Trends and Best Practices in State and Local Human Resource Management

Abstract

This article summarizes a few of themost interesting findings of a comprehensive survey of human resource management best practices in state and local government. The 4-year project has examined the most enlightened human resource management initiatives extant in government agencies and provides a number of appealing reform examples that might be transportable to other governmental settings, including federal agencies. Many of the findings challenge accepted notions about the intractable nature of public personnel systems and provide potential models that can be emulated in public agencies at every level of government.

Performance Management and Trust in Supervisors

“…As Hays (2004) identifies performance management as one of the most significant trends in state and local human resource management in recent years, many state and local governments have implemented diverse performance management initiatives, including strategic planning and management, managing for results, and performance budgeting (Melkers & Willoughby, 1998, 2004Poister & Streib, 1999. As Hays (2004) identifies performance management as one of the most significant trends in state and local human resource management in recent years, many state and local governments have implemented diverse performance management initiatives, including strategic planning and management, managing for results, and performance budgeting (Melkers & Willoughby, 1998, 2004Poister & Streib, 1999.…”

Employee Turnover and Organizational Performance: Testing a Hypothesis from Classical Public Administration

“…Most work on turnover starts with the conventionally accepted (but largely untested) assumption that turnover is bad, and then treats it as a dependent variable, as something to be minimized (e.g., Hayes 2004;Kim 2002;Perry 2004). Abelson and Baysinger (1984) proposed examining turnover as an independent variable and offered a theoretical challenge to the notion that all organizational turnover is dysfunctional (on the private sector see Dalton and Todor 1979;Mobley 1982;Staw 1980;Staw and Oldham 1978; on the public sector see Ban, Drahnik-Faller, and Towers 2003;Kellough and Osuna 1995;Lewis 1991;Lyden 1968).…”

Improving Performance: Does Performance-Oriented Management Really Matter?

“…Some studies report instances of successful implementation of POM practices in governmental settings (e.g., Hay 2004;Kamensky and Morales 2005;Osborne and Gaebler 1992;Osborne and Plastrik 1997). It should be noted, however, that there are also many cases where POM practices did not produce the results that its advocates originally intended (e.g., Boyne and Walker 2002;Perry, Petrakis, and Miller 1989;Wang 2002).…”