The quality of HRM in the public sector is critical for government performance and national development Essay

On analyzing the development of organizations operating in the public sector, it is important to place emphasis on the fact that these organizations focus on the development of effective operations and provisions of their clients with possibly higher quality of services. However, often the quality of services provided by organizations operating in the public sector suffers from the poor performance of employees and low quality of internal processes within the organization. In addition, many organizations operating in the public sector suffer from the high level of bureaucracy, which prevent them from efficient organizational performance and decrease the quality of services being delivered to their clients. In addition, organizations operating in the public sector often suffer from the lack of funding, which naturally limits their opportunities to introduce changes and to improve the quality of services.
In such a context, the quality of HRM becomes a key toward the success of organizations operating in the public sector. To put it more precisely, organizations operating in the public sector should focus on the quality of their human resources and the quality of their HRM because it is the qualification of employees, the effectiveness and productivity of their performance, and their ability to work with clients effectively that define the overall effectiveness of the organizational performance.
At this point, it is important to place emphasis on the fact that the effectiveness of organizational performance of organizations operating in the public sector defines, to a significant extent the overall effectiveness of the government performance. The following box shows the dependence of the government performance on the organizational performance in the public sector:
Box 1. UN/DESA analysis of government performance
The findings of statistical analysis performed by UN/DESA largely corroborate the conclusions of earlier studies in this area, namely, that the quality of human resource management has a significant impact on the performance of government institutions. The sources of data for the UN/DESA analysis were surveys of expert opinion from the International Country Risk Guide (between 97 and 140 countries), the State Capacity Survey (between 97 and 129 countries) and a survey first carried out for 35 countries by James E. Rauch and Peter Evans and later extended by the United Nations University (UNU) to cover an additional 16 African countries. In the UN/DESA analysis, the Rauch and Evans and the UNU datasets were consolidated into one. The following are selected findings of the UN/DESA analysis: Professionalism in the civil service is an excellent predictor of both the quality and the integrity of the public service, and its effects are consistently positive. The results from surveys of 121 countries illustrate this relationship: Scatter plot 1. Scatter plot 2.
Bureaucratic quality and merit Integrity and merit Source: UN/DESA. Source: UN/DESA. Note: Plot of quality against merit in 1999 Note: Plot of integrity against merit in 1999 (121 countries), controlling for selected (121 countries), controlling for selected variables. variables.
Legal remuneration (salary plus perquisites) of senior public officials relative to their counterparts in the private sector has some positive effect on bureaucratic quality and a much stronger positive effect on integrity, whereas, notably, extra-legal remuneration (tips and bribes) has no significant effect on the quality of bureaucracy in the public sector.
New public management (NPM), measured indirectly as mobility of high-level personnel between the public and private sectors, is not a significant determinant of the quality or the integrity of the civil service. NPM, on the other hand, is a significant negative determinant of the prestige of a public sector career for recent university graduates, but weaker and less significant for African than for non-African countries.
In fact, the trend to the close dependence of the government performance on the performance of organizations operating in the public sector can be traced not only in African or Latin American countries but also in other countries as well (Sigal, 2000). As the matter of fact, the government conducts its policies and carries out its strategic plan through the performance of public organizations, subordinated to the government or performing functions the government grants them responsible for (Xu & Shenkar, 2002). The quality of HRM is crucial for the effectiveness of their performance because they high quality of HRM contributes to the high quality of organizational performance. However, today, many organizations operating in the public sector suffer from the low quality of HRM because of the high level of bureaucratization in public organizations and low efficiency and productivity of employees working in these organizations.