Handbook of Human Resource Management in Government

INTRODUCTION

TOWARD RELEVANT HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Stephen E. Condrey

Calls for reform permeate the field of public human resource management. No longer can human resource managers be content to practice their profession in relative isolation. Increased pressures for relevance and oversight are now the norm. It appears that the language of downsizing, rightsizing, reinventing, reengineering, devolution, human capital, decentralization, centralization, outsourcing, insourcing, and privatization has become part of the public sector human resource manager’s lexicon. The challenge for the human resource manager is to anticipate and be prepared for necessary and relevant changes to the profession.

As the previous paragraph makes clear, to work in the field of public human resource management today is to work in a turbulent environment. As I will argue in the next several pages, we may be seeing a rebirth of the profession as we enter this second decade of the twenty-first century.

The purpose of this introductory chapter is twofold. First, a brief historical sketch of the field is presented to bring context to the chapters that follow. Second, five organizing models for the delivery of human resource management services in public organizations are explicated. The strategic human resource management model, the third model that is discussed, melds positive features of the first two models, the traditional and reform models of human resource management. The fourth model focuses on privatization, or outsourcing, efforts related to public sector human resource management. The fifth and emerging model blends aspects of the strategic model with the privatization model.

Changing Public Human Resource Management

Although the new path is not yet clear, change and the potential for change in U.S. public sector human resource management are in evidence, as they have often been throughout this field’s history. As civil service systems slowly emerged in state and municipal governments after the Pendleton Act of 1883 established the federal civil service system, the personnel profession began to take on distinct functions in the recruitment, examination, and classification of public employees. Van Riper (1958) reminds us that selecting and retaining public employees on the basis of merit was a novelty at that time: Before the nineteenth century most civil servants were chosen upon what have been called, not always appropriately, political grounds. That is, most public appointments were made on the basis of partisanship, influence, wealth, family, personal loyalty, blackmail, or charity, rather than intelligence or competence to do their work (p. 8).

Mosher (1982) posits that civil service systems, established in many instances to protect against the influence of partisan politics, were afforded an extraordinary amount of independence in developing and administering programs to protect our bureaucratic structures from the evils of spoils politics. The nascence of many civil service systems, with their moral overtones of good versus evil, coincided with the emergence of the field of scientific management. Given this one best way mentality, many classification and examination procedures became frozen in place, outside the purview of elected officials, other organizational departments, and other managers. As time progressed, central civil service agencies designed to protect and professionalize public workforces became characterized as hindrances to effective management.

Fairly or not, to some the public human resource management profession today represents rule-bound bureaucrats more interested in achieving their own short-term goals than the goals of the larger organization. Consider Savas and Ginsburg’s classic analysis of the New York City personnel system: The system prohibits good management, frustrates able employees, inhibits productivity, lacks the confidence of the city’s taxpayers, and fails to respond to the needs of the citizens (1973, p. 72). Although many critics fail to consider that personnel rules, regulations, and procedures were devised to professionalize government employees and protect them from undue political pressures, in many cases, means and ends have indeed been reversed: line managers view human resource managers as an impediment rather than as partners in achieving organizational mission and goals. Conversely, human resource managers view line managers as a hindrance to proper human resource management. If human resource management is to remain an intact profession, it must strive to achieve relevance to organizations as a whole.

How We Got Where We Are Today

Three relatively recent events in particular called the relevance and viability of central human resource management agencies and functions into question. The first was the application of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to state and local governments by the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972. Following the passage of the latter legislation, there was a great deal of introspection by central personnel agencies, civil service systems, government managers, and citizens about the relevance of traditional hiring practices and their results as seen in the composition of U.S. workforces. In some cases this introspection was voluntary; in other cases, it was not. Numerous charges of unfair recruitment, testing, and performance appraisal techniques were brought to light through lawsuits, consent decrees, and the like. Government agencies, now forced to defend their respective personnel systems, were obligated to prove their techniques’ validity and viability in cases where adverse impact on protected groups was detected. Traditional practices such as the rule of three (which restricted hiring to the top three candidates for a position as measured by a civil service examination) and written tests based on scanty or nonexistent job analyses came crashing down. When personnel managers were required to justify their methods, in many cases these methods were found to be sorely lacking. This increased scrutiny forced personnel agencies to rethink time-honored practices and to become acquainted with more readily defensible, sophisticated psychological methodologies: validated assessment centers often replaced written tests, broadbanding of test scores replaced strict rules of one or three, and performance appraisal systems moved from trait-based systems toward more job-related and interactive measures. In this way, implementation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 helped professionalize and energize a once dormant field. Conversely, it also laid the groundwork for a serious questioning of the role that central personnel agencies had in managing modern organizations.

The seeds of this questioning began to show evidence of fruition in the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (CSRA), the second major event that helped shape the current environment of public human resource management. Whereas the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 eventually disclosed tried-but-not-true personnel practices, response to the CSRA initiated a steady call to decentralize personnel functions and decisions.

Enacted during the Carter administration, the Civil Service Reform Act sought to bring businesslike procedures to the federal government, most notably through a merit pay experiment for federal midlevel managers. Espoused as a proven private sector technique, merit pay sought to link managerial performance to compensation, eliminating time-in-grade step increases (which, ironically, were originally designed to be associated with individual performance). Although time has proved the federal government’s initial merit pay experiment a failure, merit pay and, more important, a view of the private sector as a model for public sector human resource management diffused and continues to diffuse to many state, city, and county government organizations.

Merit pay, like many of the provisions of the Civil Service Reform Act, was born of the idea that government bureaucracies, and the public personnel administrators that had great influence in controlling them, had become insulated from executive and political input and control. With the advent of the Reagan administration and a coinciding era of cutback management, government organizations at all levels began to question bureaucratic structures and processes. Organizations were instructed to do more with less and to become more efficient, effective, and accountable to executive and public oversight and control. Soon government organizations were called on to reinvent themselves. In many instances, reinvention focused on personnel practices; this, for example, was the case for the National Performance Review. Headed by Vice President Al Gore, the National Performance Review called for decentralizing many federal human resource management functions and encouraged the empowerment of managers to act with discretion rather than purely through applying rules and regulations (Gore, 1994).

In the mid-1990s, radical reform of public human resource management systems emerged, the third major force that shapes the field today. An outgrowth of the new public management movement, pressures for reform now permeate the field. Consider the State of Georgia’s abolition of property rights for civil service employees hired or promoted after July 1, 1996. In a similar vein, the State of Florida’s Service First initiative has abolished tenure for upper-level managers, increasing the opportunity for gubernatorial influence and control. In the ensuing decade, the reforms started in Georgia and Florida spread to many other states in some fashion or another (Condrey and Battaglio, 2007; Hays and Sowa, 2007).

Heading further along this radical trajectory is the recently formed Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The legislation authoring the TSA privatizes and outsources almost all important human resource management functions, including recruitment and selection. Beyond the specific case of the TSA, it is becoming commonplace for many government organizations to contract for work that in the past was performed by career government employees. This combination of privatization of traditional government functions and an increased propensity to outsource human resource management functions has placed a strain on the traditional role of the public human resource manager.

The election of Barack Obama as U.S. president signals what may well be a fourth major milestone in the modern development of the field of public human resource management. In the process of interviewing John Berry for the head of the Office of Personnel Management, the president remarked, John, we’ve got to make it cool again (Buskirk, 2009). What President Obama was intimating is that the federal government needed to reestablish itself as an employer of choice for those seeking employment. This attitude, coupled with the deep recession of 2009 and a move away from the extreme privatization of the Bush administration, perhaps signals a rebirth of government service as a high calling and desirable career option.

Personnel Administration and the Call for Reform

Personnel administration lies at the very core of administrative management. Its thrust should be positive and substantive, not negative and protective, not specialized and procedural as had been the emphasis of the predecessor civil service movements. . . . It should operate primarily as a service to managers up and down the line, not as a watchdog and controller over management. . . . Personnel operations . . . should be decentralized and delegated to bring them into more immediate relationship with the middle and lower managers whom they [serve]. This view of human resource management comes not from the reports of the National Performance Review or the Winter Commission on State and Local Government but rather from Frederick Mosher’s synthesis (1982, p. 86) of the 1937 Brownlow Committee report. In the seven decades that have elapsed since the publication of the Brownlow report, many of its key tenets for reform remain viable and are discussed and debated in academic journals, classrooms, contemporary reform commissions, and city halls and county courthouses across the United States. These consistent and recurring criticisms focus on the traditional model of personnel administration as being more concerned with rules and procedures than with the effective functioning and management of public organizations.

In a similar vein, Perry and Mesch (1997) explicate a new vision and role for public human resource management, stating that advocates of strategic human resource management . . . contend that the human resource function can contribute more effectively to mission accomplishment and the achievement of organizational goals (p. 21). Perry (1993) calls for a redefinition of the relationship between the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and federal agencies and among the managers inhabiting both. He states that one idea associated with strategic human resource management is that the style of human resource management is consistent with the strategy of the organization and that human resource practices are adjusted, accepted, and used by line managers and employees as part of their everyday work (pp. 59-60). He explains that the strategic delivery of human resource services helps narrow the gap between the competing needs of line managers and human resource managers because its central focus is on the optimal functioning of the organization, not on two distinct sets of values or priorities.

Delivery of Human Resource Management Services: Five Models

My purpose here is to explicate four distinct established models and one emerging model for the delivery of human resource management services in public organizations. The intent is to provide an organizing focus for this handbook and also to foster discussion of service delivery models relevant to organizations in the twenty-first century. Although no one model can address the particular needs and concerns of every public organization, this discussion is intended as a step toward generating introspection in the field, with the ultimate goal of creating and maintaining a viable and relevant home for the practice of human resource management in public organizations.

Traditional Model

The traditional model of public human resource management focuses on a central personnel organization dictating rules and procedures, ostensibly to achieve fairness and equity in public sector organizations. Little thought is given to line functions of the organization, whether they are paving roads, providing recreational services to citizens, delivering social services to clients, or fostering diplomatic relations with a foreign country. Of course, such a focus was not the original intent. As Van Riper (1958) points out in his study of the U.S. Civil Service, central personnel functions were aimed at professionalizing the workforce and providing equity and fairness in distributing a public good: government jobs. Beginning in the late 1800s, the federal government and major U.S. cities began to centralize personnel functions such as hiring, testing, recruitment, and classification. Influenced by the progressive reform movement and theories of scientific management, personnelists sought the one best way to hire, classify, appraise, reward, and promote public employees. Furthermore, the Intergovernmental Personnel Act of 1970 and previous federal legislation encouraged local governments to create civil service systems with the promise of ensuing federal revenue-sharing dollars.

Reform Model

The reform model seeks to decentralize personnel authority and decision making to line managers. Almost a mirror image of the traditional model, the reform model values dispersal of real personnel authority to various organizational units, allowing them to make crucial decisions concerning employee recruitment, selection, classification, and remuneration. In many instances, these decisions may be made by line managers having little formal knowledge of or training in modern human resource management practices and techniques. The result may be responsive to the immediate needs of the organization; however, with no central organizing focus, problems of equity and fairness within and among organizational units may appear. For example, effective and consistent management of equal employment opportunity goals may be hampered, pay disparities may become prevalent, and employee assessment inequities may arise.

Strategic Model

The strategic model suggests merging the two archetypal models just discussed. As Perry (1993) describes it in his discussion of a strategically oriented federal civil service system, the strategic model seeks to balance the competing demands of the traditional and reform models, recognizing the benefits of some centralizing efforts but also realizing that human resource management takes place throughout an organization and should support, not hamper or subvert, the organization’s overall goals. In the strategic model the personnel function is shared between personnel authorities and the line departments that use human resource services. Activities that can use such cooperative arrangements include devising and administering assessment centers, recruiting key personnel, and restructuring organizational classification systems. Here the human resource manager is an organizational consultant, a valued member of the managerial team, not a roadblock to be avoided. Mesch, Perry, and Wise (1995) note that the strategic human resource management model emphasizes decentralization and devolution of authority. It seeks not uniformity but variety in personnel policies and practices. Strategic human resource management attempts to pare down excessive rules and regulations, enabling managers to function more efficiently and to focus on achieving their organizational mission within a competitive environment (p. 398).

Privatization, or Outsourcing, Model

Since publication of the second edition of this handbook in 2005, the privatization , or outsourcing, model of public human resource management has come to exert a greater influence in the field. As government payrolls constricted and political leaders increasingly looked to the private sector for models of organization, outsourcing and privatization of the public human resource management function increased, reaching its peak with the outsourcing of all significant human resource management functions for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

In this model the public human resource management function becomes increasingly moot. The challenge for organizations and managers alike is to retain coordinative control over the human resource function when privatization and outsourcing occur. It should not be forgotten that even if various functions are performed by a private entity, the public’s business and welfare are still at stake. Issues of fairness, representative bureaucracy, and equity should not be dismissed. The writing, management, and oversight of contracts should strive to represent the values of effective and responsive public service.

Hybrid Model

The excesses of the privatization model first became evident to many through problems experienced in Florida as a result of significant outsourcing of human resource payroll functions. More significantly, employee outsourcing during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gave many pause as to what was and was not the proper role of government versus the private sector in providing what had traditionally been government functions. Although the excesses of private contractors may have drawn the greatest attention, the slow and steady hollowing of the state has posed the largest concern and possible threat to traditional notions of government and governance.

The fifth model is a hybrid of the strategic model and the privatization, or outsourcing, model. This model signals a maturing of the field that allows organization-focused human resource management with features of both the strategic and privatization models. This hybrid model retains the importance of in-house human resource management expertise, but appreciates that, with proper organizational oversight, increased flexibility as well as privatization is now an established feature of organizational life. Such a recognition and appreciation can ultimately increase the role and influence of human resource managers in government organizations.

Comparing the Models

It is useful to compare and contrast the five models of public human resource management in terms of eight important factors: service delivery, goal orientation, communication pattern, feedback type, value orientation, the role of the personnel or human resource manager, the perception of the human resource management profession, and the focus of education for the human resource manager. This comparison is summarized in Table 1.1.

Service Delivery

In the traditional model, personnel service delivery is centralized through a unitary personnel authority, be it a civil service commission or a personnel department. It is within this central unit that decisions affecting an organization’s total personnel program are made, including decisions concerning recruitment, selection, classification, performance appraisal, and compensation. The archetypal reform model strips important functions from the central personnel authority and drives them downward to the operating units of the organization. Here, personnel decisions may be made by managers having little formal training in or appreciation of modern human resource management techniques.

The strategic model views service delivery as a collaborative effort between line managers and a human resource management delivery unit. In the strategic model, important personnel decisions are made with the joint cognizance and cooperation of personnel professionals and operating unit managers. Examples of collaborative service delivery include the joint development of selection and appraisal devices, the use of the operating unit’s expertise in designing effective recruitment and training strategies, and the development of classification and compensation systems that respect equity but allow managerial personnel discretion to reward employee development and performance through the use of career ladders and skill- or knowledge-based pay incentives and adjustments. Collaborative service delivery requires the personnel professional to break out of the central personnel agency box and to become intimately aware of the functional specifics of operating departments. Likewise, line managers are exposed to the opportunities and constraints that influence the delivery of public human resource management services.

In the privatization, or outsourcing, model, service delivery is performed by a private contract entity. Payroll processing, recruitment, examination, and other important services may be performed outside the direct purview of the public human resource manager and other managers in the organization. The challenge to both is to write, administer, and monitor contracts in a manner that meets organizational requirements and the public interest alike.

TABLE 1.1 A COMPARISON OF FIVE MODELS OF PUBLIC HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

In the hybrid model, features of both the strategic and privatization, or outsourcing, model are retained. The human resource manager is a key player in organizational functioning and decision making yet may also serve a primary linkage and oversight function concerning personnel or functions that have been outsourced.

Goal Orientation

A critical element in the varying approaches to human resource management is goal orientation. The traditional goal of central personnel agencies was the uniform enforcement of rules, policies, and procedures—that is, the effective objectification of personnel decision making. Taken to an extreme, this concentration on rule enforcement becomes the agency’s primary end. Unintended consequences include a dissociation of the central personnel agency from the organization’s operational goals and objectives. In the words of Wallace Sayre (1948), personnel administration obsessed with a dependence on rule orientation represents a triumph of techniques over purpose. For example, strict enforcement of a rule of one or three for personnel selection, originally intended to reward merit and discourage patronage and favoritism, may actually hinder managers in appointing staff responsive to organizational needs.

In an opposite but similar fashion, the goal orientation of the reform model is manager centered. Here the decentralization of the personnel function forces the goal orientation to cluster around the individual goals of agency managers. At the same time, such an orientation may hamper overall organizational goals, such as pay equity and affirmative action efforts.

The strategic model of public human resource management seeks a goal orientation that is respectful of effective human resource management practices yet responsive to the organization’s overall goals. For example, the banding of examination scores into highly qualified and qualified groupings might meet the goal of allowing managerial discretion in employee selection yet also maintain respect for the principle of merit-based appointments. In the privatization, or outsourcing, model, the human resource manager focuses on effective contract negotiation and administration. The hybrid model combines positive features of both of these models, with the realization that even though some functions may be contracted, there is still an obligation to effectively monitor these activities toward the end of enhancing organizational goals.

Communication Patterns

In the traditional model, communication is primarily top-down: directives from the central personnel authority are disseminated to line managers. The reform model seeks two-way communication between personnel administrators and line managers; however, in this model, standard notions of hierarchy and authority may be retained. Building on the two-way communication of the reform model, the strategic model relies on multidirectional communication, including communication with the ultimate consumers of human resource management services: employees. Multidirectional communication is the natural result of strategic human resource management’s integration into organizational mission and function. Communication in the privatization model takes the form of reports as well as contract-monitoring activities. The hybrid model extends the features of multidirectional communication to the monitoring and oversight of contracted activities and functions.

Feedback Type

Related to communication patterns are feedback types. In the traditional model, feedback consists primarily of formal and informal complaints from line managers to the central personnel authority. Feedback to human resource managers in the reform model may be muted because many personnel functions are performed in relative isolation in line departments, without the benefit of a central organizing focus for the delivery of services. The strategic model envisions continuous feedback among central personnel agency staff, organizational managers, and employees. Direct feedback may be muffled or lost completely in the privatization model. One goal of the human resource manager under the hybrid model is to unmute the feedback from privatized functions.

Value Orientation

Frank Thompson (1989) notes that multiple values, uncertainty, and the political culture present major challenges to those who seek to improve civil service systems and to those who manage within them (p. 368). The traditional model values merit. The central personnel authority is viewed as the neutrally competent guardian of the merit principle. The reform model values immediate responsiveness to organizational mission and goals, which may or may not be in conflict with traditional notions of merit. The strategic model seeks to enhance effective and responsive organizational functioning while still respecting the traditional values of merit and equity. This is possible when personnel service delivery is collaborative and when there is a mutual understanding of both organizational and human resource system goals. The privatization, or outsourcing, model values efficiency and private sector values, perhaps to the detriment of other important organizational values. The hybrid model seeks to preserve the values of merit, responsiveness, and accountability and to extend these to contracted functions. Such a model enhances the role of the human resource manager in the modern organizational environment and places new demands on those who write, approve, and administer contracts.

Role of the Human Resource Manager

The role of the public human resource manager varies widely among the five models. Although the traditional model reinforces the manager’s role as guardian of the merit principle, both the reform model and the privatization, or outsourcing, model, brought to their logical extremes, provide no substantive role for the human resource manager. In the strategic model, the human resource manager’s role is that of organizational consultant, skilled in personnel techniques and practices and knowledgeable about the organization. The hybrid model enhances the role of the human resource manager by building upon the strategic model so that the human resource manager is a key organizational player both within the traditional confines of the organization as well as within the expanded organizational scope created by privatization and outsourcing.

Perception of the Human Resource Management Profession

Similarly, the perception of the human resource management profession through the lens of each of the five models varies widely. The profession is viewed as a stilted and isolated administrative function in the traditional model; as such, it is perceived as a hindrance to effective organizational functioning. The reform and privatization, or outsourcing, models leave little room for human resource management as a distinct profession; rather, these models perceive human resource management as a collection of skills to be added to skills in standard managerial functions. The strategic model seeks to elevate the human resource management profession to the role of full managerial partner, with substantive knowledge of human resource management as well as general management. The hybrid model again extends this strategic role to the shadow organizations resulting from privatization, or outsourcing, making them more visible.

Focus of Education for the Human Resource Manager

In the traditional model, education for human resource managers is limited to topics such as employee recruitment, staffing, selection, and position classification. Because the reform model envisions no substantive role for the human resource manager, the focus of education devolves into elective selections from the traditional topics. Education for the human resource manager in the privatization, or outsourcing, model emphasizes contract negotiation and administration skills. As evidenced by the discussion of the preceding seven factors, the hybrid model places demands on educational institutions to produce human resource management professionals knowledgeable about human resource management theory, contract management, general management, organizational theory and behavior, and consulting theory and practice and possessing a substantive and practical focus on sophisticated human resource management techniques and practices. Such an educational background will enhance the role of the human resource manager, the perception of the profession, and most important, the relevance of human resource management to general management and administration.

Conclusion

The emerging hybrid model of human resource service delivery is presented as a viable alternative to the other four models discussed. Borrowing positive features from these models, the hybrid model seeks to place the human resource manager in a viable and critical role in managing modern public organizations. This role is key to the effective and equitable functioning of public organizations and, likewise, critical to enhancing and maintaining the viability of the field of public human resource management.

This edition of the Handbook of Human Resource Management in Government appears at a critical juncture in the development of public administration and human resource management. As change and opportunity abound, it is imperative that practicing human resource managers and scholars and students in the field push human resource management toward a role in public organizations that helps to ensure the relevance and viability of the field. It is to this end that this handbook is dedicated.

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 Academy of Public Administration, 2000), the idea being that if there are fewer rules, there will be fewer compliance problems. At the federal level, this was a central theme of Bill Clinton’s and Al Gore’s efforts at reinventing government. The report of the National Performance Review (1993) critiqued the excessive complexity and rigidity of civil service regulation and argued that [w]e must enable all managers to pursue their missions, freed from the cumbersome red tape of current personnel rules (p. 22). Indeed, one of the first actions taken under the NPR was to abolish the federal government’s 10,000 page Federal Personnel Manual (Ban, 1988-89). Advocates of state-level reform in the 1990s also focused on the need to deregulate. For example, the National Commission on the State and Local Public Service (1993) decried rulebound and complicated systems and argued that [w]e must not be so hidebound in order to protect against failure that we quash the spirit of innovation (p. 25). Some states took extreme approaches to deregulating the civil service, with Georgia and Florida abandoning their traditional civil service systems and adapting the private sector model of at will employment to the government sector (Gossett, 2002; Nigro and Kellough, 2008; Bowman, West, and Gertz, 2006).

Achieving Greater Efficiency Through Technology. Perhaps the most enduring response to improving the delivery of administrative services is to apply more technology. There is no doubt that personnel work, like virtually all work, has been changed by the advent of new technology—change so rapid that it is difficult to track. Technology has altered all aspects of human resource management, with the greatest effects having occurred in the routine processing required by, for example, benefits administration, payroll, and employment records generally (West and Berman, 2001). More recent developments include the use of technological applications in the hiring process, which allow, for example, online posting of vacancies, computerized or online application and testing processes, and computerized scoring or sorting of applicants (Mooney, 2002; U.S. General Accounting Office, 2003a). Both HR specialists and line managers are also using new software that assists in performance appraisals and in position classification. Training is increasingly delivered online. Current integrated systems allow managers to track key agency indicators, such as workforce trends, and to link workforce analysis with budget analysis (Ashbaugh and Miranda, 2002; Shiplett and Sutton, 2002; National Academy of Public Administration, 2000).

Technology has certainly had positive effects on how personnel offices work. It holds out the promise of doing more with less, by freeing up HR staff time for the consulting and strategic roles described later (although, as with privatization, this change may require retraining or restructuring). Or, given the cuts in HR staff at the federal level, technology may simply help personnel staff to keep their heads above water. Improved service and faster processing of time-sensitive tasks are not the only benefits. Technology enhances staff members’ ability to analyze data in sophisticated ways critical to strategic HR management.

Still, technology has costs and drawbacks. The obvious costs are for hardware, software, and staff training, and given the rapid changes in technology, these costs will recur. In fact the time between introduction of a new technology and its obsolescence continues to shorten, and the costs of upgrading can be a major drain on the budget, particularly for smaller organizations or jurisdictions. The increasing use of technology requires recruiting staff with a new mix of skills, ideally people who combine technological sophistication with good social interaction skills, a combination not always easy to find at the salaries many public jurisdictions can offer (West and Berman, 2001).

Technology can also have a negative effect on perceived quality of service by reducing face-to-face interactions. This is a contested issue, with some staff feeling that e-mail and the Internet facilitate their connections with coworkers and peers in other jurisdictions and others fearing that both HR staff members and service recipients may feel increasingly alienated (West and Berman, 2001). Perceptions of quality of service may also vary as organizations move toward employee self-service models that permit workers to go online to get information and to enter information about such things as leave requests and changes in benefits. Some employees will see this as easy and efficient, giving them direct control over these routine functions, but others will feel frustrated when they have questions the machine cannot answer, or when they try to call for information and get caught in endless recorded prompts, unable to get to a real person (Gardner, Lepak, and Bartol, 2003).

Striking the Right Balance. The challenge remains, however, to balance the two sides of the administrative role: although the current rhetoric stresses the need for HR to be a business partner to support the agency’s mission, some HR officials recognize that the pendulum may have swung too far and that the compliance aspects of that role may need to be strengthened. As a senior HR professional in the federal government told the chapter authors, We moved very far away from enforcing the rules [in the Clinton era]. We paid attention to the rules and were concerned about the rules, but enforcing the rules wasn’t so important. It is ironic that this last Bush administration did put a lot more emphasis on the rules. She found this ironic because under the Bush administration there was a major scandal involving the Department of Justice in which senior political officials admitted to politicizing the hiring of career staff by screening them on their political beliefs and activities, a clear violation of the law (U.S. Department of Justice, 2008).

The Role: From Training to Consulting

Historically, the HR office began to expand its services beyond the traditional narrow definition of the personnel function by working with agency management to identify and address the training needs of employees, both so employees could better perform their assigned tasks and so that they could prepare for advancement to management positions in the organization. Unlike the tasks associated with the administrative role, these new activities were not strictly transactional, creating at least potential conflict with the traditional role. Indeed, during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, an executive order prohibiting any government employee from helping anyone pass a civil service examination was interpreted by many agency leaders as a general prohibition on offering training (Van Riper, 1958, p. 247). However, the personnel shortages caused by World War II provided the impetus for the provision of training, which then became an important task for personnel offices in almost every federal agency (Van Riper, 1958, p. 380).

Over time the training function expanded into a broader role as both agency HR offices and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management bought heavily into the concept of HR staff becoming consultants in organizational development by assisting agencies with organizational redesigns, developing performance management systems, and working directly with individual managers to address their staffing and training needs. To understand just how deeply OPM has invested in this strategy, one need only read a portion of this OPM online advertisement: "To help your organization achieve success, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management provides a full range of these consulting services through our Performance Management and Organization Development (PMOD) Solutions area. Drawing on our expertise across the HR spectrum and our nationwide network of professionals, we can assist any federal, state, county, or municipal agency. We understand government because we are government. And because we operate on a cost-recovery basis, we can often provide more cost-effective solutions than private sector consulting organizations" (U.S. Office of Personnel Management, n.d.).

The OD and consulting role and the administration role require different relationships between HR staff and managers. In particular, the OD and consulting role downplays the compliance function and thus necessitates a culture change for personnel staff, as these new services must be offered on a voluntary basis, relying on requests from managers. This role also requires the acquisition of new competencies. Staffing and classification specialists do not automatically know how to conduct employee surveys or how to counsel managers on strategies for restructuring agency operations or improving productivity.

One study of civil service reform at the state level pointed up the difficulty of reconciling these two roles and quoted a personnel director drawing a parallel between centralized civil service operations and centralized oversight of finance: I assure you that when folks have a difficult question about a financial decision, they don’t call the state auditor. They call somebody who will help them decide what the state auditor might say. Balancing performance review with being consultative is difficult because it will mean that it will be in the agencies’ best interest to hide all difficult or questionable decisions instead of seeking advice (Carnevale, Housel, and Riley, 1995, p. 25).

Upgrading HR Staff Skills. The OD and consulting role also requires a different skill set (and mind-set) than routine administrative work does, presenting a real challenge to offices attempting to expand their functions to include this role. In fact staff sometimes lack even the requisite skills to perform the traditional administrative role effectively, let alone taking on this new role. Past studies (U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, 1993) found not only that managers felt the personnel specialists they dealt with were underprepared but also that over half the personnel specialists themselves felt that they lacked the skills or training they needed. Unfortunately, in the intervening years the situation does not seem to have improved. In response to a 2007 survey (Partnership for Public Service, 2007, p. 14), one-third of HR leaders reported that their staffs do not have adequate skills. A 2008 survey (Partnership for Public Service, 2008) found that [t]he federal HR talent pool is limited. . .[and] many of these workers have outdated skills. . . . The shift away from transactional skills to a more consultative role for HR staff that requires strategic thinking was noted by many participants (p. 9). Moreover, the problem of current and relevant skills exists not only at the agency level but also in the OPM itself. In a 2005 survey, Merit Systems Protection Board employees ranked their own agency, the Office of Personnel Management, near the bottom in relation to this statement: The workforce has job-relevant knowledge and skills necessary to accomplish organizational goals (U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, 2007, p. 10). Such skill deficits have been exacerbated by the very low staffing levels in many personnel offices. But increasing personnel staff numbers is not a viable option in most agencies or jurisdictions. At the federal level, one of the legacies of the Clinton years was a sharp reduction in the number of HR staff (Ban, 1988-89), which continued through years of the Bush administration, and funds necessary to train new HR staff members or to upgrade the skills of existing staff are often in short supply.

Division of Labor in Filling the OD and Consulting Role. Because this role requires skills and a relationship with managers that are different from those required by the administrative role, it is often a challenge for HR offices to manage it effectively. One approach is to separate the two roles organizationally, with a personnel unit performing the traditional functions and an HR unit providing consulting services to managers. Another approach is franchising or outsourcing of the routine personnel functions, discussed in more detail later. The argument is that this will save money via economies of scale and will free internal resources for providing consulting services. Alternatively, some agencies will keep the routine processing in-house but contract out for OD support with what one OPM senior official has described as an army of consultants ready to help.

Another strategy linked both to improved customer service and to changing roles for the personnel office is delegation of greater authority over personnel decisions to line managers themselves. The intention is to empower managers by letting them perform basic personnel functions, such as classifying positions, for example. At the same time, in theory, delegation of authority should lead to a changed role for personnelists, who are no longer the controllers and who become consultants helping managers exercise their new authority. Some managers will clearly welcome the freedom to do it yourself. But as Nigro (1990) has put it, this approach imposes extraordinary demands on administrators while saying very little about how they should go about meeting this challenge (p.195). Asking managers to take on responsibility for personnel functions may make them feel overburdened and resentful. Indeed, some managers have rejected taking on broader HR authority (Ban, 1995).

The Contract Management Role: From Customer to Contract Manager

Almost from the beginning, HR offices have had contracting officers to help them with the purchase of supplies or occasional specialized consulting services. However, as discussed previously, many federal agencies, confronted with the challenge of delivering more services with fewer resources, have turned to strategies that dramatically restructure the delivery of services. These include centralization of the routine HR functions within an agency as well as contracting out either to another government agency or to a private firm. This removes routine processing of personnel actions, which some describe as the backroom functions, out of the HR office that works directly with managers. This approach has advantages but significant costs as well. And it presents HR staff with yet another role they need to play effectively if this structural response is to be effective.

HR offices need to identify the services that can be centralized or outsourced and also to whom they should turn for the outsourced services. For many years, external providers have been used for major information technology (IT) functions, for training, or for providing employee services, such as Employee Assistance Programs. More recently, the usual model has been to hand off the routine functions, so that the internal HR staff are free to perform both the OD and consulting role and the strategic management role discussed in the next section.

This approach is not new, although it expanded greatly in the Bush years. Almost all federal agencies long ago farmed out their payroll functions to the small number of what are now called shared service centers (SSCs), housed within some large federal agencies. The Department of Defense and the Department of Health and Human Services, for example, have created such centers to provide a wide range of HR services to their component agencies and offices. In 2005, OPM initiated what it calls the HR Line of Business model, certifying five