Handbook of Human Resource Management in Government

Stephen E. Condrey, Stephen E. Condrey

• Editore: Jossey-Bass
• Anno: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470616093
• Edizione: 3
• Argomento: Business
• Categoria: Government & Business

HANDBOOK OF HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT IN GOVERNMENT, THIRD EDITION

The practice of public human resource management has evolved significantly in recent years due to increased outsourcing, privatization, and the diminution of public employee rights. This thoroughly revised and updated edition of the classic reference Handbook of Human Resource Management in Government offers authoritative, state-of-the-art information for public administrators and human resource professionals. The third edition features contributions from noted experts in the field, including Donald E. Klingner, Mary E. Guy, Jonathan P. West, Jeffrey L. Brudney, Montgomery Van Wart, J. J. Steven Ott, Norma M. Riccucci, and many more.

Praise for the Handbook of Human Resource Management in Government

"This third edition of the Handbook of Human Resource Management in Government is an essential resource for scholars, practitioners, and general readers in need of concise summaries of up-to-date, cutting-edge, public personnel administration research. No other handbook on the market more concisely, more comprehensively, more clearly synthesizes this vast, rapidly changing field that remains so vital to effective government performance." —RICHARD STILLMAN, editor-in-chief, Public Administration Review

"The Handbook of Human Resource Management in Government comprehensively and seamlessly blends theory and practice. The result is a clear road map that can finally make HR a key player in helping the government meet the unprecedented challenges facing our nation, our states, and our communities."
—BOB LAVIGNA, vice president, Research, Partnership for Public Service, Washington, DC

"With each successive edition, Condrey's Handbook of Human Resource Management in Government becomes a more essential tool for graduate students who wish to improve their understanding of this field. Condrey's own expertise has enabled him to take contributions from leading experts in the field and shape them into a reader that is comprehensive, engaging, and authoritative."
—DONALD E. KLINGNER, University of Colorado Distinguished Professor, School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs; former president, American Society for Public Administration; and fellow, National Academy of Public Administration

PART ONE

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT IN A CHANGING ENVIRONMENT

It is unprecedented for human capital issues to have such a significant role in the president’s budget and performance plans.

JOHN BERRY, DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT (DAVIDSON, 2009)

As governments at all levels—federal, state, county, and municipal—search for ways to reform themselves, it is imperative that human resource managers be positioned to assist, survive, and thrive in this new public sector milieu. This third edition of the Handbook of Human Resource Management in Government begins with an introspective look at how public human resource management has changed and continues to change as it finds its place in our complex government environment. The four chapters in Part One examine change in the public human resource management field as it pertains to the role of the human resource office, human resource management in a human capital environment, the political and social environment in which public human resource management operates, and the evolution and current status of civil service reform in the United States.

In Chapter One, “The Changing Roles of the Human Resource Office,” Carolyn Ban and Charles W. Gossett call on human resource managers to maintain the relevance of the profession. Ban and Gossett trace the role of the personnel office from a regulatory and clearinghouse function to a more modern model in which human resource managers are actively involved in making key organizational decisions: “The new charge is to support the mission of the organization. The strategic approach to HR also entails a new power relationship within the organization, with the senior HR staff functioning as part of the management team, sitting at the table with top management when major policy or program decisions are being made and ensuring that HR implications are considered. In sum, HR is no longer simply handling routine tasks or providing consulting services on a voluntary basis. Rather the HR organization becomes a major player—an integral part of the strategic planning process.” The authors continue, “The HR office of today and tomorrow needs staff with analytical skills, consulting know-how, and the ability to work effectively while upholding the merit system principles.”

R. Paul Battaglio Jr. and Jared J. Llorens, in Chapter Two, “Human Resource Management in a Human Capital Environment,” argue that data-based decision capabilities are increasingly important to public human resource management. To achieve these capabilities, public organizations must give significant attention to the development of their workforces: “This new approach has resulted in a renewed emphasis on areas such as workplace planning, hiring, and employer retention and it is now common for many public organizations to develop long-term, strategic human capital plans.”

Dahlia Lynn and Donald E. Klingner, in Chapter Three, “Beyond Civil Service: The Politics of the Emergent Paradigms,” describe the historical development of public human resource management in the United States and its relationship to the competing values of responsiveness, efficiency, employee rights, social equity, collaboration, individual accountability, downsizing, decentralization, and community responsibility. “Emerging then, is a human resource framework that embraces both the management of control and collaboration that is paradoxical, exposing the underlying tensions inherent in the values of monitoring (compliance) and empowerment (outcomes). The tensions are evidenced by the debates over the desire to maintain control mechanisms associated with traditional civil service systems (risk adversity) and the strategic attractiveness of responsiveness and managerial empowerment (stewardship).”

Chapter Four, “Civil Service Reform in the United States: Patterns and Trends,” by J. Edward Kellough and Lloyd G. Nigro, discusses the radical reforms of the past decade, from abolition of civil service protection for state workers in Georgia to outsourcing of human resource functions in the federal Department of Homeland Security. The authors conclude by stating: “In the end, what we will have, and indeed, what we have now, is a multiplicity of approaches to public personnel management across the states and within the federal government. The era of traditional highly centralized public personnel management appears to be over, but future conceptualizations of state-of-the-art thinking about public personnel management could change. Those views will largely be determined, as is always the case, by political ideology and politics.”

In these first four chapters, the authors delineate some of the many factors, both within and beyond the control of the public human resource manager, shaping the current environment of the public human resource management profession. Recognizing and reacting to these changes is vital as we seek to position our profession as integral to the reemergent and revitalized public sector. The chapters in Part One guide us toward this objective.

CHAPTER ONE

THE CHANGING ROLES OF THE HUMAN RESOURCE OFFICE

Carolyn Ban
Charles W. Gossett

Efforts to reform the way in which governments handle the personnel management function have a long history in the United States. Kellough and Selden (2003) claim that there were at least twelve major administrative reforms in the twentieth century alone. The last thirty-year period, however, has seen almost continuous calls for reform, many of them leading to significant changes in how the human resource (HR) function is organized and managed in the federal government, starting with President Jimmy Carter’s Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 and moving through the Grace Commission’s recommendations under President Ronald Reagan (Levine, 1985; Hansen, 1985) to the National Performance Review (NPR) era of reinventing government led by Vice President Al Gore (National Performance Review, 1993; Thompson, 2001) and to President George W. Bush’s President’s Management Agenda (Office of Management and Budget [OMB], 2002), which James Pfiffner (2007, p. 7) has characterized as containing possibly “the broadest human resource management changes since the Pendleton Act.” Early evidence suggests that the administration of President Barack Obama will put forward proposals to make further changes in human resource management structures and practices. Although much of the public attention to these various reform efforts focused on specific policy changes, such as pay for performance and contracting out, underlying all these initiatives was a debate about the proper role of a personnel office in the management of the affairs of government.

We begin with a brief overview of the background of public personnel management and then explore the range of roles that HR offices are asked to perform and some of the approaches agencies have used in carrying out these roles. Finally, we take an early look at the probable directions of the Obama administration in the HR arena. Although our focus is primarily on the U.S. federal government, many of the trends discussed are also being seen at state and local levels and in governments outside the United States.

Before we turn to the issue of roles for the HR office, it is useful to look briefly at the context for this discussion—the structure of the personnel process in the public sector. In the private sector each business or organization is free to establish its own personnel system, although it must work within the constraints posed by a growing body of employment law governing such issues as nondiscrimination, labor relations, rights of the disabled, and family and medical leave, among others. It is also important to understand that the HR office is responsible hierarchically to the chief executive officer, who ultimately determines which role or roles the HR office should perform. In the public sector, however, individual agencies have traditionally had little freedom to design their own personnel systems: they must operate within civil service laws. Traditional civil service systems were complex, highly formalized, and stressed uniformity rather than flexibility. These systems typically included a centralized body, such as a civil service commission, or, at the federal level, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which not only set the rules but actually administered the system, developing and administering civil service examinations for hiring and promotion and establishing pay policy, among other functions. These centralized organizations also had the responsibility of oversight over agency personnel offices. As we show later, the recent history of HR management in the federal government has been one of policy swings, from centralization to decentralization (Ban and Marzotto, 1984), from detailed regulation to deregulation, and from in-house to outsourced provision of services. The Obama administration appears to be heralding a swing back of the policy pendulum in at least some of these areas.

The Multiple Roles of the HR Office

The roles that can be played by the human resource office have changed and grown over time, presenting the dilemma of sometimes conflicting goals. In this chapter we discuss the following roles:

• The administrative role, which has been redefined in response to pressure to shift from ensuring compliance to offering customer service.

• The organization developmental (OD) and consulting role, which requires HR staff to take on a broader function, serving as internal consultants to managers on a wide range of organizational issues.

• The contract management and coordination role, which reflects the increased tendency to outsource parts of the HR function and requires agency HR staff to manage contracts with providers and often to coordinate in-house staff and external staff, sometimes from several contractors.

• The strategic human resource management role (or human capital management, in the current jargon), which requires HR to support the strategic mission of the organization or agency as a whole. In order to meet that goal, HR leaders are urged to act as full members of the management team, linking personnel /HR policy to agency mission, goals, policy, and budget.

The Administrative Role: From Compliance to Customer Service

The traditional tasks of the personnel office in government, as that office has evolved since the creation of civil service systems in the late nineteenth century, have emphasized routine processing of administrative actions, including what many consider the fundamental tasks of any personnel office—recruitment activities such as advertising jobs and testing applicants, performing job analysis and classification, administering benefits, and assisting managers with disciplinary actions. But that administrative function takes place in the context of an increasingly convoluted set of laws, rules, and regulations governing the civil service system, thus requiring HR staff to also enforce compliance with the rules by ensuring that managers do not circumvent established procedures in any of the administrative areas. For example, the HR office is often charged with making sure hiring proceeds according to merit principles, salaries are based on the actual tasks assigned to the position, or employees are disciplined appropriately according to the nature of their offense.

A central theme of reform efforts has been making HR staff more responsive to the needs of their customers by having them taking a positive rather than a negative approach to the administrative role. HR staff have long been criticized for their negative stance, their heavy focus on compliance, and their tendency to be naysayers, that is, to tell managers that they can’t do what they want, rather than helping them to find a way to meet their goals within the system (Perry, 1995). Past criticisms of personnel offices have focused on “personnel staff’s excessive concern with strict compliance with the rules and procedures rather than results” and on “lack of sufficient staff resources in the personnel office” and “lack of sufficient skill in the personnel staff” (U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, 1993, p. 21).

These critiques of the traditional personnel system reach back for decades. Alan Campbell (1978), who spearheaded the effort that led to the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 and who became the first head of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, excoriated personnelists for “rigidity, inflexibility, and a turn of mind . . . that thinks in terms of protecting the system; can’t do, rather than can do” (p. 61). At the heart of the problem has been a deep-seated role conflict between personnelists and line managers. As noted elsewhere (Ban, 1995): “Personnel staff saw themselves as the ‘keepers of the flame,’ charged with preserving merit in the merit system—a probably accurate reflection of congressional intent. This view of their role was also instilled by their socialization, both inside most agencies and particularly in training given by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (U.S. OPM) and its predecessor, the Civil Service Commission (CSC), which reinforced in budding personnelists an adversarial view of the system. They were conditioned to see managers as the people asking them to break the rules—to violate the merit system” (p. 91).

In addition to tensions resulting from this traditional compliance function, conflict has arisen because personnel offices serve multiple clients; they work for managers but also for employees themselves. Thus they risk being seen as either “management tool or employee advocate” (Straus, 1987).

Scholars and advocates for reform have proposed solutions for the problems and limitations common to the administrative role for over thirty years (Balk, 1969; Campbell, 1978; Nalbandian, 1981). At the most basic level, they have simply urged personnelists to do what they do better and faster and to be more responsive to the needs of managers. More specifically, this means improving accuracy and speed in processing routine administrative actions, such as shortening the amount of time it takes to hire a new employee or to reach a decision on a job reclassification. It also means taking a more positive attitude toward managers’ requests, helping them to find creative ways to do things within the constraints of the system instead of simply saying no. The effort to deliver the standard administrative services more effectively and efficiently has been characterized as improving customer service and has focused on several specific strategies: restructuring the delivery of HR services, changing the culture of the personnel office, deregulating the HR function, and relying more heavily on technology to improve service. Let us examine each of these trends in turn.

Restructuring the Delivery of Services. There have been repeated attempts to restructure HR delivery. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the trend was toward decentralizing the HR function down to the operating level in order to give managers the service they need. Both the NPR and the National Commission on the State and Local Public Service (also known as the Winter Commission, for its chair, former Mississippi governor William Winter) expressly called for decentralization. In fact the NPR reforms resulted in virtually eliminating the central role of OPM and delegating responsibility for hiring, across the board, to individual agencies (U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, 2002a). Yet some research (Ban, 1995; National Academy of Public Administration, 1996) has shown that centralized personnel functions, if well managed, can provide high-quality service.

One of the ways many federal agencies have coped with cuts in the size of their HR staff has been to eliminate many local HR offices and to consolidate service in regional or national offices (Ban, 1988-89). As discussed later, that consolidation continued under the Bush administration, which also strongly encouraged outsourcing government roles and functions, including HR functions, either to shared service centers within government or to the private sector (Johnson, 2004; Durant, Girth, and Johnston, 2009). State governments also experimented with this approach, contracting out everything from payroll administration to background checks, from job classification to employee benefits administration (Coggburn, 2007). The assumptions were that central servicing organizations were more efficient because of economies of scale and that the private sector, with its emphasis on customer service, would do an even better job of administering these personnel activities than government employees, though there is increasing evidence that this assumption does not always hold true (Coggburn, 2007; Bowman, West, and Gertz, 2006). Furthermore, neither centralizing the HR function nor outsourcing will necessarily be perceived by the customers as providing better service. According to an HR leader in a D.C.-based federal agency, managers “want the HR resources within physical seeing them and touching them distance,” which presents a real challenge when, as is true in this leader’s agency, the administrative functions have been outsourced to an office in West Virginia.

Changing the HR Office Culture. Culture change to facilitate a customer service approach to the administrative role has also been an ongoing effort. The 1990s saw the introduction of total quality management (TQM) in personnel offices in both the federal government and state and local governments (Berman, 1997). TQM encouraged personnel staff to examine their relationships with their customers and to set measurable goals for their work. It also stressed restructuring work away from narrow specialization and toward a more generalist approach and applying cross-training so that one staff person or team could follow through on all the related steps of a complex personnel action and could build ongoing relationships with a specific group of customers (Barzelay, 1992). Even though many organizations have moved on to newer reforms, the core values of TQM continue to shape the strategies for introducing or reinforcing a customer service focus among personnel office staff.

Deregulating Human Resources. One key thrust of reform proposals is to deregulate civil service systems (National Aca...