such as smoothly functioning teams of
employees), can render leaders moot.
26
Who’s In Charge: Leader Or Follower?
Contingency theory is an organizational theory that claims that
there is no best way to organize a corporation, to lead a
company, or to make decisions. Instead, the optimal course of
action is contingent (dependent) upon the internal and external
situation. A contingent leader effectively applies their own style
of leadership to the right situation.
Fred Fiedler research is perhaps the prime contributor to this
theory.
Fiedler found that when a group trusts its leader, has a clear
task structure, and the leader has the power to reward and
punish followers, the leader has high control of the group.
In a high-control situation, a task-motivated leader is the leader
with the most effective set of behaviors.
When the group is distrusting, its task structure is ambivalent,
and the leader has less power to reward and punish, the leader
has moderate control.
In these situations, a relationship-motivated leader is needed
because an invariably frustrated task-motivated leader moves
too quickly, too punitively—and less effectively.
When the group is not supportive of its leader, its task is foggy,
and the leader’s authority to dispense rewards and punishments
is ambiguous, low control is the consequence.
In a low-control situation, which often amounts to a crisis
situation, the task-motivated leader once again surfaces as the
most effective.
Although the contingency model has been the subject of some
controversy, most empirical tests of it find it to be reflective of
the real world.
27
Are Public Leadership Successful?
Administrators in both the public and private sectors agree that
leaders in government have considerably less discretion and
authority to lead than their private-sector counterparts, and,
logically,
it follows that public executives also “are evaluated as better
“transactional leaders” than transformational ones.
Public versus Private Leadership Public and private leaders
display virtually identical “power-motivation behavior,” or the
desire to make an impact and enhance one’s position but,
beyond that similarity, leaders’ behavior differs sharply in the
two sectors.
In contrast to the private sector, successful public leaders are
more desirous of change, organizational growth, and new
projects, and they are more lawful and less directive. Superiors
and subordinates perceive the executives of public agencies as
being much less successful when they direct and coordinate
their agencies and much more effective when they closely
monitor their subordinates’ work for legal compliance and reach
out to lend a helping hand to their fellow workers (again, just
the reverse in corporations).
A Supportive, Affective Public Leadership Helping their
employees is exceptionally important to public-sector leaders.
The most effective leaders in the high-stress fields of first
responders, law enforcers, and social workers are “affective
leaders” who are skilled in “emotional labor” that involves
relationships and rapport, compassion and connectedness.
“Emotional labor is inherent in effective public service.”
28
Successful Public Leadership – Maybe?
Attaining Agency Objectives? Well, Not So Much Unlike
business leaders, public leaders do not perceive that there is
much of a match between their leadership abilities and actually
accomplishing their agency’s goals. This, admittedly dubious,
distinction may be ascribed to at least two possibilities.
One is that many agencies, at least those that have quantifiable
goals, have been shown to be fulfilling them.
The other is the fact that,, agency missions are frequently
saturated by a pervasive and ethereal vagueness compared with
crisp corporate ones.
Because of this that top public executives are “consistently, and
often dramatically, more optimistic” about their agencies’
organizational successes than are lower-placed agency workers,
agency clients, and other outside stakeholders.
When organizational success itself cannot be readily
understood, a condition that is not unknown in the public
sphere, then leadership’s success, when defined in
organizational terms, is far less tenable. Thus, in the public
sector, successful leadership is cast in human terms.
29
Lead, Follow, or Get out of the Way!
Leadership
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership
Transformational leadership
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformational_leadership
Transactional leadership
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_leadership
Leadership studies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership_studies#See_also
Organizational studies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational_studies
Helen Keller
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller
30
31

PUB 503 MLTheories, Principles, & Practice of Public Administration.docx

  • 1.
    PUB 503 ML:Theories,Principles, & Practice of Public Administration Questions & Key Terms [Day Three] Critical Thinking Questions 1. Is the organization a product of our national culture? How does our American culture influence our public service employees? Where does freedom end and order begins? Give me your opinion along with some examples. 2. What is leadership? Is the leadership roles different of elected officials as opposed to the administrated roles? How does the transactional role of the administrator differ from the transformational role of the elected official? Give some examples of each. 3. What is human capital? Does the morale of the workers effect the leader- follower relationship in the workplace? What can governments’ human capital managers do to positively impact their followers work product? Discus and give some examples. 4. What is a “whistleblower” and how are they protected by Congress? Managing Human Capital in the Public and Nonprofit Sectors 1 1
  • 2.
    People as HumanCapital Personnel administration, or personnel management, is the planning and policymaking for, and managing of, employees, and is limited to “internal” processes, such as compensation. During the 1980s, a more modern view emerged: human resource management, which expands the field by including “external” processes, such as professional development. Currently, human capital management views employees as valuable assets that can be further enriched through greater investment, and aligns human capital policies with the organization’s mission. Personnel-lists, or professionals and specialists in the field, often use these terms interchangeably, as do we., the most commonly used initials “HR” designates all three titles. Nevertheless, they do have differences: each successive title represents a broader concept that places an increasing emphasis on the worth of employees. 2 Who Wants To Work And Who Doesn’t? Over five consecutive years, the percentage of undergraduates who planned to work for the federal, state, or local government “immediately after graduation” declined by nearly half: Local governments, however, exert a particular pull; 82 percent of women and 74 percent of men who once worked in local government would “consider returning” to a local government leadership position.4 Barely half of students in masters of public administration (MPA) and similar programs express interest in being employed by government, and, at the twenty top programs, not even half are.
  • 3.
    More generally, whitepeople, Republicans, and those who never served in the military are overrepresented among those Americans who spurn working for government. An astonishing 56 percent of corporate and nonprofit managers are not or “not at all” interested in working for the federal government, and only 17 percent express any interest in doing so. None of this is good news for governments, but the real story lies with growing student interest in working in the independent sector The decision to start careers in the independent sector, rather than the public one, works out well for those who make it. “Compared to those working in the public sector, managers in nonprofits report greater freedom in deciding how to carry out their job functions, more control over their work schedules, and greater opportunities for pay increases.” 3 The Evolution Of Public Human Capital Management The evolution of public HR management in the United States can be roughly divided into six phases. Government by Gentlemen, 1789–1827 Government by Spoilers, 1828–1880 Government by the Good, 1881–1905 Government by Scientific Managers, 1906–1936 Government by Policymaking Administrators, 1937–1954 Government by Professionals, 1955–Present Depending upon the phase in question, America’s governments have been dominated, in successive turns, by its aristocrats, corrupt officials, ardent reformers, “scientific” managers, dynamic administrators, and timid clerks. 4
  • 4.
    Government by Gentlemen,1789–1827 In 1789, the federal government started off with three departments (State, Treasury, and War), and, by 1836, it had five departments and 336 employees. During most of this period of very limited government indeed, the first half-dozen presidents favored “government by gentlemen,” or those who were reputed to be persons of character and competence, qualities that were defined largely by a respected family background and a high degree of formal education. Being a member of the establishment counted for a lot: over the course of the country’s first forty years, almost two- thirds of the eighty to a hundred or so top appointees were drawn from the landed gentry, merchant, and professional classes. 5 Government by Spoilers, 1828–1880 Even as they were being governed by gentlemen, however, Americans were growing less gentlemanly in their politics. When independence was declared, in 1776, over four-fifths of the states required that, to vote, men must own land or have paid taxes, but, by 1830, only half of the states retained these stipulations. As a result, far more men could vote, and many could not be described as gentlemen. When combined with a populist candidate—in the form of Andrew Jackson in the election of 1828— voting turnout more than tripled from the previous election (16 percent turnout), and surpassed half of all eligible voters for the first time.
  • 5.
    These fundamental politicalchanges meant only one thing: spoils. If presidents were to emerge, like Jackson, from the class that earned its own living, then politics had to be made to pay. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, Jackson maintained past establishmentarian patterns, dismissing about the same share of political appointees as had his gentlemanly predecessors. John Tyler (1841–1845) was the first president to implement a comprehensive spoils system, a practice that reached its apex with the presidency of Abraham Lincoln (1861–1865), but spoils continued to mar government for the next several decades. It is difficult for those of us reared in an environment of largely honest government to appreciate the extent—and the brazenness—of the spoils period. After an election, newspaper advertising typically swelled with such announcements as, “WANTED — A GOVERNMENT CLERKSHIP at a salary of not less that $1000 per annum. Will give $100 to anyone securing me such a position.” 6 Government by the Good, 1881–1905 The corrupt excesses of the spoils system eventually resulted in a reform movement that was determined to rid government of those bureaucrats who owed their office to nothing more than party hackwork. Between 1861 and 1882, sixty-four civil service reform bills were introduced in Congress, but not one of them was passed by even one chamber. The assassination of President Garfield by a deranged office seeker, in 1881, changed Congress’s collective mind. 7
  • 6.
    The Civil ServiceAct of 1883 Just two years following Garfield’s assassination, Congress passed the Civil Service Act (also known as the Pendleton Act, after its legislative sponsor), which created a bipartisan Civil Service Commission charged with creating a nonpartisan federal service. The act’s commitment to neutrality and fairness was strengthened by subsequent presidential directives that prohibited an employee’s removal for political or religious reasons (in 1896), and guaranteed due process for those who had been hired competitively (1897). Although the Civil Service Act was influenced by the British public service, the Senate inserted some major provisos that were uniquely American. One such clause was that civil service examinations must be “practical in character.” In stark contrast to Western Europe, the law laid no tracks between the civil service and the universities, and it was only in 1905 that the Civil Service Commission first observed that “the greatest defect in the Federal Service is the lack of opportunity for ambitious, well-educated young men”; a serious effort to correct that deficiency surfaced, eventually, in the 1930s. Similarly, the act set up no body of permanent, high-level, professional public administrators, as is the norm in Western Europe. The unintended consequence is that Washington now oozes presidentially-appointed political executives, who consistently underperform relative to careerists. 8 “Goodness” versus “Badness” “Government by the good” led, in 1907, to President Theodore
  • 7.
    Roosevelt’s Civil ServiceRule I, which prohibited almost seven out of ten federal workers from participating in political campaigns and barred the solicitation of political contributions from federal employees. These reforms were strengthened and broadened by the Political Activities Act, also known as the Hatch Act, of 1939. In 1940, the Hatch Act was amended to extend its coverage to state and local workers whose salaries are paid entirely or in part with federal funds, and to prohibit these employees from running for public office. More recently, Washington has lightly loosened political restrictions on government workers. The Hatch Act Reform Amendments of 1993 lifted the 1907 prohibition on federal employees participating in political campaign, but they still may not be candidates in partisan elections or engage in political activity while on duty. In 2012, Congress passed the 2012 Hatch Act Modernization Act, which continues the ban on entering elections for those state and local employees who are paid entirely with federal grants or loans, but lifted the prohibition from those who are paid only in part with federal funds. In 2016, the Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to discharge or demote a (in this case, local) government employee because he or she supports a particular political candidate. Over time, civil service commissions, which typically administered these and similar policies, became associated “with morality, with a connotation of ‘goodness’ vs. ‘badness,’ quite apart from the purposes for which people were employed.”27 9 Government by Scientific Managers, 1906–1936 Despite government by the good, good government remained
  • 8.
    elusive. In 1912, ananalyst decried the “snail like pace” of government employees, alleging that they wasted from 40 to 70 percent of their work time. The influential New York Bureau of Municipal Research, a privately-supported think tank founded in 1906, agreed with this assessment, and its first forays focused on getting public “workers to do the work they were hired to do,” a concentration that quickly incorporated a “strong link between the bureau and scientific management.” It was, a likable link, and it left legacies. A major one is the position classification system, first adopted by Chicago in 1912, and which has been described as “the ascendancy of scientific management.” The council-manager form of local government emerged as a direct outgrowth of the period’s precepts; the first government to adopt a council-manager plan was Sumter, South Carolina, in 1912, and, by 1930, 418 local governments had adopted it. Certainly government by scientific managers served to extend the reach and power of the Civil Service System. Between 1900 and 1930: the proportion of federal civilian employees administered by the Civil Service Commission shot from 46 percent to 80 percent; the number of states that had merit systems expanded from two to nine;33 and cities with civil service commissions nearly quadrupled from sixty-five to 250. 10 Government by Policymaking Administrators, 1937–1954 In 1937, the report of the president’s Committee on Administrative Management (more commonly known as the Brownlow Committee, after its chair, Louis Brownlow) was published, and, for the first time since its founding, the usefulness and
  • 9.
    power of theCivil Service Commission were quietly questioned. “Personnel was seen as a principal, if not the major, tool of management,” and the committee recommended that each major agency have its own personnel manager reporting to its top administrator. The president quickly complied, in 1938, with Executive Order 7916. The Hoover Commission’s first report, issued in 1949, also took up this cudgel, and “little Hoover commissions” in many states did the same. Today, agency-based HR offices are commonplace. There was more. “Administration” also expressed the long- denied reality that public administrators make public policy. When, in 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, assumed the presidency after two decades of Democratic government, he discovered, maddeningly, a huge civilian bureaucracy that had more than quadrupled in size since the last Republican administration, and which was run by entrenched Democratic policymakers, who, perversely, were protected by civil service regulations that were based on the premise that politics should not intrude on administration! Although academia during this period was barely beginning to recognize that bureaucrats made public policy, elected policymakers clearly understood that they did. 11 Government by Professionals, 1955–Present By mid-century, another value was entering the milieu of public HR: professionalism. The professional period encompasses two distinct systems of public HR. One is Specialized Public Professional Systems, or those public personnel systems that are geared to the career needs of high-ly- educated specialists.
  • 10.
    The other isthe Professional Public Administration System, which reflects the idea that FIR systems should encourage effective and efficient management by competent generalist administrators. These professional systems are two of the five systems of public human capital management, each with its own values and mission, the remaining three are the Civil Service, Collective, and Political Executive systems. 12 The Civil Service System: The Meaning Of Merit The civil service has been the historic heart of public administration. The general Civil Service System, or merit system (a phrase that emphasizes the values of public service, in contrast to its bureaucratic structure), is career personnel who have tenure and who are administered according to traditional merit practices. The civil service is independent of government and is also composed mainly of career bureaucrats hired on professional merit rather than appointed or elected, whose institutional tenure typically survives transitions of political leadership. It is the opposite of the spoils system A civil servant or public servant is a person employed in the public sector on behalf of a government department or agency. A civil servant or public servant's first priority is to represent the interests of citizens. Workers in "non-departmental public bodies" (sometimes called "Quangos") may also be classed as civil servants for the purpose of statistics and possibly for their terms and conditions. Collectively a state's civil servants form its civil service or public service. 13
  • 11.
    Public Human CapitalManagement What do governments’ human capital managers do? Their major duties, listed in the order of the most time that they devote to them, are: recruiting and hiring; benefits administration; pay administration; developing FIR policy, such as retirement plans; position classification; training and development; processing grievances; appraising and measuring employee performance; brokering conflict; managing diversity; and collective bargaining, among other activities. FIR professionals also may influence the morale of their public agencies. It seems that if FIR workers are happy in their work, then their agencies’ co-workers are happier than the overall norm. 14 Grass-Roots: Recruiting Bureaucrats Asked “which workforce issues are important to your organization?” more than nine out of ten state and local officials replied that “recruiting and retaining qualified personnel with needed skills to public service. State and local governments are abandoning printed media in recruiting and are going full-blast electronic. Eighty-four percent of these governments cite “online job advertising” as their “most successful” recruitment practice in “reaching qualified candidates,” followed by “government web sites” and “social media;
  • 12.
    “state/ local newsletters,”. Thosestates with more usable Web sites [receive] significantly more applications per job opening. The states are introducing major reforms designed to decentralize and simplify recruiting. A plurality of states, twenty-two, have decentralized recruitment to the agencies, and another eighteen share this responsibility with the central personnel bureau. Nevertheless, nearly four out of ten state agency heads think that the complexity of personnel procedures is their most serious impediment for recruiting. Local governments have focused on proactive recruitment. Most solicit applications from minority and women’s organizations, state and private employment agencies, unions, professional organizations, and use internships as a recruiting tool. 15 Does Washington Hire Well? In spite of itself, Washington may be hiring fairly well. Twenty-nine percent of federal executives and top professionals who were hired from outside the government think that the quality of federal supervisors is better than in their last place of employment and 21 percent think that the quality of their co- workers is higher. Most of the data support these opinions. Almost half of all entering federal employees have college degrees in specifically relevant fields. There is “little difference in the education levels and grade point averages” among applicants who accept offers of federal employment and those who take other options, an indication that Washington competes successfully in hiring. State Hiring share at least one hiring issue with Washington: “The size of the applicant pool for career professional positions
  • 13.
    is not likelyto be large [and] the quality of the applicant pool is not likely to be very strong.” 16 A Caveat about Federal and State Hiring Despite corporate managers’ contempt for working in the federal government, a solid majority of upper-level new federal hires and a dominating plurality of entry-level ones who were hired from outside the government nevertheless are drawn from the private sector. Overwhelmingly, these sector switchers cite “job security” as their leading motivation for making the switch. State mid- and upper-level administrators who were hired from corporations typically supervised few corporate subordinates, and their switch often entailed a public-sector promotion. Do these patterns imply that the public sector has a special attraction for managers whose corporate careers are stuttering, or even stuck, and only then does government become their belated second choice? It is an all-the-more intriguing question when we realize that only 3 percent of upper-level new federal hires and 4 percent of entry-level ones who are hired from outside the government are drawn from the independent sector— the sector that far surpasses the other two in terms of its employees’ disdain for job security and their strong need for socially meaningful work. 17 Classifying Bureaucrats Position classification is a core tenet of the Civil Service System. Indeed, employees in the civil service are also known as “classified” employees. Classifying Federal Employees Until 1923, when the
  • 14.
    Classification Act wasenacted, federal supervisors had unlimited autonomy to determine the pay of workers, and federal employees were growing increasingly angry about their lack of rigor and, often, fairness. The act authorized the Civil Service Commission to group federal positions into rational classes and pay their occupants accordingly. A more comprehensive Classification Act was enacted in 1949. It established the dominant classification system, the General Schedule (GS), composed of fifteen grades for civilian workers, and, within these grades, there are roughly 420 to 450 occupations, as OPM continuously revises the number. At the very top are the 8,000 or so members of the Senior Executive, Senior Professional, and Senior Foreign services, each with its own classification system. Blue-collar and Postal Service employees, and about twenty agencies, also have their own systems. Classifying at the Grass Roots All state governments have position classification systems. Eight states have decentralized classification from their central personnel office to the agencies, and another eight distribute this duty between their HR and line agencies. A dozen states require their cities to adopt classification plans, although almost all local governments of any size have them. Most cities and counties use a single classification system, although, oddly, the smaller the jurisdiction, the more likely that there will be multiple systems. 18 Training Training workers to improve their workplace skills is closely and clearly linked with organizational productivity. “The most effective private firms” spend from 3 to 5 percent of their budgets on training.
  • 15.
    Training heightens nonprofit,federal, and state and local employees’ job satisfaction, engagement, and organizational commitment, and lowers their inclination to consider quitting their jobs— not a surprising correlation in light of the fact that, as government training expenditures rise, so do promotion rates, and significantly so. Evidence also suggests that a greater investment in training reduces public employees’ discrimination charges. 19 Training Feds Most federal training emerged when the Government Employees Training Act was enacted in 1958, and today there are Management Development Centers and a Federal Executive Institute dedicated to training federal administrators. Washington spends a modest 1.3 percent of its “personnel budget” on training, and, still worse, federal administrators are prone to focus on training programs when they need to cut budgets, and to cut them back more than other programs. This need for more training seems to be present at every level of the federal service, from top, to middle, to bottom. Nearly two-thirds of the Senior Executive Service has not received “formal executive coaching,” a rising proportion, even though those with fewer than ten years of experience ranked training and development third as “the key driver of satisfaction and commitment, not pay.” The Secret Service’s uniformed officers received a average of just twenty-five minutes of training over the course of a year; A promising innovation is the growing use of training via computers. Seventy percent of “federal leaders” (GS 13 and higher) think that “digital technology has improved access to
  • 16.
    training relevant toagency mission.” 20 Training at the Grass Roots Nearly three-quarters of state and local officials report that they receive “regular training,” a proportion that is far higher than that of the feds. State administrators spend an average of twenty-five hours a year in “formal classroom training.” It appears that most training for these administrators is conducted by universities. State governments devote, on average, “more than 1.3 percent” of their annual payrolls to training, a conservative calculation, with some states spending “upwards of 5 percent.” “Unfortunately, many states report that the training budget is the first thing eliminated in spending freezes or budget cuts.” More than nine-tenths of the states impose training requirements on municipal and county employees, focusing on police and fire fighters; only a small minority of states requires training for “other” local employees. 21 Bolstering Bureaucrats’ Bravery Whistleblowers, who are found in all sectors, are a courageous (some would say crazy) class of employees who “blow the whistle” on their organizations for engaging in shoddy or corrupt practices. Persons who expose governments’ security secrets—all national governments have such secrets, and they have them for the same reason that middle-aged people wear clothes —do not qualify as whistleblowers.
  • 17.
    Encouraging Whistle Blowing Thefederal, state, and local governments have enacted laws that encourage whistle blowing. 22 Whistleblower: A Risk Worth Taking- Maybe A whistleblower is a person who exposes any kind of information or activity that is deemed illegal, unethical, or not correct within an organization that is either private or public. The typical whistleblower in the public and private sectors is a well-educated family man in his late forties who has been in his organization about seven years and has a strong belief in “universal moral codes.” Those who become whistleblowers can choose to bring information or allegations to surface either internally or externally. Internally, a whistleblower can bring his/her accusations to the attention of other people within the accused organization such as an immediate supervisor. Externally, a whistleblower can bring allegations to light by contacting a third party outside of an accused organization such as the media, government, law enforcement, or those who are concerned. Whistleblowers, however, take the risk of facing stiff reprisal and retaliation from those who are accused or alleged of wrongdoing. 23 Federal Encouragement The most significant legislation that Congress has passed is the 1986 amendments to the False Claims Act of 1863.
  • 18.
    They permit thefederal government to award whistleblowers from 15 to 30 percent of any money recovered from fraudulent practices, with the exception of tax fraud, that they report in any federally funded contract or program. These amendments have been quite effective. Prior to their passage, only three out of ten federal workers who observed an illegal or wasteful activity reported it, but, following their enactment, fully half did so. A decade after their passage, more than 1,100 companies were exposed by whistleblowers for defrauding the government, compared with just twenty during the previous decade.166 24 Securing Bureaucrats’ Jobs The popular image of the Civil Service System is one of a job for life; 58 percent of Americans think that government offers better job security than business, compared with 13 percent who say the same for business versus government, or a factor of better than four. Do, in fact, government employees actually have more secure jobs than private-sector employees? You bet they do. Americans commonly assume that the long tenures that job security brings equate with mediocre performance. This is far from the case, at least in government, for two reasons. First, multiple studies have found that greater job security correlates clearly and positively with higher productivity in governments, Second, even when there is relatively little job security in the public sector, there is no “strong evidence” that managers take advantage of it by dismissing low-performing employees at a significantly accelerated rate. 25
  • 19.
    Civil Service Slippageat the Grass Roots For more than thirty years, Congress encouraged state and local governments to adopt merit systems. The 1939 amendments to the Social Security Act of 1935 mandated that states establish systems for their unemployment- security and public- assistance employees, or lose their Social Security funds. All states quickly complied. The Intergovernmental Personnel Act of 1970 offered grants to subnational governments to expand and refine their civil services, but, as Congress grew disenchanted with merit systems, funding vanished within a decade. As in Washington, the Civil Service System’s grass-roots’ reach peaked in the 1980s, when about three-fourths of the states had comprehensive merit systems, and 60 percent of all state employees worked in them. Eighty-eight percent of cities with populations of more than 50,000 had merit systems, and an estimated 95 percent of all municipal employees worked in them. These numbers would soon wither. By the 1990s, literally hundreds of grass-roots’ personnel reforms were in the offing. 26 Civil Service Reform in the States At the end of the first millennium, “the general picture that emerges [in state governments] is one of administrators trapped by rigid, slow, and cumbersome systems that are incapable of meeting government’s human resources needs.” This was especially unfortunate since personnel is the single largest consumer of revenue in the states; “almost everything a state does is labor intensive.” But change was afoot.
  • 20.
    In 1996, Georgiainitiated civil service reforms that were the most sweeping of any government at the time; other states followed Sixteen states have contracted out at least some of their personnel services to the private sector There has been a discernible decline in state-employee job security in thirty-one states, twenty-eight of which have adopted, in whole or part, at-will employment —that is, employees serve at the sufferance of their supervisors sans protection by the merit system. Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas have, for all intents and purposes, eliminated their civil services. States most likely to implement these reforms tend to have relatively weak public unions, Republican-controlled governments, high administrative and legislative professionalism, low unemployment, and plentiful resources. Has the stature of state merit systems been diminished by these reforms? Yes. In 1983, the heads of personnel agencies in thirty-nine states reported directly to the governor, but two decades later, this held true in only twenty states. Georgia’s personnel reforms, cited as the “most dramatic reforms” of any state, were hailed by prestigious professionals as “likely the best in the country. There are, however, some benefits for civil services in reformed states. The more that governments decentralize human resource activities, the more that “positive relationships” develop between “senior line managers” and human capital executives, and these relationships increase HR’s influence and performance. 27
  • 21.
    Civil Service Reformin Communities As with the states, personnel is localities’ largest single devourer of dollars, so it follows that civil service reform is at the heart of local governmental reform; perhaps 70 percent of all local reforms relate to personnel policies. Five percent (precisely the percentage it was thirty years earlier256) of cities and counties contract out their “personnel services” to a for-profit corporation, more than 1 percent are delivered by another government, and half a percent contract with a nonprofit organization. Nearly 9 percent of local governments deliver personnel services via “public employees in part,” meaning that corporate or non-profit employees are involved, as well as the government’s own employees.257 28 The Impact of Civil Service Reform As with the states, personnel is localities’ largest single devourer of dollars, so it follows that civil service reform is at the heart of local governmental reform; Civil service reform has been remarkably successful. The states, where reforms have been relatively radical, provide the best examples of this. Hiring, promoting, reassigning, and firing have been streamlined, and, although at-will employees are dismissed more expeditiously than are employees who are protected by civil service regulations, at-will employment does not associate with greater numbers of employees being fired. State employees who serve at will are “significantly less negative about the full range” of civil service reforms than are their co-workers who are in the civil service, but state personnel managers display, at best, only a rueful acceptance and some distrust of at-will reform. An understandable concern among traditionalists was that
  • 22.
    reform would re-introduceunfettered patronage to state government, but this has not happened. We must note that a sad consequence of public personnel reform is that HR directors, and the enterprise of public human capital in general, often are sidelined, ignored, or dissed. This seems especially true at the federal level, where morale in most agencies has been in decline for years, a decline that may be linked to the corresponding decline of HR management. 29 The Collective System: Birth Of Organized Labor Public human capital system is the Collective System, and it refers primarily to blue-collar workers and white-collar professionals whose jobs are administered via agreements between management and organized workers. The core of the Collective System is worker solidarity; in a word, unions. Efforts to organize public employees first surfaced in the 1830s, and with reason: wages and working conditions typically were abysmal. With the passage, in 1935, of the National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act), which guaranteed private-sector workers the rights to unionize, bargain collectively, and strike, unions surged forward. At its apex, in 1953, organized labor included almost a third of all nonagricultural employees in the nation.267 30 Bargaining with Governments Collective bargaining, or collective negotiations, is a method in
  • 23.
    which representatives ofemployees and employers jointly make policies about employees’ working terms and conditions. Historically, collective bargaining has largely been the preserve of the private sector, but, in 2009, this relationship reversed for the first time, and the public sector had over 9 percent more workers covered by negotiated agreements than did the private one. By 2013, the traditional pattern had reestablished itself, and businesses had nearly 10 percent more workers who bargained collectively than did governments. Of those public employees who are covered by a negotiated agreement, 59 percent work for a local government, 27 percent for the states, 8 percent are federal civilian employees, 6 percent are Postal Service workers. 31 Striking Government There is scant agreement on whether public employees have a right to strike, with some arguing that striking is an act of insurrection, and others contending that it is a fundamental freedom. The courts have held that there is no constitutional right of public workers to strike, but neither has the judiciary prohibited the enactment of laws permitting them to strike. Striking Washington The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 was the first legislation to prohibit strikes by federal employees. In 1970, more than 210,000 postal workers violated the law by staging an unprecedented walkout; the Labor Department met almost all their demands, and the strike was over in just two weeks. A nonplussed Congress soon divested itself of its postal problem by passing the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970,
  • 24.
    which transformed thePost Office Department, a federal agency, into the Postal Service, a federal corporation. More broadly, Congress reasserted its anti-strike policy with the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which forbids strikes and slowdowns by federal employees. In 1981, however, 95 percent of the 13,000 members of the Professional Association of Air Traffic Controllers (PATCO), possibly justifiably, probably arrogantly, and certainly foolishly, struck. President Ronald Reagan promptly decertified PATCO—that is, the federal government no longer recognized PATCO as the official representative of its members— and dismissed more than 11,000 air traffic controllers, breaking their union in the process. Reagan’s decertification was historic, and arguably strengthened the hand of all governments in dealing with unions. 32 Why Do Incompetent Federal Employees Hang On? Nonperformers are deeply entrenched in their jobs, and average an astonishing fourteen years in the federal employ. How could this be? There are several reasons. A Little-Used Probationary Period An Awful Appeals Process Taking Unsatisfactory Action Regrettably, supervisors often take “disciplinary” action that effectively rewards incompetents and sanctions productive employees. A Supine System Federal supervisors receive little support from above Congress Intervenes (Temporarily) State administrators seem to be doing a better job of dealing with incompetents than their federal counterparts.
  • 25.
    Although a thirdof state agency heads think that personnel rules make it difficult to discipline or discharge poor performers, they nevertheless terminate classified workers in a speedy twenty-nine days, on average, for “performance issues,” and an even briefer eighteen for “behavioral issues.” 33 Some Helpful Hints on Dealing with Incompetents Not all is lost in the battle against incompetents. Research has found that, regardless of sector, some underused techniques can be effective. These include: ■ Confront with clarity, empathy, and privacy. When supervisors deal with a poor performer quickly, directly, issue more warnings and formal sanctions more frequently, fire (when possible) promptly when warnings fail, and do so while treating the underperformer with dignity, their units’ productivity is higher than those of supervisors who do not.510 Of course, any conferences with poor performers should be done in private. ■ Put all the rotten apples in the same barrel. Not only does isolating them reduce their ability to infect good apples, but a bunch of egocentric, energetic, destructive, overbearing people often can come up with excellent, creative ideas.511 ■ Make accountability human. When radiologists saw photographs of patients whose X-rays they were examining, their diagnostic accuracy quintupled relative to when they did not see their patients’ photographs.512 ■ Let the sunshine in. Employees are less honest and more selfish when they work in dark recesses or wear sunglasses in their office.513 Light up the workplace and beware the employee who sports shades in it.
  • 26.
    34 The Attributes ofEffective Classification One is the identification those attributes that an effective public job classification system should have. These include the following: ■ Equity: All employees with comparable qualifications and responsibilities should be assigned to the same grade level and be paid within ranges that are comparable to similar qualifications and responsibilities in the private sector. ■ Transparency: The classification system should be predictable and comprehensible to management, employees, and taxpayers. ■ Flexibility: The classification system should allow for adjustments in pay (among other potential adjustments) within a uniform, government-wide system so that agency needs and missions may be fulfilled. ■ Adaptability: Fundamental reviews of the entire classification system should be undertaken periodically so that the system’s adaptability to changing workplace and workforce characteristics is assured. ■ Simplicity: The classification system should enable employee mobility among agencies, maintain a rational number of occupations and meaningful differences in skills and performance within those occupations, and be cost-effective and easily managed. ■ Appropriateness: Positions should be classified based on mission needs, and employees should be classified according to their unique abilities so that those positions may be filled appropriately. 35 Lessons Learned There are some organizational factors that encourage, indirectly
  • 27.
    but clearly, moreeffective performance management. These include: employees who are engaged in their jobs; organizational and managerial flexibility; high levels of trust and professionalism in the organization; and useful performance appraisals. More proactively, public and nonprofit administrators also can act in ways that will result in better performance management. These include the following. ■Evaluate the effectiveness of the agency’s current performance appraisal system. ■Establish a separate budget for the performance pay system. ■Involve employees, including union officials, in building a high performance organization and in revising the pay system. ■Assure that there is a “clear separation of interests,” such as separate career paths, “between politicians and senior civil servants.” ■Communicate goals clearly. ■Link individual objectives with organizational goals. ■Make sure that rewards are high and clearly differentiated. ■Link performance pay with additional incentives, such as promotion. ■Select supervisors who are flexible and who will effectively manage performance. ■Hold every supervisor accountable for effective performance management. ■Arrange so that the system can be reviewed both internally and externally. ■Provide supervisors with the training, resources, and managerial support they need to improve their employees’ performance. ■Say “thank you” when it is warranted. 36 The Rise of the White House Loyalty Test
  • 28.
    37 The Fibers ofOrganizations: People 1 1 2 “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much” ― Helen Keller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller Why Work For The People? Threads” served as our metaphor for theories of organizations. “Fabric” referred to the interwoven forces that form organizations. And “fibers”—the woof, weft, and tensile strength of organizations—describes people in organizations. Sixty-three percent of government workers prefer to work for government rather than business (preferred by 36 percent), and local government employees appear to feel the most
  • 29.
    positive about workingfor government. 3 3 The Draw of the Public Sector The reasons why people enter, or do not enter, public service are reasonably clear. Starkly Different Values Those people who enter government careers have high public service motivation (i.e., the desire to serve society in a secular context), positive views of the public sector, and negative perceptions of the private one. Those who enter business hold values that are “completely opposite… Money Does Not Make Their World Go Around, It appears that high salaries are considerably less important to those who work in government than they are to those who enter the corporate sphere. Note: When it comes to compensation, governments can’t win. 4 Making a Difference The classic view of public administration is that of a calling, and, to a surprising degree, it still is. Additional research confirms that mission matters. Holding a public administrative office correlates more strongly with public service motivation than any other factor, including even one’s “personal characteristics.” Personal characteristics that associate with high levels of public service motivation include women, people with more education, and members of professional associations.
  • 30.
    There is atangible connection between public service motivation and making a difference—a good difference. There is an additional motivation that underlie why people work for government, and it eclipses all else. It is: job security. 5 The Draw of the Independent Sector The sector with the most committed professionals is the independent one. Money matters for the most part, much less to these workers than those in other sectors. However a large number of nonprofit chief executives are paid between $500,000 and $1 million—compensation that exceeds that of any public counterpart—and the median CEO pay exceeds $120,000.) The opportunity to do “something worthwhile” in their organizations means much more to the purpose-driven worker as to their wiliness to serve as volunteers more intensively than either their public or private counterparts. Note: because job security means much less to nonprofit employees, many nonprofit employees are more inclined to undertake riskier behavior and make riskier choices than are workers in the other two sectors. 6 Building A Bridge Through Public Service 7 Psychological Man
  • 31.
    Administrative man Rational, orEconomic, man “Administrative Man” In Models of Man, Herbert Simon contrasted psychological, or Freudian, man, as the model of the human condition with rational, or economic, man, which is the model used by economists to predict the behavior of the economy. Economic man has the same goal (acquiring money) as everyone else in the economy, and behaves (ration-ally) just like everyone else to achieve it. Administrative man bridges psychological man and rational man. Administrative man has all the unique idiosyncrasies and limited reasoning power of psychological man, but, like economic man, also understands the mission of the organization, and knows that his or her interests and those of the organization can be somehow synchronous and complementary. This freakish fusion of the Freudian and the fiscal, when combined with any organization’s obsession with minimizing uncertainty, can produce “the bureaucratic personality,” that can render the bureaucracy ever more rigidly where rule- bound can result in “over conformity” among its fellow, who have made inflexibility and indifference an art form. 8 The Energetic, Committed Bureaucrat Americans work hard. On average, they work longer than do workers in other developed countries, or about thirty-four hours
  • 32.
    per week; a fifthof Americans work forty-nine hours or more per week, and more than two-fifths take no vacations, not even of one day. And their work hours are growing; Americans work eleven more hours per week, on average, than they did in the 1970s. Public Administrators seem to “hang in there” with the same tenacity as their private-sector counterparts, and studies “do not indicate a terrible malaise in the public sector if the private sector is used as a baseline.” Where employees in the public and private sectors diverge is in the depth of commitment to their jobs, and some research suggests that public administrators may hold a passion for their work that borders on the unhealthy. Bureaucratic Burnout among American managers attains “serious proportions in both arenas,” but burnout in the public sector is “not appreciably worse” than in the private sector. “City employees feel more time stress than their state and federal counterparts,” and it is indisputable that some types of local employment, such as public safety, have inherently high levels of stress. Nonprofit Professionals may be the most devoted to their jobs. They score highest in “total energy and investment in the job,” followed by government workers and corporate employees, respectively. 9 Job Turnover – Maybe? Most Americans like their work. National polls taken over three decades find that, in nearly every survey, Americans report that they are satisfied with their jobs, and would take the same job again “without hesitation,” and only one out of eight is dissatisfied with his or her job. Bureaucratic Satisfaction Bureaucrats provide some variation on these themes, although the research on this topic is singularly
  • 33.
    opaque, and contradictoryfindings on the job satisfaction of public administrators are “equally abundant.”51 There is, however, at least one commonality: public employees who possess emotional intelligence, or the ability to comprehend, harness, and manage moods in themselves and in others, are more satisfied with their jobs than are those who lack such intelligence. From the 1960s through the 1970s, the job satisfaction of federal workers was low and falling lower. For the last three decades, however, job satisfaction has risen steadily, and, over thirty years federal employees report that they are not only satisfied in their jobs, but would recommend their government as a place to work. 10 Today’s Management Challenge In sum, the public and nonprofit managers’ maze: Compared with business administrators, government executives are faced with employees who are: Hypercritical loners determined to do something of social importance, Employees demanding unremitting recognition but who are uninterested in being bought off with monetary bonuses. Managers in the independent sector share these same characteristics—with a vengeance. They are more committed to making a difference in society and have lower needs for wealth, recognition, and job security than either public administrators or private ones. According to some research, nonprofit employees also have a greater need to dominate colleagues and may be wilier in getting their way than are their private-sector counterparts. Certainly, these are precisely the kinds of qualities that we want
  • 34.
    in our publicand nonprofit administrators. But they make for a tough workforce to manage—and to be managed by. 11 Are We a Product of Our Birth Environment? The circumstances under which people are born and how they mature determine how people perceive their organization and behave in it. It appears that the order in which they were born caused the child to behave and develop certain characteristics. In specified cases, the firstborn child that was studied as an adult, continued to demonstrate the identical traits as seen when they were a child. It has been observed that the first born is often raised with more attention than the following child or children, which causes the first born child to develop certain leadership characteristics. Studies that were related to the U.S presidents, discovered that more than half were firstborn, the rest were middle and four were lastborn. After investigating the birth order of the U.S presidents, important leaders were also looked at and showed the same outcome; a large number of every type of leader was firstborn rather than last. Note: Although not infallible, birth order is the major determining factor in explaining why some people defend the establishment and other revolt against it. Firstborns are, literally, born to conserve. Laterborn’s are, literally, born to rebel. 12 Organizational Culture Vs Turning Points
  • 35.
    Birth order playsa large part in the progressive mastery of psychological tasks that determine what sort of leader, follower, or stakeholder one becomes. How one approaches these tasks is known as “turning points.” The first turning point occurs from birth to year one, when trust or mistrust is inculcated into one’s psyche as a result of one’s early experiences with others. From one to six, the development of autonomy versus shame and doubt. From six to ten, initiative or guilt. From ten to fourteen, industry or inferiority. From fourteen to twenty, identity versus role confusion. From twenty to forty, intimacy or isolation. From forty to sixty-five, generativity versus stagnation. And from sixty-five until death, ego integrity as opposed to overwhelming despair. Should one take a negative path at any given turning point, all is not lost; with effort, a positive path can be taken at the next turning point. 13 Is the Organization a Product of our National Culture ? Just as birth order and aging influence how people inside organizations behave in them, so does the larger society in which they live. National culture, or “the collective mental programming of people in an environment,” is perhaps the single greatest external determinant of organizational behavior. One indicator: senior corporate executives judge a startling 42 percent of their managers assigned to projects overseas to have failed. 14
  • 36.
    Yes We Are! Nationalcultures are reflected in their bureaucracies, even when those bureaucracies administer cultures far removed from their own. 15 Organizational Behavior National Culture Turning Points What Is Leadership? Leadership is both a research area and a practical skill encompassing the ability of an individual or organization to "lead" or guide other individuals, teams, or entire organizations. Folks who attain the position in a administrative organization most likely embrace the creed that “the superior of all is the servant of all.” Leadership “at the political level is an influence relationship among leaders and followers who intend real change that reflect their mutual purposes.” These definitions stresses non-coercive manipulation by both leaders and followers; the presence of multiple leaders as well as multiple followers; the purposeful attainment of substantive change; and teamwork. Despite the fact that most of the country’s founders questioned
  • 37.
    the whole ideaof political leadership, the United States is the focal point for much of the leadership literature. 16 Leadership or Administration? Is leadership different from administration? Yes. Is one more important to organizational success than the other? No. Leadership deals with change. Administration copes with complexity. Both are equally vital to organizational success. Both leadership and administration involve “deciding what needs to be done,” creating the work and relationships to achieve it, “ and then trying to insure that those people actually do the job.” Leadership’s way of accomplishing these three tasks is to set a direction—create a vision—for the organization, and then align people, communicate, and inspire to fulfill it. Administration plans and budgets for the vision, and organizes, staffs, controls activities, and solves problems to implement it. In periods of slow change and a placid environment, administration is of greater significance; in times of rapid change and a turbulent environment, leadership is. “A peace time army can usually survive with good … management up and down the hierarchy …. A war time army, however, needs competent leadership at all levels. No one yet has figured out how to manage people effectively into battle; they must be led.”1 17 Full Range Leadership Model The Full Range of Leadership Model (FRLM) is a general
  • 38.
    leadership theory focusingon the behavior of leaders towards the workforce in different work situations. The FRLM relates transactional and transformational leadership style with laissez-faire leadership style. 18 19 Transactional Leadership is a part of a style of leadership that focuses on supervision, organization, and performance; it is an integral part of the Full Range Leadership Model. Transactional leadership is a style of leadership in which leaders promote compliance by followers through both rewards and punishments. Through a rewards and punishments system, transactional leaders are able to keep followers motivated for the short-term. Unlike transformational leaders, those using the transactional approach are not looking to change the future, they look to keep things the same. Leaders using transactional leadership as a model pay attention to followers' work in order to find faults and deviations. This type of leadership is effective in crisis and emergency situations, as well as for projects that need to be carried out in a specific way. 20 Transformational Leadership is a theory of leadership where a leader works with teams to
  • 39.
    identify needed change, creatinga vision to guide the change through inspiration, and executing the change in tandem with committed members of a group; it is an integral part of the Full Range Leadership Model. Transformational leadership serves to enhance the motivation, morale, and job performance of followers through a variety of mechanisms; these include connecting the follower's sense of identity and self to a project and to the collective identity of the organization; being a role model for followers in order to inspire them and to raise their interest in the project; challenging followers to take greater ownership for their work, and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of followers, allowing the leader to align followers with tasks that enhance their performance. The transactional approach has its limitations. It concentrates only on the problems confronting the leader in dealing with a small group, but not the leader’s subordinates and the problems confronting them. What kinds of transactions, or exchanges, occur between and among leaders and followers that facilitate or impair both the leader’s and the group’s effectiveness? 21 What is Political Culture? Political culture is defined by the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences as the "set of attitudes, beliefs and sentiments that give order and meaning to a political process and which provide the underlying assumptions and rules that govern behavior in the political system". It encompasses both the political ideals and operating norms of a polity. Political culture is thus the manifestation of
  • 40.
    the psychological andsubjective dimensions of politics. A political culture is the product of both the history of a political system and the histories of the members. Thus, it is rooted equally in public events and private experience. 22 What is the Relationship of Political & Civic Culture? The term “political culture” refers to the specifically political orientations, attitudes toward the political system and its various parts, and attitudes toward the role of self in the system. We speak of a political culture just as we can speak of an economic culture or a religious culture. It is a set of orientations toward a special set of social objects and processes In describing the values of a nation, civic culture is a subspecies of the political culture which includes: positive orientations toward a democratic infrastructure; the acceptance of norms of civic obligation; and the development of a sense of civic competence among a substantial proportion of the population. Note: A civic culture is one committed to democracy and civic engagement. 23 Political Culture Of The United States Political culture is a part of a society for which shared attitudes and beliefs establish a unique identity with regard to public and private governance. In the United States, at least three political cultures took root during the colonial period. They were formed in New England by religious refugees from
  • 41.
    England, in theMid-Atlantic region by Dutch settlers, in Virginia by English adventurers seeking fortune in the New World, and in Carolina by English investors who envisioned a model constitutional society. In Virginia and Carolina, and later elsewhere in the South, Scots-Irish settlers influenced the cultural hearth that created the American South. Each began with established cultures of the British Isles and the Netherlands, evolving into unique cultures that remain in existence today in the United States. 24 How Does Political Culture Impact Leadership? Because leadership can be defined as a process of influencing others to agree on a shared purpose, and to work towards shared objectives. Although leaders may be required to undertake managerial duties as well, leaders, whether politically or administrative, typically focus on inspiring followers and creating a shared organizational culture and values. Although managers deal with complexity, while leaders deal with initiating and adapting to change, many organization leaders take responsibility to direct and guild the tasks of planning, budgeting, organizing, staffing, controlling and problem solving. This is accomplished by take on the task of setting a direction or vision, empowering people with shared goals and objectives , and communicating, and motivating along cultural guidelines. 25
  • 42.
    Are Leaders Needed? Thedramatic and inspiring image of “The Leader” at the head of charging warriors persuades the less palpitating among us to ask: Are we being conned? Do we really need leaders? More precisely put, do organizations need hierarchical leaders, or those people who occupy high executive office? This question is even more radical than that of whether we need leaders, because chief executives do a lot more than lead. “Leadership” is only one of ten distinct roles, such as disturbance handler and spokesperson, that an executive plays, and these executive duties are common to both the public and private sectors, perhaps because “the private sector is becoming more like the public sector.” How do organizations get things done? The answer: Those who get things done in organizations are those who have the knowledge and skills that are crucial to the achievement of organizational objectives. The Limits of Leadership. But is it possible that organizations really do not need chief executives and top administrators? Well, yes, at least in a fairly substantial minority of organizations in all sectors. Why? Because environmental forces, and, less commonly, internal ones (such as smoothly functioning teams of employees), can render leaders moot. 26 Who’s In Charge: Leader Or Follower? Contingency theory is an organizational theory that claims that there is no best way to organize a corporation, to lead a company, or to make decisions. Instead, the optimal course of action is contingent (dependent) upon the internal and external situation. A contingent leader effectively applies their own style of leadership to the right situation. Fred Fiedler research is perhaps the prime contributor to this
  • 43.
    theory. Fiedler found thatwhen a group trusts its leader, has a clear task structure, and the leader has the power to reward and punish followers, the leader has high control of the group. In a high-control situation, a task-motivated leader is the leader with the most effective set of behaviors. When the group is distrusting, its task structure is ambivalent, and the leader has less power to reward and punish, the leader has moderate control. In these situations, a relationship-motivated leader is needed because an invariably frustrated task-motivated leader moves too quickly, too punitively—and less effectively. When the group is not supportive of its leader, its task is foggy, and the leader’s authority to dispense rewards and punishments is ambiguous, low control is the consequence. In a low-control situation, which often amounts to a crisis situation, the task-motivated leader once again surfaces as the most effective. Although the contingency model has been the subject of some controversy, most empirical tests of it find it to be reflective of the real world. 27 Are Public Leadership Successful? Administrators in both the public and private sectors agree that leaders in government have considerably less discretion and authority to lead than their private-sector counterparts, and, logically, it follows that public executives also “are evaluated as better “transactional leaders” than transformational ones. Public versus Private Leadership Public and private leaders display virtually identical “power-motivation behavior,” or the desire to make an impact and enhance one’s position but, beyond that similarity, leaders’ behavior differs sharply in the
  • 44.
    two sectors. In contrastto the private sector, successful public leaders are more desirous of change, organizational growth, and new projects, and they are more lawful and less directive. Superiors and subordinates perceive the executives of public agencies as being much less successful when they direct and coordinate their agencies and much more effective when they closely monitor their subordinates’ work for legal compliance and reach out to lend a helping hand to their fellow workers (again, just the reverse in corporations). A Supportive, Affective Public Leadership Helping their employees is exceptionally important to public-sector leaders. The most effective leaders in the high-stress fields of first responders, law enforcers, and social workers are “affective leaders” who are skilled in “emotional labor” that involves relationships and rapport, compassion and connectedness. “Emotional labor is inherent in effective public service.” 28 Successful Public Leadership – Maybe? Attaining Agency Objectives? Well, Not So Much Unlike business leaders, public leaders do not perceive that there is much of a match between their leadership abilities and actually accomplishing their agency’s goals. This, admittedly dubious, distinction may be ascribed to at least two possibilities. One is that many agencies, at least those that have quantifiable goals, have been shown to be fulfilling them. The other is the fact that,, agency missions are frequently saturated by a pervasive and ethereal vagueness compared with crisp corporate ones. Because of this that top public executives are “consistently, and often dramatically, more optimistic” about their agencies’ organizational successes than are lower-placed agency workers, agency clients, and other outside stakeholders.
  • 45.
    When organizational successitself cannot be readily understood, a condition that is not unknown in the public sphere, then leadership’s success, when defined in organizational terms, is far less tenable. Thus, in the public sector, successful leadership is cast in human terms. 29 Lead, Follow, or Get out of the Way! Leadership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership Transformational leadership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformational_leadership Transactional leadership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_leadership Leadership studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership_studies#See_also Organizational studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational_studies Helen Keller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller 30 31