It's All about Context and Implementation

Abstract

The 2005 World Public Sector Report makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the drivers of public sector performance. It skillfully manages to meld scholarship, breath, specificity and pragmatism into a unified and coherent whole: it is thought provoking and surely required reading for all who are concerned about the role of people in effective public administration in general and the critical contribution of human resource management (HRM) to public sector success, in particular. This short article focuses selectively on a number of the report's key findings and arguments. It adopts the perspective of a HR practitioner, concerned with the intellectual thrust and direction of public sector HR management but focused chiefly on matters of implementation and on the context in which implementation takes place. It argues that effective public sector HR practice is situational: adoption of particular management practices and HR tools hinges on an understanding of local culture and organizational form: one size doesn't fit all. Increasingly too, the composition of the public sector workforce is changing and the boundaries between the public and private sectors are blurring or at least becoming more porous. This has profound implications for public sector HRM. The temptation is often to ape “best practice” from the private sector. Judicious borrowing from the private sector can pay handsome dividends but care is needed in crafting practices and approaches which respect the unique character of the public sector, its workforce, esprit and values.