Differential Approaches to Human Resource Management Reform in the Public Services of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago

Abstract

The introduction of New Public Management in the public services of many countries brought with it not only changes in epistemology but new methods and techniques for managing resources.1, 2, 3, 4 With the advent of New Public Management, for instance, techniques such as contracting out, divestment, and the disaggregation of the public services into separate self contained units were employed by many governments to increase output and reduce cost in the public sector. However, it was also recognized that another resource, namely how employees are managed, needed to be reformed as well. This concern for proper management of human resources was implicit in one of the primary tenets of New Public Management, which stressed that managers should be “free to manage.”5 This “freedom to manage” principle involved more than changes in the process of decision-making. Indeed, it led to a radical attempt on the part of various states to replace the former systems of personnel administration with the “new” private sector system of human resource management. This article examines the attempts to reform, human resource management systems in the public services of two of the larger countries in the Commonwealth Caribbean—Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. It argues that although these two countries share a remarkable commonality in terms of historical backgrounds, and political and economic developments, the human resource systems that were introduced under the wider ambit of administrative reform varied. Moreover, it was evident that Jamaica was far more successful in the actual implementation of human resource systems than Trinidad and Tobago. What is even more striking is the fact that reformers in both countries took only what they wanted from the reform package and in some cases amended them in the light of factors such as ethnicity, political culture, party dominance, or levels of economic development.