Public Personnel Management

Browse past and current articles from this publication.

Evaluating HR management strategies for recruiting and retaining IT professionals in the U.S. federal government.
Public personnel management scholarship and practice increasingly focus on creative human resources management (HRM) strategies for attracting and retaining employees with special skills and institu . . .

The relation between managers' emotional intelligence and the organizational climate they create.
Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to understanding and recognition of oneself and others-abilities, perception and attitudes. This mental ability has an important influence on the other abilities o . . .

The importance of employee health benefits to public and private sector organizations.
Employer-sponsored health benefits are a vital part of human resources management (HRM) because they compose a large and growing portion of an employee's total compensation package. (1) The costs of . . .

Correctional officer turnover: of Maslow's needs hierarchy and Herzberg's motivation theory.
Undoubtedly, many organizations know that employee turnover negatively impacts productivity. Mobley (1) described employee turnover as a potentially costly phenomenon facing many organizations. The . . .

Rational techniques as myth-based rituals: the role of reflective practitioners in remunerative justice.
Political, social, economic, and organizational forces often compel public administrators to address the problem of justly remunerating employees. This problem is fundamentally "wicked," but for a h . . .

Challenges facing senior public servants in a plural society.(Report)(Statistical data)
It is generally the case in plural societies that the civil service and government are dominated by one powerful group. This was so under colonial rule, and in countries such as Trinidad and Tobago . . .

Employees' perception of organizational change: the mediating effects of stress management strategies.(Statistical data)
Organizational change is the process whereby an organization converts from an existing state to a hoped-for future state in order to increase its effectiveness. For employees, organizational change . . .

Perceived fairness of a background information form and a job knowledge test.(Statistical data)
A wealth of empirical literature provides compelling support for collecting background information from candidates when making personnel selection decisions. For example, many studies indicate that . . .

Assessing electronic recruitment implementation in state governments: issues and challenges.
Since the 1990s, one of the leading challenges in public personnel management has been implementing effective human capital strategies to enhance government performance and accountability. (1) The e . . .

Psychological testing in personnel selection, part III: the resurgence of personality testing.
In the first article in this series, which was published in the Spring 2008 issue of Public Personnel Management, we noted that while the utility of some selection instruments, particularly cognitiv . . .

Minority representation in senior positions in U.S. Federal Agencies: a paradox of underrepresentation.(Report)(Statistical data
US federal government agency workforces are typically believed to epitomize equal opportunity and embrace merit principles. The federal government has historically spearheaded policies and programs . . .

New tricks for an old dog: visualizing job analysis results.(Report)
For the past 30 years researchers and practitioners have relied on the same job analysis methods for their work. Most often, the projects begin with interviews of subject matter expert (SME) groups . . .

Identifying the right course for talent management.
Talent management has always seemed to me to be a tricky subject. It is at risk of becoming mere hyperbole, as in the War for Talent, (1) or of becoming the fad of the conference circuit because the . . .

Talent management: issues of focus and fit.
Talent management has been high on the agenda of HR professionals in the United Kingdom for the past few years. This high level of interest is reflected in a number of recent case study-based resear . . .

Talent management in the era of the aging workforce: the critical role of knowledge transfer.
Imagine you are an HR executive and there are two possible scenarios you might experience. In the first scenario, you are fully aware of and concerned about the aging of your organization's workforc . . .

The U.S. federal Senior Executive Service (SES) and gender diversity: would proposed legislation enhancing the representational
The Senior Executive Service (SES) corps consists of high-level managers throughout the U.S. federal government who hold positions just below the level of presidential appointee. Career members of t . . .

The next generation of leadership assessments: some case studies.
Great leaders. We know them when we see them, but how can we identify those high-potential employees who will one day run their organizations? Workforce planners have been warning for years of the i . . .

Managing talent in the South African Public Service.
South Africa is in the midst of a skills crisis, with the former deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka acknowledging that "nothing short of a skills revolution by a nation united will extricate us . . .

A systematic approach for assessing the currency ("up-to-dateness") of job-analytic information.
It is almost a given that some jobs have the potential to change rapidly over time. Some of these changes are the result of new or developing technology. That is, technology appears to be changing a . . .

The impact of work redesign and psychological empowerment on organizational commitment in a changing environment: an example fro
Personnel management in both public and private organizations emphasizes human commitment to organizations. Highly committed employees identify with the organization's goals and values, expend extra . . .

Developing effective internships within public sector organizations.
Almost everyone agrees that, in theory at least, there should exist a symbiotic relationship between organizations and the interns they occasionally hire. With a perfect internship program, the orga . . .

How does the SCHIP exclusion affect health insurance coverage for children of low income state workers?(State Children's Health
The State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) was created in 1997 to expand health insurance to uninsured low income children. Almost four million children were covered through this program . . .

The Luevano consent decree and public personnel reform.(Professional and Administrative Careers Examina)
The question of what constitutes "merit" and whether civil service examinations adequately test for merit has been, and remains, a key issue in public personnel administration since late in the nine . . .

The coachability and fakability of personality-based selection tests used for police selection.
The use of personality and biodata measures in safety force personnel selection is increasing due to demands to reduce adverse hiring, placement, and promotion decisions. The U.S. Department of Just . . .

The human resource competency studies and the IPMA-HR competency training and certification program in China.(International Publ
In 2004, the U.S.-based International Public Management Association for Human Resources (IPMA-HR) and the China-based Training Center of State Administration of Foreign Expert Affairs (TC-SAFEA) est . . .

The blended workforce: alternative federal models.
Federal employment has long been characterized by lengthy tenures, wages set according to an internal job classification scheme, a high level of job security, promotion from within, and adequate-to- . . .

Nursing generations in the contemporary workplace.(Statistical table)(Survey)
As populations of developed countries age, proportionately fewer people participate in the workforce. Concerns about the labor supply has created an interest in workplace demography. In addition to . . .

Blurring the line between public and private sectors: the case of police officers' off-duty employment.(Statistical table)
While much recent attention has been given to the outsourcing of government services, little is known about the opposite situation in which private organizations retain the services of public worker . . .

Tomorrow's workforce: the needs for immigrant workers and strategies to retain them.
Corporate decision makers throughout the United States are now facing tremendous challenges in the intensified global marketplace. They have realized that in the new business environment, people, no . . .

Psychological testing in personnel selection, Part II: the refinement of methods and standards in employee selection.
During the first hundred years of scientific management and personnel selection, psychological testing became a powerful and institutionalized tool that was broadly applied. Universities and trade s . . .

Work-family experiences and the insights of municipal government employees: a case study.(Statistical data)
Accumulating evidence about the links between paid work and family life has prompted many businesses to initiate strategies to aggressively confront the work-life challenges experienced by their emp . . .

Nonrandom response and rater variance in job analysis surveys: a cause for concern?(Statistical table)(Survey)
Job analyses should provide the foundation for all HR management activities. (1) Job descriptions, consisting of samples of incumbent behaviors, provide the data to describe work conditions, work pr . . .

No easy path to HRM performance measurement systems: exploring the introduction of the U.S. Human Capital Assessment and Account
In contemporary public administration, one can see clearly an increased focus on measuring performance in government and public organizations. (1) Performance measurement is an important issue in ne . . .

E-mail policies of the 50 states: a content analysis.
Even though wide-scale use of e-mail and the Internet in government organizations came a bit later than it did in private sector organizations, growth in e-government initiatives are currently narro . . .

Hispanics and Anglos: the role of group composition on satisfaction.
In January 2003 the U.S. Census Bureau declared Hispanics to have surpassed Blacks as the largest minority group in the United States, yet surprisingly little empirical research has attended to the . . .

Policies for managing the training and development function: lessons from the federal government.
The administration of employee training resources is guided, in part, by laws and regulations. This is exemplified in the case studied here of federal employee training. After reviewing the literatu . . .

Mentoring--a relationship based on trust: qualitative research.
The study reported in this article aimed to explore the trust proteges felt for their mentors and the effects different dimensions of relationships that can influence this trust in mentoring relatio . . .

Two years later: Hurricane Katrina still poses significant human resource problems for local governments.
This study explores the impact of Hurricane Katrina on local government HR management for several cities along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The authors interviewed mayors, city managers, chief admini . . .

Revitalizing human resources management in state government: moving from transactional to transformational HR professionals in t
This article illustrates how the State of Michigan transformed human resources in state government by developing HR leaders for the future. A transformational plan was developed in March 2000 to enh . . .

Psychological testing in personnel selection, Part I: a century of psychological testing.
The application of psychological testing to human resource selection, particularly the use of instruments designed to assess personality traits, has a long, colorful, and somewhat contentious histor . . .

Job characteristics of officers and agents: results of a national job analysis.
The law enforcement community represents a group for which the decision to hire, fire, and make many other personnel-related decisions is of critical importance. When a law enforcement officer or ag . . .

Legislating for best practice HRM: the New Zealand approach.(Author abstract)
Reforms in the New Zealand public sector in the 1980s meant economic objectives became a priority for public sector employers. This threatened the for, met objectives of social justice and equity, a . . .

Affirmative action in federal employment: good intentions run amuck?(Author abstract)
Introduction Affirmative action programs have been a mainstay of efforts to obtain equality of opportunity for minority employees in the federal government for more than 40 years. Since the earl . . .

Comparing public and private choices of managed health care plans: rhetoric versus reality.(Author abstract)
Introduction and Background The rhetoric is that the public sector offers greater health benefits coverage and affordability than the private sector. (1) This study tests the reality of employer-s . . .

The Georgia Department of Corrections: an exploratory reflection on correctional officer turnover and its correlates.(Author abs
Introduction In recent years, strategic workforce planning has played an increasing role in human resource related activities of many state public agencies in Georgia. The GDC is no exception. The . . .

The validity of the Reid Report for selection of corrections staff.(Author abstract)(Report)
Although estimates for industry losses from employee theft and counter-productivity vary across reports, employee honesty and integrity is a serious concern for many employers. The solution for most . . .

Living wage ordinances in the public sector.
Two key efforts in the United States wage movement attempt to assist low-income families in freeing themselves from poverty by increasing their incomes. The first involved the enactment of a minimum . . .

Synthesizing minimum qualifications using an occupational area job analysis questionnaire.(Author abstract)
Whether done formally or informally, most organizations apply an evaluation process to an applicant's personal history items such as amount of experience, level of education, type of degree and othe . . .

A revolution in public personnel administration: the growth of Web-based recruitment and selection processes in the federal serv
Employee recruitment, examination and selection are among the most essential public personnel management activities. These are the processes through which merit is measured and employees are brought . . .

Organizational trust, trust in the chief executive and work satisfaction.
Introduction Especially in the past decade, employees have begun to change their view of the organizations in which they work, with traditional employee-organization bonds becoming weaker. (1) The . . .