Public Administration Public Personnel Administration

Public Administration

Public Personnel Administration

Public personnel administration is a division of human resource management that is concerned with the attainment, expansion, operation and reimbursement of a public organization's labor force. The expression public personnel administration includes three key concepts. First, public refers to local and neighborhood governmental agencies as well as non-profit ones. Personnel have to do with the human resources who work in the public sector and provide public services to the public. Third, administration refers to the management of human resources in public organizations in an efficient and competent way that helps the organization reach its goals and objectives (What Is Public Personnel Administration, 2012).

There are four main tasks of public personnel administration. The first, planning, includes organizing staffing plans and budgets, deciding how workers will be used, and setting pay rates. Acquisition is the second, and refers to choosing and recruiting workers. The third is development, which entails worker training and advancement programs, as well as performance appraisals. Sanctions which are the fourth function, deal with employer-employee relationships, and often include workplace safety and handling grievances (What Is Public Personnel Administration, 2012).

In the United States of America, Woodrow Wilson is considered to be the father of public administration. He was the first to formally recognize public administration in an 1887 article entitled "The Study of Administration." In this article Wilson said it is the aim of administrative study to find out, what government can suitably and successfully do, and, secondly, how it can do these suitable things with the maximum possible efficiency and at the least possible expense either of money or of energy. Wilson was very influential to the science of public administration because of this article in which he advocated four concepts: disconnection of politics and administration, relative examination of political and private organizations, improving effectiveness with business practices and attitudes toward every day operations, improving the success of public service through administration, training civil servants, and using merit-based assessment. The separation of politics and administration has been the subject of lasting debate (Evolution of Public Administration, 2010).

As the extent of public services and the number of civil servants grew, particularly after the Civil War, this system deteriorated into the abuses of the spoils system in which service to party was more significant than capability and governments took to creating extra jobs to offer additional political currency. The growth of government workers also led to a problem of decision-making control. Hiring took up extravagant amounts of time, particularly for the President and monitoring the performance of employees became more and more difficult. After the War, a great debate took place on the relative merits of spoils and a merit system. The supporters of the former believed that spoils were imperative to the health of political parties; therefore democracy and that benefaction guaranteed loyalty and responsibility (Shepherd, 2003).

The growth of the economy and of government also led to an alteration in the nature of political competition. The center and national policies grew at the cost of the periphery and of spoils politics. By the same token, the technical and industrial revolution was leading to a scale of productive operations like larger firms and markets, longer periods for financing investments that required levels of economic security that went beyond spot transactions between individuals who knew each other. A great coalition of smaller firms aimed to defeat patronage and create an acceptable, predictable, regulatory environment; in other words, a credible commitment mechanism was needed, and politicians could supply this. This confluence of monitoring problem, change in political parties, and demand for security led to demand for a merit system that would offer legal security via impartial public agents, and that was less vulnerable to political manipulation (Shepherd, 2003).

Public administration is made up of two levels. One level consists of the political directorates like cabinets, councils and advisory bodies. Members of the political directorate may be elected, co-opted, nominated by interested groups or selected by some other means. The political directorate may also include members from the military or civil services. The other level comprises permanent career officials and bureaucratic organizations. Civil servants are supposed to be selected on merit, and spend their whole careers in the civil service subject to acceptable performance. In theory, both civil service impartiality and the policy-administration dichotomy highlight the role differentiation between the members of political directorates and the career services. In practice, there is a close connection between political directorates and civil servants within the executive branch (Rethinking Public Administration: An Overview, n.d.).